Being a chef, and self-taught butcher, Maciej Tomaszewski is the owner of a Bialystok-based culinary project combining a restaurant, a bakery, and a butcher's shop where you can buy quality beef from Podlasie. We are talking to him about seasonal entrecôtes, the American dream, and why we prefer to attract guests rather than customers to the premises.

Tomasz: This year, on Children's Day to be precise, you are celebrating the tenth anniversary of the opening of Cut of Meat. What's the key to staying so long in such a highly competitive gastronomic market?

Maciej: 11 years ago, when I came back from the States, I had already known that I wanted to open something that would be for everyone. The secret lies in being honest with guests and employees, conscientiousness, continuous education, an¬d development of myself and my staff. I boast that over the years more than 400,000 guests have been served at 60 seats. Had it not been for the pandemic, there would have been more...

As for the second part of your question

“(...) I don't think the restaurant market is competitive, either in Białystok or Warsaw. Chefs don't compete with each other, because each of us cooks something different, we have different tastes. I would talk about competition in the case of pizzerias, kebabs, and highly specialised cuisines in general. I've always wanted another restaurant to open next to me.”

Tomasz: You are both the chef and the owner. How does your perspective change when you combine both positions?

Maciej: I started cooking late, at the age of 28. Being a chef was my dream.

“(...) If you want to work in gastronomy, you have to have a passion for it. Not only must you like the people, but also the stress, which is different from that present in other industries: it's short but frequent. We also have more of it during the day than in many other professions. The right character is also required: everyone can be a cook, but not everyone can be a chef because it's a responsibility you have to be ready for if you don't want to mess yourself up.”

Quite accidentally, the pandemic made me realize how tired I was. If it hadn't been for the lockdown, I would keep going the way I did before, which was to overwork myself. Now I'm becoming more of an owner, a businessman. I've grown into it and I want to improve at it because I can already be a sound cook and a chef. In my opinion, combining these two positions is very difficult. One British university made a study in which they pigeonholed different professions in terms of psychopathy: out of the ten positions, the chef was in the ninth position and CEO in the first. So there must be something wrong with me (laughs). Fortunately, I have a wife who is my business partner and without whom the restaurant would not exist. She is the secret ingredient.

Tomasz: Your establishments are famous for good service. What do you pay attention to when training your staff?

Maciej: The most important thing is knowledge and the willingness to share it. Our professions are specific. Even if our restaurant looks inconspicuous from the outside, what we cook in it is no longer so and requires a great deal of knowledge from the cooks and also the staff in the dining hall. Guests need to be told exactly what is special about the dish they are about to consume so that they will want to order it. This is why we place so much emphasis on the education of the waiters who are obliged to work one full shift in the kitchen during their training. In the case of a chef, we need about six months to build up a relationship of trust before we can leave him alone on a shift. Fortunately, we don't have a high turnover; I've had the same team for five years. On the other hand, many of the people who work at Cut of Meat Butcher’s are former cooks and waiters.

Tomasz: In catering, it is often said that we serve guests rather than customers. What do you think is the essence of this distinction?

Maciej: This is a broad issue and I spent a lot of time exploring it during my time in the US.

"During my first classes, it was explained to us that we don't need customers, we need guests. We want to treat all visitors in that way. So we learn their names, and their needs, remember their faces, and build a relationship. In the case of the customer, you don't want to do that, you don't need to."

Employees who understand the meaning of this difference approach their tasks in a completely different way because this has an impact not only on the satisfaction of the visitors: with this approach, an employee treats his job as if it was his home. He takes responsibility for it. He doesn't need to be supervised so closely, but needs more explanation. He needs to be asked to do things rather than demanded and reprimanded. That's the difference.

Tomasz: In addition to the restaurant, you also have a butcher's shop connected to the shop (Cut of Meat Butcher's), where you season the meat yourself. What was the reason for creating such a place?

Maciej: One has to speak of a holistic undertaking. In Polish nomenclature, it is called MOL, or marginal, limited, and local activity. [The butcher’s was created for a very simple reason: I had nowhere to buy good quality meat for restaurants and for myself ...

Tomasz: Coming back to the issue of training workers, where can one learn butchery in Poland?

Maciej: Unfortunately, all vocational schools have been abolished. For 4 years, the powers that be have supposedly been trying to bring back the whole profession, but no public consultation has been conducted and there has been no discussion with the industry on how and what they should teach. As a result, the curricula are not adapted to the market reality. In Bialystok, there were huge meat factories and two schools training butchers. Now they are gone and the profession cannot be acquired outside of the workplace. This means that we always take on new people, but there are not that many of them.

Tomasz: What is the most important thing you have brought back from the USA?

Maciej: My profession and I'm not just talking about cooking. In Poland, we have only recently started to talk about something like labour costs. Until now, the Horeca industry has mainly discussed food, forgetting how important it is to pay employees. I believe we are a good few years behind the US gastronomy. Another example is the use of a food runner who is just learning what a waiter does. This enables us to reduce the proportion of skilled people on the crew. Sometimes this is dictated not so much by cost savings as by a simple lack of professionals in the market.

Overall, in the US I learned the mathematics of kitchen management very well.

“I fulfilled a bit of the American dream because after two years and three months I became a chef in a restaurant with 160 seats, nine cooks, and 12 waiters per shift. I showed such passion and drive that I was quickly promoted from a prep cook, a position almost at the bottom of the hierarchy, to the head chef. ”

Our boss left, or rather was fired, so I jumped into his place, which was my blessing and curse at the same time: for I had never even held the position of a deputy chef before. I had to learn a lot of things on the job.

Tomasz: In culinary terms, I associate the United States with a highly developed culture of eating beef, especially burgers and steaks. Is it similar in Poland?

Maciej: It is interesting that beef became really fashionable in the USA only about 11 years ago, just when I was returning to Poland. There were centuries-old steakhouses serving traditional cuisine, but there were no such artisanal, restaurant-style burgers, for example, bars served dry, lean meat patties fried to the max. As I was leaving, I was sure there would be a breakthrough in the beef world. And it has happened in the USA: beef is prepared respectfully in different ways, using all the parts of the animal. In Poland, we are already able to do that too.

Tomasz: How was with the availability of quality beef when you started your business?

Maciej: Back then, the beef in Podlasie came from two plants that had no idea about seasoning and the fact that in the US, meat cuts are prepared in such a way to be given the right characteristics. There was a belief that a cow was a cow, and that the different types of cattle, and the ways in which the meat was processed, differed only a little. There was no good meat for steaks, such as in the USA, which is tender even without seasoning. I am not saying that our beef is in general bad: I think it is the best in Europe because it is the healthiest, least industrial. But to make it suitable for steaks, I had to learn to season it.

Tomasz: But I don't think it's possible to make a super product out of a poor-quality cut with the help of seasoning.

Maciej: Right, we have to start with a good product. If the meat is suitable for barbecue and the cow was raised and slaughtered in a fair way, you can season it for a short time, even 10 days, and then eat it. If, on the other hand, the breeding conditions were poor and the cow was stressed in transport, nothing interesting will come out of the freight car either. My opinion after 10 years is that we as cooks have about 20% of the power but 60% is the quality of the slaughter, and the remaining 20% is the seasoning.

Tomasz: And are there any disadvantages to seasoning? Because we know the advantages: it is a change in texture, new aromas, a deepening of flavour ...

Maciej: Rather not, but you can't overdo it. We assume that around 60 days is the maximum, because after that the meat changes quite significantly, cheese and mushroom flavours appear. Let's remember that each place has different bacteria that are involved in seasoning, and they also affect the rate of changes and their outcome. Our bacterial cultures, which we have grown at Cut of Meat Butcher's are specific. We usually season the roast beef for a minimum of 35 days, and the ribeye for 40 days, although we have some stock that is a few days older and we also sell it. After this length of time, even the tendons with which the ribeye is fleshed out become edible unless you are dealing with a weak cow.

“But I think the biggest advantage of seasoning is how we digest such meat: it puts less strain on the intestines and the body in general because the seasoning itself does some of the work for us.”

Tomasz: What does your collaboration with producers look like? Is it difficult to get a consistently good product?

Maciej:  

“In Polish agriculture, consistency is a problematic concept, to say the least. Livestock breeders are reluctant to talk to buyers about their products. They are businessmen who pay less attention to the details of breeding and more to make it profitable for them.”

Consistency and openness are hard to come by. Let me give you an example: it is an open secret that companies who declare that they sell the meat of a certain animal breed simply lie. There is no law in Poland that makes it compulsory to declare the breed of the animal and 90% of the distributors do not tell the truth about its origin. Despite these transparency problems, we manage to select quality meats that come from cows that lead good lives and are slaughtered in the right way with respect for the dignity of the animal.

Tomasz: I know that you like to prepare offal. How do you disenchant them for the Poles?

Maciej: I try to make it tasty (laughs). You have to use different cooking techniques, and choose the right sauces. Our guests are rather conservative and mainly want to eat liver and tripe. In Warsaw it's a bit different because there the culture of eating offal is more developed: brains, hearts, and testicles are also popular. Both in my kitchen and at the Butcher's, we occasionally try to convince guests to eat thymus or oxtails, for example.

Tomasz: And which of the elements of the fifth quarter do you find most interesting?

Maciej: The veal heart is delicious. It is prepared in a similar way to steaks, without braising. You have to strip it completely and take out all the membranes and then fry it briefly in a pan, not on the grill because it needs some fat.

Tomasz: Finally, I would like to ask a question about the future of beef. Vegetarianism is becoming increasingly popular and meat prices are rising. Will meat be an option only for the rich in a few years or so?

Maciej: Meat prices are rising in our country because of the increase in transport prices and the increased demand for Polish meat in the West. When we entered the European Union, beef was cheaper than pork: it became more expensive because we could export it in large quantities to other markets. Also, it is impossible to consider only the isolated Polish market because in fact the prices that we pay are in euros. Poland is not big enough a consumer to be able to influence them.

As for vegetarianism, there have been many attempts to open and maintain vegetarian restaurants in Bialystok. They have gone bankrupt because vegetarians in our city tend to cook at home. We don't have as wealthy a society here as, say, in the capital, where more people can afford to go out frequently to restaurants.

To conclude I

“(...) , never urge anyone to eat meat. I myself am at a stage in my life where I eat a lot of vegetables, and I believe that a balanced, varied diet is much better for us than restricting ourselves to only a certain narrow group of products.”

Tomasz: Thank you for the interview.

Text: Tomasz Zielke
Photos: Jakub Wilczek