A cut above The Fredericktown Butcher Shop celebrates 40th anniversary
Bob Niedbala/O-R Butch Booze strings beef sticks, preparing them for the smoker.
Bob Niedbala/O-R Many people like to have their pictures taken with the pink pig outside Fredericktown Butcher Shop.
Jim McNutt/O-R Exterior of Fredericktown Butcher Shop
Bob Niedbala/O-R Mary Pirt, deli manager, fills an order of fried chicken.
Jim McNutt/O-R Beverly Bailey, left, employed by the Giles family at the Fredericktown Butcher Shop for the past 39 years, looks over bills with Cynthia and Albert Giles, shop owners.
Jim McNutt/O-R Mary Pirt, a 19-year employee and one of the deli managers, stocks the shelves with a tray of chicken at the Fredericktown Butcher Shop.
Jim McNutt/O-R The staff takes a break to pose for a photo in the Fredericktown Butcher Shop.
Jim McNutt/O-R Shirley Kelly, a 13-year employee, makes chicken salad sandwiches in the deli section.
FREDERICKTOWN – Blanche Tinelli of Fredericktown won’t go anywhere else to buy her chicken or ground beef.
“They have the best meat here,” Tinelli said earlier this spring as she pushed a grocery cart into the Fredericktown Butcher Shop.
Tinelli, who once worked at a supermarket, said she knows a little something about how grocers prepare meat. Others who came to the shop that afternoon were of the same opinion.
“The prices are good, and the meat is excellent,” said Nancy Washington of Cardale, who had finished shopping and was loading grocery bags into her truck.
Washington won’t shop anywhere else.
It’s obvious Fredericktown Butcher Shop has a following.
The butcher shop occupies a long, white, block and metal-sided building on Route 88 between Millsboro and Fredericktown. A 5-foot-tall rooster is perched on its roof above the entrance.
Outside, the smell of frying chicken permeates the air. It’s the chicken that has gained the shop much of its reputation.
But the store is also known for a variety of meats and meat products, including beef, pork, ribs, beef jerky, sausage, hamburger, ham salad and kielbasa.
“We make the stuff that people like a lot, that nobody else makes,” said Albert Giles, who, with his wife, Cynthia, own and operate the store. “Once you come here, we hook you. You’re going to come back because it’s good, not because it’s cheap, but because it’s the best.”
Giles said he buys the best meats, knows how to prepare them and knows the recipes for making them taste just right. There are many secrets he accumulated over his life and the past 50 years of “doing this” work.
The energetic 80-year-old happily introduces all the employees and stops to talk with each customer. It’s like the old days, when grocers knew the people who shopped in their stores.
“We talk to all our customers. We like to chitchat with them; all our employees do,” he said.
On May 21, the couple celebrated the butcher shop’s 40th anniversary. Albert grew up in Fredericktown, and his wife is from nearby Vestaburg. Before starting the shop, Albert had a grocery store in Malden. He said he and his wife decided to open a store in Fredericktown because of the high volume of traffic on Route 88.
“If you wanted to get into Greene County, you had to go up Route 88,” he said.
The couple built a small store that Cynthia said “wasn’t even big enough for buggies.”
After all the work was done, the couple was ready for a grand opening on March 18, 1976. Then, the night before the grand opening, came the fire.
“We were all cleaned up and ready to go for the next morning,” Cynthia said.
The employees and other workers had come over to the house to have pizza when someone called and told them the store was on fire. The fire was believed to have been intentionally set, she said, though to this day no one knows who did it or why. The couple thought of just picking up and leaving, Cynthia Giles said, but they didn’t, and numerous people helped them to rebuild.
“With their determination, dedication, loyalty and love, Fredericktown Butcher Shop was once again on its way to being rebuilt,” she said.
In the last 40 years, they have increased the size of the store with about a half-dozen additions. It still is not large, measured against most of today’s supermarkets. Inside, the shop has three aisles for groceries on one side of the entrance and on the other, two aisles with coolers and freezers for produce and meat, leading to the deli department at the end of the aisles.
The store got its start in the chicken business in 1986, when Albert and the couple’s son, John Bodnar, a manager at the store who later died in a boating accident, decided to give it a try.
They bought a cooker. Two weeks later, they had to buy another, Albert said. Today, they have eight, with each one capable of cooking 68 pieces of chicken in 12 minutes, he said.
The recipe and preparation, however, is a closely guarded secret.
It’s a store tradition that every child who comes in gets a free piece of chicken. The store has been doing it for so long that people who once came in as children and got a sample now return as adults with their own children in tow.
“It has brought in generation after generation; they keep coming,” Albert said.
He likes to experiment and has come up with some items that only he sells. That’s how it was with his kielbasa, his recipe given him from the mother of a friend.
“It was so good I said I have to get that, but she wouldn’t give it to me. I begged her, and she wouldn’t give it to me,” he said.
Only when she was dying did she ask him to come to see her. It was then that she finally gave him the recipe.
The kielbasa not only is made from this special recipe but it also is available in the form of a patty, like a kielbasa burger. It’s an Albert Giles innovation.
When he first tried the patty, he said, he put about 50 pounds out one day and the next day it was gone.
“You make something like that and it’s just something that takes off like crazy.”
Albert said he sells about 800 pounds of kielbasa a week, both patties and links. He said he sells a similar amount of beef jerky.
“It’s all the way we make it, from our own recipes,” he said.
While many of the butcher shop’s customers are local, some travel long distances to stock up on their meat.
“There are people who come in in the summertime with coolers and take stuff back to like Michigan or wherever,” Cynthia said.
One woman told her she lives in California and stops to buy enough kielbasa to get her through the summer grilling season.
Though many of the stores in the once thriving river town have disappeared over the years as coal mines closed and large retail stores like Walmart opened and took away business, the butcher shop has continued to do well.
“There are no butcher shops around anymore,” Cynthia said about their popularity. “People have become accustomed to us, and they love the atmosphere and our products. It’s unique, and you can still get everything you want here.”
The store also carries produce and a full range of groceries, though it may have only one or two brands of a particular item. But it’s the friendly employees and throwback atmosphere that keeps bringing people back, Albert said.
“People want the good stuff,” he said. “They want the good stuff first and then the price. If you give them price without quality you’re wasting your time.”