Chapter One · The Counter
Some shops modernised. This one didn’t need to.
There is a particular kind of customer this butcher knows by sight — the one who plans ahead, who wants the roast kept whole and the steaks cut to a thickness they’ll point to with two fingers held apart. They don’t order off a screen. They fill out a form. And the shop cuts it exactly that way, because that’s the whole arrangement.
It’s a small thing that tells you everything: a butcher confident enough in the work to put it on a single sheet of paper, signed. Whole, half, or one good steak — the counter on Mission breaks it down by hand, the way it asks to be broken down.




