Monahan’s Meats planned in South Glens Falls on Main Street

By Zander Frost, Chronicle Staff Writer

Career butcher Mark Monahan plans to open his own butcher shop — Monahan’s Meats — at 67 Main Street, South Glens Falls, in a building he purchased in 2013. He said he hopes to launch in late June or early July.

He says he’ll offer “sliced meats and cheese. I’m going to make some roast beefs… and some hams.” He said he’ll craft and smoke much of the meat himself — plus importing meats and cheeses from Italy, and regularly bringing more up from Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.

He plans to make patties, sausages, “marinated chicken, marinated beef,” he said. Plus, “we make jerky, snack sticks, summer sausage, kielbasa.” Mr. Monahan says he is going for quality — “it’s going to be hard to compete with the fresh meat prices” of major supermarkets. “Hopefully I sell better quality beef and steaks and chicken,” he said. “So [customers] will come in here.”

Mr. Monahan said he has spent decades working as a butcher, and for years has operated a deer processing business.

“It’s always been my dream to open a butcher shop,” Mr. Monahan said.

He said that he graduated from Hudson Falls in 1992 and went to college in St. Paul, Minnesota, to study meat processing. “We learned how to smoke meats,” he said. “The smoke house, I would say, is what’s going to make me [successful].”

He said he loves the process — he can smoke hundreds of pounds at once.

“Snack sticks take, like three and a half hours, because they’re really small,” he said. Kielbasas and hot dogs are 5-6 hours, hams 12 hours.

“The taste of product when it comes out is so good,” he said. “But it could be so bad, too, because if it’s not the way you want it…I’m my own worst critic,” he said.

After college, Mr. Monahan said he spent decades working as butcher. “I was at Grand Union from ‘95 to 2000. Then BJs, and then the Quaker Road Hannaford until two years ago.”

He said his deer business grew alongside it. Customers pay him to skin and process venison into sausages, snack sticks, and more.

“My whole family are workers. We always worked. My dad embedded it in me.”

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