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SUNDAY
TIMES LIFESTYLE
AUGUST 13 2000
I
HAD A DREAM
We
all have our romantic ideas about what the country and small towns
are supposed to be like. My own fantasy is to find one of those
old small-town hotels which still serve a set dinner of about
nine courses whether you like it or not. I don’t think they
exist but if there is one would someone please let me know. More
realistic is the idea that country people still go off to their
friendly butcher to buy meat. In Upinton there are more than 20
butcheries. One of them would put every butcher in Johannesburg
or Cape Town to shame. Skaapland Butchery is a new concept in
butcher shops, if you can call it that. I had been told that I
could not miss it when in town – that’s how it gets
its fame, by word of mouth. This is an emporium that takes the
display and sale of meat to new heights. Gone is the smelly shop
with carcasses in a cold room and a few trays of steak in a cold
counter. Here self-service fridges sit opposite what look like
marble-fronted bank cubicles, except that they each have a cutting
table. Serious carnivores can choose their sheep carcass from
those hanging in a glass cold room, and then personally watch
and instruct its cutting. At the back of the vast shop, which
doubles as a deli – selling anything to do with the cooking
of meat – is the biltong section, where huge rotating washing
lines of meat and wors hang drying under serious air-conditioning.
There are five of them carrying 750kg of biltong each looks like
canine heaven. Owner Henk Snyman started out in the butchery business
with R3 000 and a bakkie in 1992 after his family farm folded.
Today his is worth millions and runs one of the five best meat
shops in the world. “I had a dream,” he says, and
his dream was of a state-of-the-butchery in a business that was
never considered and art. Today he sells more than 15 tons of
beef and three tons of lamb a week, employs 50 people in the butchery
and is under pressure to franchise similar outlets in Johannesburg
and Cape Town, where he already has 600 customers.
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