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Butcher bucks L.E.S. trend

BY FARNOOSH TORABI | SPECIAL TO amNEWYORK

January 23, 2006

amNewYork profiles a Lower East Side butcher shop that has thrived despite rents that have tripled in the past 20 years.

As a boy, Jeffrey Ruhalter used to stand on milk crates to greet customers at his family's butcher shop, Allen Ruhalter Meats, on the Lower East Side.

Today, Jeffrey is grown -- he'll turn 50 this Friday -- and the neighborhood has been transformed. But the shop remains.

Jeffrey Ruhalter is now the fourth-generation owner of the family shop, which he renamed Jeffrey's Meat Market when he took over two years ago. The shop opened on Orchard Street in 1929 and moved to the Essex Street market a decade later. It is the only original tenant from the indoor bazaar that remains standing.

"I'm a piece of antiquity still kept alive," Ruhalter said.

The butcher shop has done more than survive; it has thrived despite rents that have tripled in the past 20 years. As the Lower East Side has evolved into a zip code for higher-income residents, many local businesses have closed their doors, giving way to wealthier, national stores like American Apparel and Whole Foods. But Jeffrey's has sidestepped the trend.

The trick? For one, "we diversified," said Ruhalter, who now boasts a finer collection of meats, ranging from Porterhouse steak to Kobe beef to prime rib. The previous butcher never carried any high-end steak. But "a few years back, this woman came into the market wearing a gorgeous coat and diamond earrings," Ruhalter recalled. "She asked if I had filet mignon. That's when I thought, 'Oh god, things are changing.'"

A new wholesale arm also helped sales, Ruhalter said. "We sell to restaurants, daycares, churches, nursing homes, hotels -- anyone and anywhere that could possibly need meat," he said.

And in its most recent acclimation to the neighborhood's new class of trendy professionals, the butcher has introduced "Dinner by Jeffrey," a menu of prepared meals. "My customers work six days a week," Ruhalter said. "They're tired of take-out Chinese. They want a home-cooked meal."

At $10, the eight-minute microwavable boneless chicken breast with gruyere cheese, Portobello mushroom, asparagus and yellow squash is a favorite with low-carb dieters.

Thanks to all these changes, Ruhalter said, sales have more than doubled in the past three years.

As a bonus, the Food Network has heightened people's interest in gourmet meals. "People come asking how to prepare beef Wellington for six," Ruhalter said. "You can't go to Pathmark for this. You come to me."

Some customers have been coming for decades. Ivy Dawson remembers tagging along with her mom on Saturday mornings in the 1970s to visit the neighborhood butcher. "While all the other kids were watching cartoons, our chore was to get our meat," she said.

Dawson is still a regular. On a recent Thursday night, on her way home from work, she made small talk with Jeffrey, who was his typically energetic and chatty self behind the counter. "Your father filled my mother's fridge," she told him as she paid for her pork chops, continuing a family tradition of her own.

Farnoosh Torabi is the business producer at NY1 News. If you know a small business with an interesting story, please e-mail her at AMSmallBusiness@gmail.com.