Dare you to drink this: Roasted beet puree, Berkshire bourbon, sage, rosemary and cardamom garnished with a radish and olive eye and a raw chicken foot from last year's dinner.
A plate of passed appetizers from last year's dinner.
Making blood sausage for last year's dinner.
Owner Jeremy Stanton at The Meat Market in August.
Fettuccine Bolognese from last year's Offal Dinner with pig skin and pork kidney garnished with fresh basil. The annual event serves up little-used butcher portions in a gourmet meal for All Hallow's Eve.
GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — The Meat Market's third annual Offal Dinner is not your commonplace Halloween celebration.
No candy corn or caramel apples.
And there's a lot of detail needed to appreciate this ghoulish gourmet livestock farm-to-table six-course innards tasting dinner.
So for those with the gustatory fortitude, the dinner honoring All Hallow's Eve is Saturday night at 6 p.m.
The Meat Market is the dream child of food entrepreneur Jeremy Stanton. He started the full-service, locally raised animal, nose-to-tail butcher shop in late summer 2011. Eight years before, he had launched his successful Fire Roasted Catering business that brings local food and high heat to parties big and small around New England and New York state.
A year after opening, he offered his first All Hallows Offal Dinner for those who love those often eschewed and avoided animal parts including the nose and tail. He calls Halloween his favorite creepfest. A time to indulge our fears.
Stanton has a natural bent to entertain, educate, excite and dazzle which he intends to do with his Offal Dinners. Just to note, The Meat Market also celebrates Valentine's Day, creates inventive sausage tasting afternoons, holds fried chicken Thursday dinners all summer and runs all cooking classes from knife skills to sausage making.
But the Offal Dinners stand apart.
"In the world of eating, nothing is so creepy to the eater as the unusual," Stanton said.
Third Annual All Hallow's Eve
Offal Dinner six-course tasting menu, Nov. 1, at 6 p.m.;
reservations required & costumes encouraged
The Meat Market 389 Stockbridge Road, Great Barrington
413-528-2022 Cost is $50 with a cash bar
The first dinner offered small tasting plates of delicacies such as deviled kidneys, pickled tongue, fried gizzards and hearts on a stick with dessert. Stanton encouraged diners to come costumed by giving away a free first drink to anyone who came dressed for Halloween.
The dinner has evolved to a six-course sit-down affair with standing and passed appetizers and specialty and classic cocktails. This year's cocktails include a Brain Hemorrhage, the contents of which remains a secret.
"This food is not for everyone," Stanton said. "But, those who love it, love it."
This year's menu starts with appetizers of whipped lardo (seasoned pork fat), pig ear terrine and chicharrones (fried pork skin), beef tongue Reubens and giblet corn dogs.
There will be a warm winter greens salad garnished with more chicharrones and egg and dressed in a housemade salami vinaigrette.
Main courses will be roasted beef marrow bones, Blutnudeln (pasta made with blood), and what Stanton and his chef Jim Gop have named "Broken Hearts, "a special concoction of trotter, guanciale confit, mustard, and apples," (pig's feet, Italian cured pork jowls, mustard and apples).
Traditionally, dessert has included blood orange sorbet and chocolate, sometimes with caramel, sometimes with bacon. This year dessert will be a surprise.
Everyone will be delighted with diners who wear costumes and dancing will fill the rooms including around the meat cases and lockers.
The dining room is small so reservations are required.
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Fettuccine Bolognese from last year's Offal Dinner with pig skin and pork kidney garnished with fresh basil. The annual event serves up little-used butcher portions in a gourmet meal for All Hallow's Eve.
