16 Top Butcher Shops and Smokehouses in Upstate New York

Speaking from personal experience, I love an old-fashioned butcher shop. My father owned a little neighborhood butcher shop and deli in the 1950s and 1960s in my small hometown in Delaware County. When I was a kid I remember he would work all through the night preparing the steaks, chops, and other meat items for his customers for the week.

It was like watching an artist at work. He trimmed, cut, weighed, wrapped, and labeled hundreds of items and then moved into the old wooden meat cooler where the band saw was and cut up some more. He cut and quartered hundreds of chickens and made an uncountable number of pounds of ground chuck. And all the while my mother was right there arranging everything in the case, making signs, and cleaning the old butcher block table (several times a night).

Today there are still many neighborhood butcher shops across the region. I have listed sixteen for you to check out. These also include meat stores and smokehouses.

As you will see, many of these in this gallery are 50, 60, 80 and even well over 100 years old, and still being run by new generations of founding family members.

I must add a tip of the hat to the meat managers at the big chain grocery stores. They also do a fantastic job. I like to get steaks and chops from our own Price Chopper, Hannaford, and even the nearest Wegmans when I am around one. But my heart will always lie in the small mom-and-pop meat stores of our region.

I hope you will check these out. And since we obviously cannot list all 100 or 200 of them, feel free to go to our Facebook page and give a shout-out to your own favorite butcher shop or smokehouse!