Guerilla chef Gabriel Claycamp cannot be stopped.
Just two weeks after Claycamp’s Culinary Communion cooking school on Beacon Hill went under—following a series of disputes with the health department, liquor board, Fire Marshall and his landlord—Claycamp has moved to Vashon Island and has rented kitchen space near the West Seattle Golf Course, where he intends to reopen his bacon and meat-curing business, The Swinery.
“We’ve officially, legally leased a kitchen in West Seattle,” Claycamp says. “I’m supposed to get the health department on the phone today and organize the site inspection.”
Claycamp hopes he’ll be able to start producing “two to three hundred pounds of meat” every week to sell at local farmers markets. Right now, he’s waiting for the health department to give him a “bacon variance” so he can get back to making bacon. “If I wanted to I could be making bratwurst or something, [but it] seems a little anticlimactic to go to a market without bacon.”
Does he get is pork from local pig farmers or is he just another ship-it-in-from-wherever-and-sell-it-as-local kind of butcher? I’m always on the lookout for locally farmed meats. Heh.
Is the square root of a bacon variance a bacon deviation?
@1 – At least when he was over on Beacon Hill, he was sourcing his meats, as much as he could, from a provider on Vashon.
ooh i live near west seattle golf course! i want neighbors who make bacon!!
I want a Swinery T-shirt.
Sweet, I would eat his meat.
@2
I can’t believe someone beat me to an obscure and nerdy stats/bacon variance joke!
YES YES YES YES! Gabe’s bacon is the most delicious bacon in the whole wild world of wonder. I just used some that I had in my freezer last night for a quick bok choy bacon stir fry. So delicious!
meat porn meat meat meat stuff my face with animal carcass drool and jerk off all day over meat meat meat porn dead animals and rotten stinking flesh shove tons of it into my mouth and down my gullet, pounds of fetid rotten animal flesh, more than i can possibly eat, and make my liver gigantic so that some other creature can chop off my head and eat my organs because on the stranger it’s meat porn, all meat, all the time.
9, It’s good to be at the top of the food chain!
Too bad he screwed up the Napa interview, now it seems we’re stuck with him. *sigh* Let’s hope he finally does something legally.
I wonder what he’s going to do with that (new as of last summer) bread oven. 🙁
Wow, I’m surprised he got this together so quickly. And happy too as this is some of the best bacon I’ve tasted. Actually, the pigs he uses for the bacon are sourced from a farm in Port Orchard. I’ve been there and it really is a model farm. Clean, humane, organic-feed, etc. The pigs are heirloom Berkshire and it makes a tremendous difference in the rich flavor.
For bacon even better than The Swinery you should totally try Thundering Hooves Ranch. They deliver to Seattle neighborhoods from their ranch full of happy animals in Walla Walla pretty much every weekend. You can order on their website as much or as little as you like and I have not been disappointed with any of what we have bought. IMHO better than Gabes, and the bonus is you can always get it and there is no drama!
Go away, no one wants your shitty excuses for cured meat.
Some of us like drama with our bacon! Glad to have him in West Seattle!
Clearly, he was planning this for a while, hence the most recent bacon sale. I’m just wondering how he’s paying off his debts to former students, construction costs, etc.
DON’T SUPPORT THESE PEOPLE!!
THEY TOOK AMPLE AMOUNTS OF MONEY, from even people that hadn’t took a class at Culinary Communion, and then folded – knowing very well the whole time that they were going down. They promised at least some refund and without ever intending.
VERY UNETHICAL PEOPLE and are now opening a new deli with former clients money.