Schaller & Weber is quickly becoming one of my favorite places in the country to acquire pork products.
I visited their store on the Upper East Side during my recent trip to NYC, but while this was my first time visiting their store, it was not my first time tasting their products. Schaller & Weber also sells their products over the internet and at various fine food stores around the country, and as a result I had previously sampled their wonderful double smoked bacon. If you missed my article about it the first time around, you can find it here.
An article that was in the New York Times a couple years ago does a good job of describing the experience of visiting the Schaller & Weber store:
“A number of the polite but unsmiling men deftly carving and weighing at Schaller & Weber, the redoubtable meat purveyors who have maintained the same small shop at Second Avenue and 86th Street since 1937, speak with German accents. This gives the itinerant shopper the comforting impression that, at least within these orderly confines, all is still right in the world. Nothing has changed here in a very long while, precisely because nothing has needed to. A stroll through the store turns up items rarely found in butcher shops today. Among the Westphalian hams and braunschweigers are tongue-twisting Teutonic mysteries like kasseler rippchen, nuss-schinken and touristenwurst.”
Schaller & Weber is a German deli in the truest sense, and browsing the meat case and grocery aisles is an overwhelming experience. After I finally got my bearings, I settled on the following products:
- Homemade spaetzle. Oddly enough, spaetzle is one of my favorite all-time foods. And the Schaller & Weber spaetzle is some of the best I’ve had in the United States.
- Weisswurst. This is a very traditional German white sausage. We ate them for dinner last night. They were quite lovely with deli mustard.
- Cocktail bratwurst. Imagine bratwurst in miniature form. I had no idea such a magnificent thing existed. From this point forward, I want to serve these at every cocktail party I host.
- Paprika bacon. This bacon is the only thing I purchased at Schaller & Weber that I haven’t eaten yet. I’ll report back once I actually try it. But my sense is that the experience will be quite interesting since you can smell the paprika through the shrink wrap packaging.
- Bacon bits. These are some of the biggest bacon bits I’ve ever seen. I used them to make a bacon and mushroom risotto for dinner tonight. I’ve included some photos below. The bacon bits had a hammy taste that was quite delicious. And they were great for giving the risotto a nice bacony flavor.
The older woman at the checkout stand at the Schaller & Weber store was like a long lost German grandmother. She was really friendly and threw a few pieces of chocolate candy in my bag as a treat. She also talked me into purchasing the chocolate St. Patty’s Day pig pictured here. I have no idea why I bought it, but it somehow made a lot of sense at the time!
As a side note…there was one odd thing about my trip to Schaller & Weber, and it didn’t happen inside the store. Before I entered the store, I encountered a guy walking down the sidewalk yelling “apples!” at the top of his voice over and over again. And he definitely wasn’t selling apples. I got a good chuckle out of it. There’s nothing like crazy people in the city.
Anyways, Schaller & Weber is truly a Manhattan gem and is arguably one of the best places in the country to acquire pork products, including bacon. After my wonderful experience at their store, and because of the good quality and taste of their products, I’ll definitely be ordering from Schaller & Weber again in the future.
Schaller & Weber
1654 Second Avenue @ 86th Street
New York, New York
Phone: 212-879-3047