Healthy Haven

Buying well-raised meat -- from reputable farmers who can tell me how the creatures who end up on my plate have lived and died -- is a commitment I’ve made for myself of late. On the whole, it’s been easy. But, as I’m discovering, it’s hard to be spur of the moment.

Buying in bulk and having a well-stocked freezer helps. But I’m not always that organized. On a recent cold and dreary Wednesday night I felt a sudden need to whip up shepherd’s pie -- but no ground meat handy. The farmer’s market was not an option, and I wasn’t about to make an emergency trek to the farm gate in the near-dark. So I skulked into the supermarket and bought a couple of pounds of generic ground beef. The pie was tasty; but having made a commitment to buying healthily-raised meat, (and knowing nothing about what I’d just bought or where it came from), I was feeling disappointed in myself. Convenience had won out.

Since then, Kitchener has welcomed the arrival of The Healthy Butcher, and picking up a pound of quality ground beef from a butcher you know after work is suddenly easier. This is the third store for owners Mario Fiorucci and Tara Longo, a married couple from Toronto who have had enormous success with their stores on Queen Street West and, more recently, Eglinton Avenue. 

The Kitchener location is part of the new, 12,000 square foot Healthy Haven, just off of Victoria Street on Bruce, overlooking the expressway. The open-concept market was the brainwave of David Ehrenworth, owner of the David’s Gourmet shops in downtown Kitchener and North Waterloo. He was looking to open a third location, and was interested in the old Cowan Insurance building, but the space was too large. Why not share the space with other vendors, he thought, and, within a matter of days, he found several interested parties. Fiddleheads, a well-established local health food store, was first on board. Next came Gerald Kara of Kara’s Smart Foods, who, along with his father, specializes in produce and has a long history at the St. Jacob’s market.

“They thought about it and were missing meat and fish, and they had heard of us so they gave us a call,” Fiorucci says of Ehrenworth and partners Jenn Arsenault and Kim Ziegler-Boril, who co-own Fiddleheads. “We originally said no, because we had just opened the Eglinton store, but we gave in because they had such a passion for what they were doing and they shared our philosophy for food and retail. It was a good opportunity and it’s a world-class store. It’s a great mix, these four retailers under one roof.”

Indeed, the Haven, which opened in late October, makes for a unique shopping experience. The four retailers are in one open-concept store, each in their own section, but with a single cash check-out.

You can pop by to pick up all the necessities for a lovely meal -- veg from Kara’s carefully-selected supply, meat or fish from the butcher (including over 50 varieties of housemade sausage and burgers), organic dairy, grains and legumes from Fiddlehead’s and pretty much anything else you can dream up from David’s. It’s also a good spot to source out a hard-to-find culinary item (duck fat, say) or to sit in the cafe area and have a latte, lunch or a scoop of ice cream. In the future, says Ehrenworth, they plan to have an outdoor patio and a learning room that features various clinics.

“It’s about good food, more than anything,” Fiorucci says of the owners’ shared philosophy. All meat at The Healthy Butcher, for example, comes from organically-raised animals on Ontario farms. Their goal, he says, is not just to educate people on eating local and organic, but to introduce them to the concept of nose-to-tail eating.

“It’s not just boxes of loins that we’re selling,” he explains. “That’s what sells, that’s what’s tender, but a cow’s not a walking loin. With every 40 pounds of striploin, there’s 600 pounds of everything else. Our deal with farmers is we buy the whole animal.”

As a result, Fiorucci says he tends to price prime cuts (like rib eye steaks) higher, whereas non-prime cuts (like ground beef) are comparable to supermarket prices. “We try to encourage people to look aside. Prime cuts are a nice treat, but there’s so much more than that.”

Fiorucci believes we need to get away from eating large quantities of cheap meat and instead move toward eating smaller quantities of high-quality meat. Despite having been warned that KW shoppers are “price-conscious,” Fiorucci says that, so far, the clientele here are proving more knowledgeable than in Toronto.

“People understand organic and what we’re trying to do,” he said. “They understand they’re going to be paying more. There’s been no one I’ve had an argument with about price. Maybe it’s because here, people are much closer to agriculture and to farming than they are in Toronto.”

The Healthy Haven, at 25 Bruce Street, is open Monday to Wednesday from 9 to 7, Thursday and Friday from 9 to 8, Saturday 9 to 5 and Sundays noon to 5. Check out their website for more information at www.healthyhaven.ca.
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