A Butcher Shop Has Roots in Chicago's Meatpacking Heyday – And Crafted an Exceptional Italian Beef

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“Butcher – First Class. Experienced man; good wages; steady position; chance for advancement,” reads a job listing for Hofherr Meat Co. in a 1919 issue of the Chicago Tribune. Sean Hofherr was about a century too late to apply for that role, but he has taken it up nonetheless by reviving the family business with a modern take on the meatpacking company his ancestors started in Chicago. 

“We’re taking what they were doing, making it health inspector-approved, and still continuing some of the traditions,” says Arielle Hofherr, Sean’s wife and partner in their Northfield butcher shop, which retains the name Hofherr Meat Co. The Hofherrs are “passing on techniques that are kind of a dying thing.” 

Sean’s great-great-grandfather started the original Hofherr Meat Co. in the late nineteenth century after he immigrated from Germany to Chicago; the business was sold after his great-grandfather’s untimely death at a young age. Sean and Arielle opened the new Hofherr Meat Co. at 300 Happ Rd. in Northfield in 2014 after Sean migrated from a career in finance to one in butchery.

“He always did feel like it was in his blood,” says Arielle, even though the family was out of the meat business for two generations. Sean worked for a time at Keefer’s Steakhouse, then went into banking to get away from the trying hours of the restaurant business. “He hated sitting at a desk way more,” Arielle says, so he took up an apprenticeship and then a job at Zier’s Prime Meats & Poultry in Wilmette, learning under a butcher from Zakopane, Poland. That late mentor still watches over him from a framed photograph in the back prep area of Hofherr’s own shop.

Arielle had worked as a server in restaurants and for a food publishing company, and thus had her own experience to bring to Hofherr Meat Co., which not only sells, well, meat, but also locally grown produce and artisan products from the area, including Tortello’s pasta and Four Star Mushrooms. 

But butchery is obviously the focus of the shop. Hofherr offers cuts of pork, chicken, lamb, veal, and beef, the last of which they also dry-age for steaks. They prepare a wide variety of sausages in-house, grinding and stuffing brats with Wisconsin cheddar and cherries, smoking Chicago-style hot links, and drying Spanish chorizo and Polish sausage. There are housemade deli staples, too – pastrami, pancetta, roasted turkey – and provisions for a charcuterie board.

“One of Sean’s big mantras is, meat comes in the back door expiring the minute it walks in,” Arielle says. “It’s our job to either make it something that somebody’s going to cook at home, to cure it and make it something inspiring, or make it into sausage, turn it into something else. That’s what separates the craft.”

A Challenge to Improve the Italian Beef

That craft was harnessed several years ago when local food writer Kevin Pang, a regular at the shop, challenged the Hofherrs to make the best possible Italian beef. Pang had always been disappointed by the iconic Chicago sandwich, which has generally resisted innovation or cheffiness since its purported origin as a cheap way to stretch meat for Italian weddings. The Hofherrs kept the classic Turano roll for bread but took a fresh look at every other component after sampling different Italian beefs every day. 

Go behind the scenes of Johnnie’s Beef, a favorite Italian beef shop in Elmwood Park.

“We bonded on America’s Test Kitchen,” says Arielle. “So we were like, we’re going to approach it exactly like they do: Try different cuts, see what works, what’s more tender, what’s got more flavor, all the different variables.”   

They settled on chuck roll from the shoulder, cooking it just to medium and then bringing the thin slices to medium-well in a warm jus right before serving. Arielle calls the jus a “tare,” the Japanese marinade used to flavor meats before grilling, because its intense flavor is so concentrated – it’s made from roasted beef bones and a puree of the vegetables with which the beef was cooked. The sandwich is topped with roasted mini sweet peppers, because Arielle found green peppers acrid, and a labor-intensive giardiniera that came from Mikey Soler, a colleague at Hofherr. Soler’s great-grandfather brought pepper seeds to Chicago from Italy; those are the basis of the family giardiniera recipe, which is aged and includes celery and serranos – and no vinegar, just olive oil. 

Watch the hosts of America’s Test Kitchen choose their favorite giardiniera, and try a recipe from Hailee Catalano, an Elmhurst native whose first cookbook won a James Beard Award.

Hofherr sold the Italian beef for one day in December of 2022 – and it proved so popular that they have periodically brought it back, despite the amount of labor involved in each step of its preparation. That wasn’t enough to satisfy demand, so last year they opened a satellite location in the Winnetka train station that they call the Depot, offering coffee, pick-ups from the butcher shop, and their Italian beefs. Their America’s Test Kitchen approach found an official stamp of approval when ATK itself came calling (Pang worked there for a time) to use the Hofherr sandwich to develop their own Italian beef recipe, which has been chosen to represent Illinois for an “America’s Potluck” initiative celebrating the country’s 250th birthday with favorite dishes from each state.  

The Hofherrs are proudly displaying a copy of the America’s Potluck collection that Sean’s mom saw and bought at “the Jewel,” as he excitedly told me in his Chicago accent. Both Hofherrs are proud natives of the Chicago area; one of the two portable smokers they take to events to prepare brisket or pulled pork has the Bears and Cubs logos bolted to it, even though Arielle herself is a Sox fan. They haven’t yet tackled that other meaty Chicago street food, the hot dog, because it requires a large piece of equipment to mix and emulsify the sausage. Instead, they sell Vienna Beef. (They do offer their take on other regional specialties, like the New Orleans noodle soup yakamein and Cincinnati chili.)

They’re proud that they’re carrying on a family tradition in a metropolitan area where there are still traces of the stockyards, to which they have made a pilgrimage to see where Sean’s ancestors once worked. They even still prepare corned beef according to the same recipe the original Hofherr Meat Co. used. You can see ads for that original corned beef on the walls of the butcher shop next to a black-and-white photo of a Hofherr cart delivering to The Berghoff and a testimonial from a long-dead chef at the Palmer House. Between that historic ephemera are photos of Sean and Arielle, adding their own chapter to the family story.