Mondo Wholesale Butcher (Osborne Park)

I like meat. I like small family-run businesses, sharp knives and watching professionals who know what they're doing. I have a bit of a thing for quality butcher shops.

Our little neighbourhood in the inner suburbs of Perth is blessed with several great butchers. Torre on Lake St is maybe my favourite, with steaks cut to order and any cut minced on request. Princi on Fitzgerald St is old-school Italian, with beautiful lamb, capretto, offal meats and an abundance of pork. Princi is also next door to my favourite Italian deli, Di Chiera Bros.

Meat the Butcher (top name) at Dog Swamp shopping centre and Meat @ The Mezz in Mt Hawthorn also know their stuff. They both make top-quality sausages (I think Meat the Butcher has won some awards for theirs), give good cooking advice, and have a decent range of raw, prepared and semi-prepared meats.

Perhaps the most well-known of all Perth butcher shops is Mondo di Carne on Beaufort St in Inglewood, owned and operated by the gregarious and generous Vince Garreffa. His shop isn't just full of good meat but has well stocked shelves of various 'gourmet' ingredients that you might struggle to find elsewhere. They also have on hand a lot of cuts that you might need to order ahead of time elsewhere, like beef cheeks, veal tail, wagyu steaks and the like. According to Vince, the only pork product they don't get in is the uterus (but apparently some butchers in Northbridge sell that).

Everyone in Perth who cares about food knows about Mondo di Carne. What you might not know is that there is a Mondos wholesale outlet in Osborne Park that also sells direct to the public.


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The outlet sells a pretty wide range of cuts, from game birds (frozen, unfortunately, but we can't get fresh anywhere anyway) to premium wagyu to shoulders of pork. The only potential catch is that everything is sold in packages of about 2kg and up, but that isn't much of a problem if you like to cook. It's also not the sort of place to go if you would like to get things cut to order, or if you need to ask the butcher for some cooking tips. It is the sort of place to go if you want to buy big chunks of the best value meat in Perth.

I recently got six deboned quail, two big bags of chicken carcasses, a free range pork shoulder butt and a pack of six osso bucci for around $75 or so, which is pretty stunning value (especially given the fact that the quail took up about half that amount). A copy of their pricelist is here.

Osborne Park isn't that far to travel for cheap, good quality meat. I've posted the map above. It's in a little industrial unit (number 5) down the back on the left, behind Craft Decor.

Mondo Bulk Meats
5/41 King Edward Rd
Osborne Park WA 6017, Australia
(08) 9446 4778

Meat Class #1 with the Prince of Flesh

"Pork fat... is just delicious" - Vince Garreffa

Vince Garreffa, butcher to the stars, is a master of the porcine arts. He's the sort of guy who gets up at six o'clock on a Sunday morning to boil three pigs' heads to make brawn for his charcuterie class.

I've been looking around for decent cooking classes in Perth, and Mondo di Carne's meat classes seemed like a pretty good bet. I booked in for five classes: two on charcuterie, two on boning and cooking lamb, and one on breaking down and cooking poultry.

I really wanted these classes to be good. I recently took a class on seafood cooking at another local cooking school, and it was disappointingly rudimentary, as if it was designed for people who have never been in a kitchen before.

The first Mondos class was exactly what I was looking for! There was not a single shriek at the sight of the boiled pig's head (above), and everyone seemed to be pretty into food and cooking.

Vince Garreffa first explained to us about the role of sodium nitrate ("pink salt") in curing meat. He then showed us some partially-cured pancetta and demonstrated the 'massage' or 'kneading' process that must be completed daily. We were shown how to make duck prosciutto and smoke our own chorizo, and the main part of the class revolved around making brawn.

He'd started the morning by boiling a massive vat full of three pigs' heads, a few beef tongues and various other lovely animal parts, which he spread out on huge roasting trays and asked us to chop.

The chopped meat was then mixed together with a few handfuls of capers, some salt, pepper, parsley, garlic and red wine vinegar, ladled into plastic containers and topped with a bit of the boiling liquid that had become rich and gelatinous from the trotters that were included in the mix. Next week we each get to bring home our own little container of brawn that we helped make!

As well as teaching us all sorts of valuable little meat-related tips (his method for creating an improvised hot-smoker was particularly revelatory for me), Vince taught us all about the difference between good meat and bad meat. At various points he would teach us how things should be done, and then tell us about the way supermarkets do things. All hams, it seems, are not created equal.

I appreciated getting a bit more information about the distinctions between well-prepared and poorly-prepared meat. Sometimes it can seem as if avoiding the supermarket is just a bit of foodie prejudice, or a culinary fashion statement. Vince's descriptions of supermarkets' meat preparation techniques confirm that there is a world of difference between smallgoods prepared by respectable artisans and mass-produced stuff injected with water and chemicals.

I've already done a fair bit of reading about charcuterie, mostly the writings of my favourite food writer Michael Ruhlman, but this is definitely an area of cooking in which it pays to get some hands-on instruction before trying things yourself. There's no way for a book (or a TV show) to tell you how a partially-cured duck breast should feel, or how hard you should massage your pancetta.

I think the classes on boning and breaking down lamb and poultry will be informative in the same way: instructions to "slice the knife along the saber bone to the joint" are all well and good, but what does that look like? How much pressure should I use? What angle should my knife be held at? What the hell is the saber bone?

I'm excited about my remaining four classes, and I hope to start applying some of my newly acquired knowledge at home. If you're in Perth and looking to acquire a bit more skill in working with meat, I highly recommend the classes at Mondo di Carne.