“Why wouldn’t you want to buy a steak sandwich from a butcher?” Master butcher Gary McBean poses the question while standing in front of his glamorous new store at Prahran Market.

G. McBean Family Butcher is the fruition of a decade-long project to move, rebrand and relaunch his industry-leading Gary’s Meats, which supplies restaurants including Attica and is favoured by Melbourne foodies including Karen Martini and Alice Zaslavsky.

The new 300-square-metre shop, kitchen, smokehouse, rotisserie and deli is almost three-times the size of McBean’s former store at the other end of the meat hall in Melbourne’s oldest market, established in 1864.

Handsome green tiling, marble flooring and a brass logo set the tone at G. McBean, now the market’s largest place to buy meat.

“This is the dream come true,” says McBean, who has floated this expansion through three rounds of market board and management. “We’ll expand the range: more free-range pork and lamb, more wagyu, more smallgoods.”

A backroom smoker means Christmas hams will be prepared onsite for the first time and pâtés will be ground in a special industrial cutter that emulsifies without heating, improving shelf life, colour and flavour. Intimate steak nights will introduce keen eaters to secret butchers’ cuts and premium wagyu.

Until now, the only ready-to-eat food in the meat hall has been the occasional sausage sizzle or sushi pack. McBean will now offer a rotating roster of rolls and sandwiches (it’s porchetta with lots of crackling this weekend), as well as curries, pies and bolognese to take home. A liquor law loophole that allows butchers to sell alcohol without a licence means customers can buy a snack and beer or wine and take it to the market courtyard for lunch.

“Our store has been successful to date, but we think the brand-new shop puts us more on a global scale.”

Ash McBean

G. McBean Family Butcher is just metres from the old Prahran Market meat hall where Gary McBean, 63, started working as an eight-year-old. “My father brought me to where he worked on Saturday mornings,” recalls McBean. “I was raking sawdust and washing dishes at first, then I got put in charge of the offal window. They taught me how to use a chopper when I was only 10 or 11: I’d split the lambs’ heads open, get the brains and tongues out and line them up in the window.”

When his father, Ken McBean, bought a butcher shop in Bridge Road, Richmond, Gary moved with him. “I was only 14 and in form 3 when Dad told me to leave school and come to work,” he says.

McBean qualified as a butcher under his father’s eye, then followed Ken McBean back to Prahran Market in the 1980s. “I was working for dad then I bought the shop next to him,” says McBean of the first Gary’s Meats, which opened on the site of the new butcher shop in 1984, before market management moved him further along the hall.

“I’m going back to where I started and it’s just a few metres from where I swept up as a little boy,” says McBean. It’s a far cry from the sawdust days, though. The butcher has spent about $2 million on the equipment and fitout, with design by Wendy Bergman, whose interiors team also worked on restaurant Studio Amaro, which recently opened on nearby Chapel Street.

McBean is working with his daughter Ash, 31, the fifth generation of McBeans to work in meat. She qualified as a butcher three years ago after twice winning apprentice of the year.

“I’ve been working in Dad’s shop for every bit of 15 years,” she says. “Dad has worked so hard, and we’ve been among the leaders in Melbourne.” Gary McBean has been at the forefront of marinating meats, pushing free-range and ethical meats, as well as dry-ageing (hanging meat to improve flavour and texture), and moving to plastic-free packaging. He was also among the first to push fat as flavour.

“The trend in the 1990s was all about lean meat,” says Ash McBean. “We decided to scrap that and focus on the high-fat content you get through grass-fed beef that’s raised for a few years on green pastures. You end up with a far better product.”

The relaunch comes in a hot environment for both meat and markets. The new G. McBean will inevitably be compared to meat boutique Victor Churchill, which became Melbourne’s most spectacular place to buy steak when it opened in nearby Armadale in 2021.

The Sydney import has a horseshoe-shaped marble dining bar and a workspace that is more exalted altar than boning room. In the produce market stakes, Prahran looks dowdy compared to vibrant South Melbourne, with its plethora of eating places and consistent shoulder-to-shoulder shopping on weekends. The five-year renewal of Queen Victoria Market also puts Prahran Market on notice.

“Our store has been successful to date, but we think the brand-new shop puts us more on a global scale,” Ash says. “When people come to Melbourne, we want them to come to G. McBean Family Butcher because they want to see what we are doing here.”

Stall 501, Prahran Market, Commercial Road, South Yarra, 03 9826 0815, gmcbean.com.au