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Long's Meat Market ... One of our BEST customers!

Best of . . .

After 80 years, Long's still in its prime

BEST MEAT
Long's Meat Market
Where: 81 E. 28th Ave.
Hours: 8 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Monday through Saturday
Phone: 344-3172
On the Web: www.longsmeatmarket.com

When Team Best of ... wants a rack of lamb, a rack of ribs or a rack of rattlesnake, we take our meat craving to Long's.

In business since 1927, this old-school meat market offers homemade sausages, whole sides of beef and prime rib that hasn't been sitting in a freezer for three months.

You can even find quail and rabbit, duck, and you can special order whole hogs, alligator and other exotic meats.

Most everything is cut, ground or sliced right here before your very eyes. Even the sausage is squeezed out in the front room, not the back, which disproves that old adage about not wanting to see how sausage is made.

At Long's, you see, it's always a pleasure to watch the guys in white aprons (call them meat cutters, not butchers, please) work.

That's because this place is decidedly old fashioned. Sure, it's got fancy pastas, high-end cuts of perfectly marbled meat and spendy wines that will knock your socks off. But Long's also has got straight-up ground beef, ground pork and ground veal (not so easy to find), and at surprisingly reasonable prices.

It's also amazingly clean, which puts our minds at rest when we hear about all of these mad meat diseases.

We also love the 50-year-old maple butcher's blocks, which are so burly they require four guys just to move them. Years ago, the USDA tried to force the market to switch its blocks to plastic, but old man Wooley held his ground.

Nowadays, Richard Wooley's son Mike runs the business and everybody (even the government) knows plastic is a breeding ground for bacteria.

“It's this kind of working class wisdom that makes Long's such a special place. The business's roots go back to 1927 when Ernest "Butch" Long opened up shop at seventh Avenue and Charnelton Street. The meat moved to the L&L Marketplace at 16th and Willamette in 1927 and to its current south Eugene location in 2005.

For sure, Long's has evolved, but in many ways it's still the same old "hang the beef fresh" kind of market its always been. As Wooley points out, every sale involves interacting directly with the customers, which makes the meat cutters all that much more determined to send you away happy.

“That was certainly the case when we went there recently hot on the mission to make 200 meatballs. To our great surprise, we got out of there for less than 20 bucks. And not only that, we had the real meat market experience we had been craving.

The guy wrote our order on the same piece of butcher paper he crapped the pork in, did some simple column addition on the paper and then slapped a sticker on it with a slogan that summed up the whole experience perfectly.

"Long's Meat Market," it read. "Home of good meats."