Business Community
New premium butchery coming to Gig Harbor
The co-owner of Blue Max meats, a premium butcher with two stores in east Pierce County and a highly enthusiastic fan base, has plans that should set Gig Harbor carnivores’ mouths a-watering.
Tommy Marshall, a partner in Blue Max, and his wife, Lisa Marshall, are opening a new meat emporium, Gig Harbor Meat Company, in a former paint store on Kimball Drive. It will be the area’s only standalone butcher shop.
The Marshalls are starting big by leasing the entire 5,855-square-foot building.
Tommy and Lisa Marshall plan to open the Gig Harbor Meat Company in a former paint store at 6876 Kimball Dr. Photo by Ted Kenney
Dry-aging chamber
In the half of the space that comprises the retail shop, the Marshalls plan something eye-catching: A high-tech, windowed, 5-foot by 5-foot dry-aging chamber.
Customers will be able to watch from outside the aging room as premium cuts of beef mature to tender, flavorful perfection. The process takes 35 days and involves UV light, a chamber wall made from Himalayan salt, and constantly circulating 38-degree air.
Gig Harbor Meat Company will include a dry-aging chamber like this one. Photo courtesy of The Aging Room
Tommy Marshall noted that a host or hostess of a Christmas dinner could choose a batch of steaks to serve, arrange for them to be dry-aged, and invite guests to drop by Gig Harbor Meat Company to check the progress of their increasingly succulent future dinner.
Not Blue Max redux
The Marshalls are not creating a new Blue Max store. Gig Harbor Meat Company will be their solo (or duo) venture, without Tommy’s partners from the other business.
And he said he’s reluctant to promise that specific house-made products (edibles that are mixed, marinated, rubbed, smoked or otherwise manufactured on-premises, according to recipes) at the Gig Harbor store will exactly match those at Blue Max. His Blue Max partners or others who retain a proprietary interest invented some items, he explained.
But Tommy said the Gig Harbor store’s product mix will, at the least, equal the variety, creativity and quality found at the Blue Max shops in Puyallup and Buckley.
That’s a big commitment, given the Blue Max stores’ reputation. They are known for their broad selection, offering everything from dozens of beef jerky variants to Beast Mode sausages made from spicy ground pork infused with actual Skittles — Seahawks legend Marshawn Lynch’s favorite candy.
Tomahawk steaks maturing in the commercial dry-aging chamber made by The Aging Room, a Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif.-based company. The glowing surface behind the meat is a wall of Himalayan salt, which helps regulate humidity, among other benefits. The Gig Harbor Meat Company will offer steaks aged using the technology. Photo courtesy of The Aging Room
Unique offerings
A reporter who visited the Puyallup Blue Max store described another highly creative (and for meat lovers, delicious-sounding) offering: A trail mix made not from nuts and M&M’s but from nuggets of jerky, pepperoni stick, and smoked Bratwurst, mixed with cheese cubes.
“This is one of those honest-to-goodness locally owned butchers with an enormous selection of meat, including specialty things you won’t find anywhere else,” wrote Sue Kidd, the late food critic and proprietor of the Dine Pierce County group on Facebook. “They smoke their own sausages, make their own jerky and have killer landjaeger.”
Tommy Marshall confirmed that the Gig Harbor Meat Company will have “every cut of chicken, every cut of lamb, every cut of pork, every cut of beef.” It will also sell seafood, and even stock exotic meats (the Blue Max stores’ website mentions frog legs, elk, bison, venison and ostrich, among others).
Marshall said he and his wife were exploring possible locations for a new store in DuPont, Graham and Gig Harbor when they lucked into finding the available building on Kimball Drive.
He’d envisioned a space with a windowed dividing wall separating the space where customers shop from the side where the butchers work, to give customers a view into the production. He was happily surprised to find this already existed in the Gig Harbor building.
Gig Harbor ties
As the new store grows, Lisa Marshall will focus entirely on Gig Harbor Meat Company while Tommy contributes to both Gig Harbor Meat Company and Blue Max. The couple, both 52, have enough time to satisfy such a big commitment now that their children have finished college, he said.
Neither of the Marshalls have owned a business in Gig Harbor before. But Tommy, a butcher before co-owning Blue Max, worked at the QFC store that is now Metropolitan Market in his 20s. Much earlier, at age 18, he worked in Gig Harbor’s Big 5 Sporting Goods, he said.
Lisa worked at the Stock Market grocery store, but not at the one that used to be in Gig Harbor’s Olympic Village. Her stint was at the Stock Market store in Sumner, where, at age 21, she had the distinction of being the chain’s youngest-ever deli department manager.
The couple lives in Orting, but Tommy Marshall said a move to the Gig Harbor area is tempting.
Marshall said that Gig Harbor Meat Company has leased the Kimball Drive space. The couple applied to the city of Gig Harbor for a review of its plans for tenant improvements. But, mindful of the uncertainties inherent in a startup, he declined to predict a date by which the store would open.