The Farmhouse Group’s Guild Commissary has been up and running for more than a month. Tomorrow, the ultimate fruit of master butcher Frank Pace and chef Tom Deckman’s labors will be unveiled with the official opening of Guild Fine Meats at 111 St. Paul Street.

Today, the staff at the new butcher shop and deli is getting used to the space with a soft opening.

But sorry, meat lovers, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow for a look at the good stuff. The butcher case is papered over.

Co-owner Jed Davis says that a full menu of sandwiches and salads will be available within a few days, with the majority rolling out tomorrow.

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AAN award-winning food writer Alice Levitt is a fan of the exotic, the excellent and automats. She wrote for Seven Days 2007-2015.

11 replies on “Guild Fine Meats Opens Tomorrow in Burlington”

  1. tip: please have a menu available online. didn’t find an official website just a facebook profile. shouldn’t be too hard to snap a picture and upload.

  4. maybe as a web developer i am more anxious for information. my thoughts, as a new restaurant already with your domain, how hard is it to upload an image of the menu. sure, one could argue they want to stylize it than just upload a camera pic or PDF. but at the end of the day, all people want to see is what they have offered and pricing. all they have to do is mention that their site is currently under construction, but here is a temp menu. takes less than a minute to upload, even to facebook photos.

  6. As a web developer, maybe you misinterpret the meaning of a soft opening. Details are still being ironed out, menus may not be finalized and/or even printed yet… things are still in flux. It’s a restaurant thing. If you can’t deal, wait a few weeks.

  7. kelci, i get that it is a soft opening and things are still in flux as you said. but as i mentioned above, i wasn’t looking for anything final. using GFM as an example, they could have easily posted on their facebook this morning what the menu for today was. would have taken maybe 10minutes to post. why am i making a big deal out of this? i would think as a restaurant, you want to make money. GFM could have had my business today. but when i checked their facebook account, there was no info. therefore, i looked at the facebook profiles of some of the food trucks around here and went there.
    *guild fine meats: was just using you guys as an example above. i seriously can’t wait to try your sandwiches 🙂

  8. also, as a web developer who supports a few burlington restaurants, i can tell you that besides the homepage, menus are the second ranked most viewed pages on a restaurant website.

  9. I think you just lack a sense of adventure 🙂 I agree; having a menu online is a wonderful benefit… but sometimes you just need to walk in and see what it’s about. And I will concede that I’ll totally be perusing the online menu if/when it’s posted, but it’s not a prerequisite for my business.

  10. kelci, i will totally agree that my approach is a lack of adventure. to be truthful though, while i have been to the guild and enjoyed my experience there, it also isn’t the cheapest place. therefore, one may assume, like me that this new place may also not be the cheapest place based on brand identity with the guild, farmhouse and el cortijo. w/o a menu, i am currently thinking their sandwiches are prob in the $10+ range? i could be wrong tho, but w/o any info, i have no idea. honestly, i don’t want to spend $10+ on lunch. so this simply just goes back to my original point of having a menu online and being able to evaluate my options for a #btvlunch.

  11. I’m only 31 years old, but I can remember, distinctly, a time in my life when I did not carry a telephone in my pocket, let alone a computer with voicemail, and the only way I could read a document, such as a menu, was to pick it up and read it.
    Somehow, I managed to enjoy my life. I never found myself in a state of shut-down freaking out because I couldn’t pre-plan my plans. If I wanted to check out a new restaurant in town, I listened a bit to the buzz, and then I went and checked it out.
    I get that we live in the world of ‘everything I want at my fingertips 24/7.’ Heck, these folks are even constructing a website that will, I’m sure, provide all of that instant information we all feel so entitled to. Maybe back down from the website critique until they, I dunno, actually open with their full menu.
    I’m a chef, and I can attest to the nightmares born of posting a menu online that turns out to head in a different direction once things get rolling. I know you can change it, but the people who read it have read it, and they’ll be upset when they can’t get ‘that thing’ they read on the website three weeks ago that you scrapped two weeks ago. I’m not saying not to post an advance of your menu prior to open. I’m just saying there are a number of very good reasons not to. Just my experience.
    I guess what I’m saying is that reading your comments made me feel like you’ve missed the point here. Heck dude, they’re house curing bacon. That alone is a religious undertaking. These guys are gonna craft you amazing food. They’re not going to tap some buttons on the replicator. Put down your tricorder, and enjoy the crux of the experience: an OLD-TIME deli in the midst of a world of technology overload and rectangular logs of ‘honey roasted chicken’ at Shaw’s….
    In my humble opinion.

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