Is a butcher shop actually a conversation hub, with a hundred people cycling through all day to chat? Is a butcher secretly someone whose skill with a bone-cutting band saw is secondary to her ability to remember the names of people’s dogs?
I jotted down these questions in my reporter’s notebook as I watched Kristin Tombers, butcher and omnipresent whirling dervish, swivel, dash, and literally run cups of water to customers at her 22-year-old butcher shop, Clancey’s.
Clancey’s has been iconic in local food from the date Tombers took over an existing butcher shop in a slim slip of a storefront in Linden Hills and pretended, to the media and everyone, that there was some “we” of owners behind the scenes when it was really only Tombers alone. “In my mind, it’s always been a ‘we,’” said Tombers. “I took a second mortgage on my house to buy the business, but I always felt like a ‘we’ makes it happen.”…