Victor Churchill appoints youngest ever head butcher in 143 years
He started his butcher apprenticeship straight out of high school and now Micky Peacock has been named only the third head butcher ever at the acclaimed Victor Churchill butchery — making him the youngest ever in the company’s 143-year history.
When Micky Peacock started his butcher apprenticeship straight out of high school a decade ago, he admits his friends were perplexed to say the least.
Initially a way to sidestep university — a path that he says “never appealed” — Peacock soon found himself swinging a cleaver for 80 hours a week while his friends drank and partied.
“A lot of my friends were like; ‘What are you doing? Come out’,” Peacock, from Oxford in England, said.
“Initially it was just a job, really. My uncle was a butcher but I was more into food and cooking.
“But then it changed and I started to love everything about it. It was a trade where you’re just learning so much and luckily I had a boss at the time who encouraged education and trying new things.”
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It was a passion that has paid off.
Now aged 28, Peacock has just been handed one of the butcher industry’s most revered honours — he’s been named only the third head butcher ever at the acclaimed Victor Churchill butchery in Woollahra.
He succeeds Darren O’Rourke and Danny Woodward before him and, not surprisingly, is the youngest person to hold the post in the company’s 143-year history.
It all follows a serendipitous sequence of events after Peacock, a devourer of cooking and travel shows, first learnt of the famed Queen St shop, which the late Anthony Bourdain described it as the “most beautiful butcher shop in the world” on his show No Reservations six years ago.
After watching the episode “probably 100 times”, Peacock contacted Vic’s owner Anthony Puharich by email and soon found himself on a plane headed for Sydney.
“I remember holding the plane ticket and thinking ‘Oh my God, this is really happening’.”
In the years since, he says he has watched the meat industry transform from behind Vic’s marble counters.
Most significantly, the boom in nose-to-tail butchery which, fuelled by advocates like Bourdain and fellow Brits Fergus Henderson and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, has seen the rise in popularity of cuts formerly relegated to the mincer or a sausage casing.
He claims even Victor Churchill’s refined Eastern Suburbs clientele are ditching fillets in favour of more adventurous cuts like hangars, beverts, cheeks and even tongue.
“Tongue is actually a lovely cut if you braise it properly for three or four hours,” Peacock said.
“I must admit it’s a hard sell because you have to peel it before you cook it and not everyone is into that.
“But I always push the cheaper cuts because they genuinely do have more flavour. Fillets account for only about 2 per cent of the meat on the animal.
“There is so much more to beef. I always tell customers that there is so much more to explore which has better flavour and a lot more texture.”
And in twist that makes his early brush with the late Bourdain seem pre-destined, Peacock may soon find himself stationed at the soon-to-be opened Victor Churchill’s outpost in New York — a venture Bourdain helped collaborate on before his death last year.
“Who knows what could happen,” Peacock said.
“Butchery is a hard business and certainly smaller businesses do it so tough with supermarkets dominating everything.
“But I’ve been so lucky so far to be able to do something I love and be where I am.”
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