Artisanal butcher shop comes to Pike/Pine

It's a great feeling when you're finally able to achieve your life's ambition, whether that be climbing a mountain, jumping out of a plane, or getting the Hammer Suit in Super Mario Bros 3 so you can be totally invincible to fire attacks. Achieving his life's ambition to sate your belly, the dude behind Rain Shadow Meats.

Conceived by a former Discount Tire jockey/Boat Street sous chef turned meat carver, and tucked into the vestibule at the Melrose Project, RS's a classically white-countered butchery slinging NW sourced meatiness, and boasting its own wooden curing shed, plus a windowed freezer so you can peep sides of beef, whole pigs, and maybe a whole crate of those ice cream bars that look like baseball mitts with the ball made out of gum. Beefiness comes from Oregon's Painted Hills farm and ranges from bone-in beef shortribs and Cafe de Boeuf ribeye steak, to tenderloin filets, to giant Porterhouse/T-bones; plus there's whole tenderloins, beef shanks and oxtails from Walla Walla's Thundering Hooves that're 100% grass fed, like Ricky Williams in Australia. On the non-beef front, RS rocks racks of ribs and boneless legs of lamb from Cattail Creek, OR; pork chops, tenderloin, and pork belly from Carlton Farms; and Cornish chickens, poussin (baby chickens), and whole rabbits from Mad Hatcher, aka Terri when her best scenes were cut from Spy Kids.

RS also slings house made sausage, and charcuterie (Zoe's dry rub bacon, Italian Pio Tosini prosciutto) but, when the permits clear, he'll also be able to cure his own salami and other Italian-style meats, which tend to turn hard as stone if you leave them out, almost as if someone hit down arrow, B.