Local sausage maker 13th St. Meats is all over D.C. these days. Within six months of being in business, this meat-producing newcomer has become the favorite cylindrical meat provider of several neighborhood watering holes and two of the city’s popular music venues’ kitchens.
Most notable has been U Street Music Hall, where 13th St. Meats became the sausage producer for its new set of pho dogs, the music club’s popular bar chow. The venue overhauled its bar menu last December but kept the Vietnamese-noodle-soup-styled frank and multiplied it to six varieties.
This month the Black Cat also started to offer the sausage company’s version of D.C.’s delicacy, the half-smoke, at its Food for Thought Café. Breadsoda, Dodge City and Pharmacy Bar added 13th St. Meats items on their menu last fall.
This Saturday, the sausage company will launch its second “pop-up shop” at Pharmacy Bar in Adams Morgan, where packages of six different types of handmade sausages — half-smokes, spicy Italian, smoked duck, roasted poblano, German weisswurst and lemon basil chicken — will be sold to the public.
Not known as a popular food destination on H Street NE, The Pug was the first to embrace the Italian sausage, gladly expanding its small grub menu to sell what owner Tony Tomelden describes as good, simple bar food. “I liked the Italian so much,” says Tomelden. “Every time we sold it, everyone loved it. So it made sense to expand.”
And what would the new D.C. beer be without a local sausage pairing? DC Brau Brewing Company recently teamed up with 13th St. Meats for its monthly Saturday grilling events. Not bad for a business that didn’t plan to churn out that many wholesale sausages earlier last year.
“We kind of started off with no real goal in mind,” says Scott McIntosh, the owner of 13th St. Meats.
McIntosh, a long-time D.C. bartender, has always been fascinated with the process of sausage making. Inspired by a Bay Area friend, who made home crafted cheese and sausages, he started producing his own franks a few years ago.
“It’s a very whole food,” he says about sausages in general. “It’s not something that your average cook does. But every time I’ve had homemade sausages, I’ve been impressed with the flavor.”
He also credits his wife, Ana, another veteran in the city’s bar and restaurant scene, and her “tireless appetite” for good quality food that has worn off on him. “There’s so much processed stuff in our lives,” he says.
He admits that he, too, is guilty of eating over-processed food all the time, but he does want to “try to be able to push back against” that norm. So he gravitated toward that awareness and shared what he perfected over time with others. In the past year, whenever McIntosh had a surplus of sausages, he would bring them to friends at Toki Underground (where his wife was a cook) and its downstairs neighbor, The Pug, for dinner.
The Pug was actually where the entrepreneurial seeds were planted in McIntosh. His long-time friend Tomelden, whom he describes as a “tireless business man” who always wants to improve whatever he’s involved in, encouraged him to take his product out to the public. “I said, ‘Look if you want to go bigger with this, I’ll sell it,” Tomelden recounts his conversation with McIntosh.
Last spring, his creations were added to the menu and became a hit, overshadowing the hot dogs and bratwursts that have always been on the list. Later that summer, McIntosh also participated in D.C.’s own Grey Market, an event that allows up-and-coming small food business owners to test how a mass audience will be receptive to their homemade goods. He admits his unfamiliarity with the market’s concept coming to the event, but near the end of that day, he sold all the sausages that filled his large cooler.
“I didn’t know what I was doing. I made the stuff and kind of went in cold,” he says. “We ended up selling out in a couple of hours. At that point, people seem to be asking real questions, wanting to know more about it. That made me feel like I should take it seriously as a business.”
McIntosh then officially launched 13th St. Meats (named after the street he currently lives on in Columbia Heights) and partnered with a local purveyor that offers free-range and hormone-free meat. That fall, his official debut of 13th St. Meats at the H Street Festival was also a success, thanks to the help of a few friends, including Chad America, another long-time D.C. bartender and now business partner.
At this point, McIntosh says he’s not depending on his side business as a moneymaker. All he cares is creating simple food that’s made with care.
But 13th St. Meats’ growth has mostly been due to McIntosh’s personal connections with other bar owners throughout the city – he bartends at Breadsoda, his wife used to work at Dodge City and America is currently at Black Cat. He’s also good friends with the guys behind Pharmacy Bar in Adams Morgan, where he now uses its commercial kitchen to make his goods.
“We’re a tight-knit group and we want to support,” says Erik Bruner-Yang, chef and owner at Toki and who also created U Street Music Hall’s food menu. But what the chef mostly praises about the new sausage maker is the quality of his product and professionalism. Most startups, he says, take a long time to find their groove.
“[McIntosh] happened to be incredibly reliable,” says Bruner-Yang. “He takes the time to make products that are well-made. I make an order and the order is always [delivered] on time.”
13th St. Meats Pop-Up Shop
Saturday, Jan. 21, 1-5 p.m.
Pharmacy Bar
2337 18th St. NW
Metro: Woodley Park Zoo/Adams Morgan
