From the minute I walked into Prime Butcher Baker, the latest creation from the Prime Group, every ounce of jaded elitism that I may have developed over the years abandoned me. Part of the problem with writing about food is that you find yourself sampling so many gourmet items and going to so many impressive places that you can find yourself taking for granted things that are truly wonderful. But this butcher shop on the Upper East Side immediately vanquished any sense of “oh well, I’ve seen something like that before” that I may have had. To put it mildly, Prime Butcher Baker is glorious.

The first thing you see when you walk to the door of Prime Butcher Baker is the visible portion of their aging room just beyond their front window. This aging room is used by the butcher part of the store to dry age their beef and create their home made cured meats. Picture a large wooden room filled with gleaming metal racks all packed with huge sides of beef. Dangling from the sealing are clean looking lining packages filled with bresaola and salami.

The front of the store is the portion dedicated to the butcher shop. It’s a long and beautiful case filled with perfectly cut pieces of beef, lamb and veal. The thing I noticed was that not only was this case filled with the average hard to find cut of meat like a full veal breast or an entire crown roast, but it also contained cuts of meat I didn’t even know you could find kosher, most notably Porterhouse steaks. Porterhouse steaks are essentially a t-bone but cut from the rear end of the short loin so that the steak contains a portion of New York Strip steak and tenderloin. Tenderloin however is problematic because it contains the deeply unkosher sciatic nerve. Though there are kosher butchers that go through the arduous process of removing the nerve to be able to sell the tenderloin they are few and far between and I have never seen a piece of tenderloin still attached to the bone that had been given this kosher preparation.