The butcher’s case, Applestone likes to say, is a canvas: Every day he has a picture to paint. “What butcher shops do is, we make raw meat look like candy. The whole thing is based on sight. If I can get it in their mouth — and they like food — they’re mine.” Filling the case is a race against the clock, with the goal being to finish by opening time every day. They rarely make it. When he and his top assistant are firing on all cylinders, it can take more than four hours to get through a day’s cutting. Today it’ll be more like five or six. “It looks fantastic when we’re done,” Applestone says. “But it’s fucking work.”

Pigs are the first order of business today. Because it’s finishing season — meaning farmers slaughter them so they don’t have to feed them over the winter — Applestone has a lot of pork. And because Fleisher’s is a sustainable business, he has to use every bit of it. What he can’t sell fresh, he’ll smoke or turn into charcuterie. The fat he’ll use for sausage or render for soap; other parts get ground up for homemade dog food. Even the tails get snipped off, braised, and barbecued like tiny hot dogs. “You can’t eat them regularly unless you’re, like, running around naked in the Arctic,” he says. “But they’re fucking delicious.”

Applestone hauls a massive slab of pork out from the freezer and slams it on the butcher block. When he first started butchering, it took him an hour and a half to break down a pig. These days he can do it in 44 seconds. (His dream is to one day do it with a pocket­knife.)

With his G.I. Joe shoulders and thick upper torso, he can deadlift more than 200 pounds, about the weight of an arm chuck. (If he were a steer, he’d make a great brisket.) Working to the strains of Black Sabbath and AC/DC, he blows through the pig in no time, pausing only to scrape something pink and plaquey off a cut of shoulder. “Bone dust,” he says.

Next it’s time for the lamb. First he slices out the tongue and uses a bone saw to take off the head, which he tosses in the garbage with an unceremonious thud. Then out come the insides — the heart, the kidneys. Contrary to popular imagination, butchers don’t actually use their cleavers that much: Instead, most of Applestone’s work is done with a five-inch boning knife, which he works with the deft precision of a surgeon. When he reaches down for his scabbard, he knows where each knife is without even looking.

But then it’s time to take off the legs, and Applestone needs the heavy machinery. He fires up the band saw. There’s a high-pitched whir, and then the piercing whine of metal on bone.

Over the speakers, the intro to “Welcome to the Jungle” starts to play. Applestone glances at the clock. “Two hours!”

—

All is quiet on Wall Street. No, not that one. This one is in Kingston, New York, a sleepy upstate town on the banks of the Hudson River. It was here, eight years ago, that the original Fleisher’s opened for business, on the same block as a Renaissance costume shop and the Hudson Valley LGBTQ Community Center. These days — thanks to Fleisher’s, no doubt — it’s one of the tonier spots going, with a mixology-inspired cocktail lounge and a tapas bar. “I tell Jess all the time,” jokes Applestone, “the day there’s a cobbler across the street, we’re done.”

It’s a Monday, so the store is closed. But inside, two apprentices are laboring intently, the only noise the ambient soundtrack of butchering being done: the snap of rubber gloves, the rip of brown paper, the soft thump of a knife blade on the wooden block. Applestone hauls an armful of pork out of the freezer, a pungent walk-in chamber they call Big Bertha, and grins. “That’s fresh-cut muscle you’re smelling. Blood, really.”

Applestone grew up on Long Island, the son of two public school teachers and the great-grandson of a butcher named Wolf Fleisher (Applestone is his wife’s last name). After high school, he spent his twenties wandering the country working various chef and bartending jobs: Portland, Madison, Brooklyn, Berkeley, Santa Cruz. He rode motorcycles, smoked his share of pot, spent a few years following the Dead. Then, in 2001, he was headed to Maui to move in with some buddies when his mom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and he moved back home to Long Island to take care of her. That’s where he met ­Jessica.

Fleisher’s started in 2004, basically on a whim. Jessica, who’d long been a vegetarian, decided she wanted to try eating meat again. But when she looked around for ethical local options, she couldn’t find any. She was shocked — didn’t they live in a farm belt? She and Josh started talking, and they landed on a crazy idea: What if they opened a butcher shop of their own? They hatched the plan in February, started raising money in March, got married in May, and by June, were open for business.

The first few years were tough, Apple­stone says. “We lost everything in the first six months. I mean every freaking penny. We were throwing shit out left and right — we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing.” They were getting crash courses in everything from animal husbandry to Hudson Valley climatology; he says their learning curve was a vertical line. Then there were the accidents: Josh nearly severed his carotid artery with a meat hook; another time he impaled himself with a boning knife and almost died of septic shock. He was also hospitalized for five days with bleeding ulcers, brought on by stress. “We should have died, multiple times,” he says. “We were way the hell out of our league. But we were also way the hell ahead of the curve.”

Meanwhile, Applestone was also some­thing highly unusual for a butcher: a vegan. He had been since high school, when his younger brother was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory disorder of the intestines. Josh gave up dairy out of solidarity, found that he liked it, and eventually phased out meat and eggs as well. “I just wasn’t into meat,” he says. “It didn’t taste good. It wasn’t that great. It was expensive. It’s not like I was calling
myself ‘a vegan.’ That’s just what I was.”

Applestone’s veganism was always more practical than moral. “I didn’t eat meat, but I’m not a big animal-rights guy,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, I love animals. But if you take a steer and release it into the wild, it’s gonna starve and die. These animals have been domesticated for hundreds and hundreds of years. No, they’re not healthy, and, no, it’s not the best thing in the world — but that’s what they’re here for.”

Then, in 2004, a bad motorcycle accident crushed his knee, and he had a really hard time recovering. Jessica convinced him that animal protein might do him some good. “You gotta eat blood,” she said. “You need liver. You need meat.” Eventually, six months after they’d opened, he relented and gave bacon a try. He cooked up a knuckle-thick slab of Fleisher’s finest — rubbed in pepper, hot-smoked, and basted with apple cider — and proceeded to devour it straight out of the pan. Followed by another. And then another.

“It was mind-blowing,” Applestone says. “I think more than anything else, it was the fat. That’s the one thing vegans and vegetarians don’t get — fat is brain power. If you don’t eat fat, you are starving your body. Immediately I was like, ‘Wow! I feel better!’ ” Within a month, he was a full-on carnivore. His conversion is commemorated by a ­T-shirt they sell, which reads “bacon: the gateway meat.”

Eight years later, Applestone has eaten just about everything: heart (“amazing”), brains (“pretty good”), coxcombs (“a little chewy”), testicles (“taste like balls”). “A butcher shouldn’t be afraid to try anything once,” he says. “We’re not there to yuck your yum.”

—

Applestone has grand plans for Fleisher’s over the next few years. Right now the biggest project in the works is their meat-cutting university, which they plan to open later this year. They hope to offer 30 courses, in everything from slaughtering to sausage-stuffing, with Fleisher’s butchers as instructors and a shuttle service to get people to campus and back home in time for dinner. “Not to be arrogant, but we can change the way people look at food forever,” he says. “Usually it takes billions of dollars and several corporations to do that. This time it’s just two Jews from Long Island.”

And thus the former vegan has become a full-on meat evangelist. Still, he’s not trying to get people to eat more meat. In fact, he’d be happier if everyone ate a little bit less. “Jessica and I are constantly trying to downsize people,” he says. “Four to six ounces apiece — you don’t need any more than that. Much more and you’re going to kill yourself. You eat that much meat, and you’re not gonna be around in 10 years.”

“And we,” he adds slyly, “want you around.”