Casa Rizzieri turns a butcher shop into a full meat chain

Outside Ferrara, Casa Rizzieri has turned a 1969 butcher shop into its own meat supply chain, from farm to curing cellar to dining room.

The project started as F.lli Rizzieri, a neighbourhood butcher shop opened in 1969 in Focomorto, a hamlet on the edge of the city. Three generations later, it still sells meat over the counter. It just does much more besides.

Lorenzo Rizzieri runs it now. He grew up visiting farms with his father, started working the counter at 15, then spent roughly a decade in IT before returning to the family trade in his early twenties, when an interest in cooking took hold.

One family, ten farms, one standard: proof that craft and consistency can still share a counter.

One standard for every supplying farm

His father bought from around ten small farmers, each working to different standards. Lorenzo replaced that patchwork with a single specification, drawn up with vets and nutritionists, that every partner farm signs. It began with beef and now covers chicken, pork, sheep and lamb.

Lorenzo visits the farms himself, once or twice a week. "Being disciplined is how you get to consistency," he says of the routine. A similar push for traceability has helped Parmigiano Reggiano's exports grow despite tariffs, even as supply chains come under more scrutiny.

The cured meats follow the same logic. Salt, pepper and wine are the only additions. Depending on the casing, they age for 90 to 150 days in cellars where the moulds that coat each piece are left to form on their own.

A dining room built around the counter

The restaurant sits behind the shop, separated from the butchery and curing rooms by a single door. The room is kept plain: wood, warm light, no tablecloths, and an open kitchen facing a marble counter.

The menu runs on what the farms and the curing cellar produce: focaccia finished on embers, pork belly cooked in soy and poppy seed, pig's ear with candied carrot, and a risotto cooked on embers with chicken livers. Dessert is gelato with a bone-marrow mou.

"I'm still surprised how little attention we give to the value and quality of food," Lorenzo says. At Casa Rizzieri, the answer has been to control that value from the farm gate onward, rather than argue about it over the counter.