The art of butchery is drawing new devotees. Adam Tiberio studied videos of master South American butchers.

In a San Francisco bar, fans pay $30 each for the opportunity to watch Ryan Farr cut up a pig.

By KIM SEVERSON


If chefs were rock stars, they would be arena bands, playing hard and loud with thousands cheering.

Farmers, who gently coax food from the earth, are more like folk singers, less flashy and more introspective.

Now there is a new kind of star on the food scene: young butchers. With their swinging scabbards, muscled forearms and constant proximity to flesh, butchers have the raw, emotional appeal of an indie band.

And it doesn’t hurt that some people find them exceptionally hot.

“Think about it. What’s sexy?” said Tia Keenan, the fromager at Casellula Cheese and Wine Cafe in Manhattan and an unabashed butcher fan. “Dangerous is sometimes sexy, and they are generally big guys with knives who are covered in blood.”

Of course, there is more to butcher love than that. “Obviously everyone is in the middle of a total meat obsession,” Ms.Keenan said. In the last few years, quality meat from small producers has started to make a comeback. These farmers do not send their animals to the large processors that dominate the meat industry, creating a demand for people who know how to extract short ribs from a side of beef.

So young men and women, many with culinary backgrounds, begged their way into apprenticeships with the few old-school butchers and small slaughterhouses that survived. Or they taught themselves.

Now they’re working in boutique butcher shops in cities like New York, New Orleans and San Francisco.

In San Francisco, Ryan Farr calls himself a “producer of porcine pleasure.” Mr.Farr, 30, is a former restaurant chef who is working on opening his butcher shop, 4505 Meats. In the meantime, people pay him $75 to learn how to break down a young 40-kilogram pig. They get to take home about 5 kilograms of pork.

Max Heilbron, 31, bought slots in a late spring class as a birthday present for his girlfriend, Jade Le, 28. She hacked away at a leg while he documented the event on his iPhone and Mr.Farr tried to give away some of the grimmer tasks.

“Who wants to start taking the face off the head?” he asked.

For $30, Farr fans can be part of meat and liquor mash-ups at a local bar where he butchers a pig while people drink cocktails and eat his handmade corn dogs and pulled pork sliders.

But more drive than training among beginners can lead to amateur butchery.

Joshua and Jessica Applestone, owners of Fleisher’s Grass-fed and Organic Meats in Kingston, New York, are trying to prevent that. They are inundated with requests from people who want to work for free at their shop. So they formalized the program and charge $10,000 for six to eight weeks of instruction. Students can sleep in a camping trailer.

Of course, as in music, there are always new styles and new challengers coming up. In August, Adam Tiberio will roll into New York from Massachusetts and take up the knives at Dickson’s Farmstand Meats in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood.

He is one of the few young butchers who has worked in a slaughterhouse and cut beef for a supermarket chain. His idols are South American butchers, whose YouTube videos he studies to learn how to break down hanging beef with their poetic elegance.

When he’s in New York, the butchering game might become more competitive, he says. But he means no disrespect to other young butchers in town.

“There is always going to be some guy in some meat room in some part of the world who is going to be faster than you,” he said. “I just leave that alone and cut.”