Watching head butcher Mike Lindsay `break down’ a leg of beef is like watching a contemporary dance. It’s a performance he has done a thousand times before and it shows. He does the job for the most part with just a hook and a relatively small knife talking as he goes about changes in the industry over the years, customer preferences and the need to be delicate here and there so as not to compromise the most expensive cuts. Mike is from the old school where butchers were trained to use the whole animal and not to waste a single scrap. Here the beef is dry-aged on hooks in a hanging cooler for between 21 and 28 days – much longer than beef raised in regular feedlots where the meat is immediately packed into cryo-vac bags and aged in its own juices before hitting supermarket shelves.

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