Style Weekly
Tanya Cauthen, 39
Owner, Belmont Butchery
Richmond cooking will never be the same, and Tanya Cauthen can be held partly responsible. Her artisanal butcher shop in the city's Museum District has become a culinary clearinghouse for chefs, gourmands and novices who can't tell a rillette from confit. They find in Cauthen a trained chef with serious chops — someone as delighted to share recipes and expertise as she is to custom-cut house-cured guanicale or prime-grade beef.
Cauthen is evangelical about food and describes her work as joyful, especially when that means sawing through cow bones or harvesting the squishier parts of a pig. Most of the shop's meat is free of hormones and antibiotics, and much comes from local farmers — contributing to a growing locavore movement that Cauthen has promoted for years while working at Ellwood Thompson's, the Edible Garden and other natural-foods trailblazers here.
She's also active in many food-related benefit events, donating time and merchandise with the same zeal she offers to customers who want to learn more about what they're buying and eating.
Lately she's been pulling a national spotlight toward Richmond's food scene with features about her work in Saveur and Food & Wine magazines. “My career has been punctuated by bringing something to Richmond that didn't exist here before,” she says.
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