The City Grew Around Cherry Street Meats. Its New Building Keeps It in West Medford.

"If you're headed down Stewart, we're around the little bend." That's how Cherry Street Meats gives directions to its shop at 986 Cherry Street. It sits just off Stewart Avenue, between Columbus and Lozier. The shop admits it can be hard to find. That's because of how the area changed: "Once upon a time, we were nestled among open farmland just west of Medford. The city has grown around us." Today the shop sits inside a newer residential neighborhood.

This fall, that hard-to-find bend got a new building. Bruce and Thea Emerson started Cherry Street Meats and Emerson Distributing in 1981 to supply meat to restaurants and the public. Their son, Neil Emerson, now runs the business. The Rogue Valley Times reported that after more than four decades in West Medford, the company set an October 15 ribbon-cutting to open a new building. This Thanksgiving is the shop's first holiday season in it. For holiday cooks, two details shape the season. The counter cuts meat to order, and it keeps weekday hours.

A wholesale shop with a counter for the neighborhood

Cherry Street Meats was never built to be a grocery store. It started as a supplier for restaurants, with a public counter attached. Medford Alert describes it as a business that still serves restaurants, businesses and the public across Southern Oregon. When the city filled in the farmland around the shop, a wholesale operation ended up surrounded by homes. Now the nearest butcher counter for many West Medford households is attached to a building made for cutting, smoking and storing meat in volume.

The neighborhood is still filling in. S+B James Construction, which designed and built the new building, says its crew also ran utility lines for six residential lots behind it.

What went into the new building

The building replaced an aging facility. S+B James Construction's case study says the goals were better efficiency, better food safety and room to grow. The new building has 11,532 square feet, with dedicated spaces for each step of the work:

• Meat-cutting rooms
• Freezer and cooler space with high-efficiency refrigeration
• A smokehouse
• Loading areas, plus support space

The site took work. The builder ran into groundwater, underground utilities that weren't on any map, and limits on where stormwater could drain. Then there was the freezer floor. A walk-in freezer can freeze the ground under it, and frozen ground can push the slab up. The original plan used a glycol heating system to stop that. The builder replaced it with a six-inch concrete slab over eight inches of rigid insulation, a sand layer and passive ventilation pipes. That change saved an estimated $30,000 or more. A simpler way to install the exterior siding saved another $15,000 to $20,000.

People's Bank of Commerce financed the project in partnership with Business Oregon, according to the Rogue Valley Times. In a news release the same paper quoted, the Emersons said the business "has remained focused on customer service, quality products, and competitive pricing while building lasting relationships throughout Southern Oregon."

For holiday shoppers, the smokehouse and freezers are the parts that count. The smokehouse is where smoked items like the shop's jerky and smoked pork chops get made. The cold storage is what lets a shop stock seasonal birds and big roasts at holiday volume.

The counter works by order

The shop's Fresh Cuts page says its meat is "primarily locally sourced and freshly cut to your specifications." It also asks shoppers to speak up when they don't see what they want: "Chances are, if we don't have it, we can find it." Here is what the shop lists for the dishes most likely to anchor a holiday meal:

The sausage case is all Oregon: Taylor's from Cave Junction, Hill's from Pendleton and Zenner's from Portland. Links include chicken apple, linguica, German, Polish and Swedish potato. For holiday stock, the counter carries beef, veal, chicken, grass-fed and lamb stock bones. The deli slices cold cuts to the thickness you ask for, and the shop says its seafood comes from dock-frozen sources. The list runs from scallops and shrimp to lobster and ahi tuna.

"Cut to your specifications" also means some items take time. The shop says it can do custom ground-beef blends "with a little notice." Its meat packs are cut and packaged when you order them, and the shop asks for 1 to 7 business days to fill those orders. If you want a specific holiday roast, call ahead.

Ten weekdays until Thanksgiving

The counter is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The shop's website lists no weekend hours. That's the part of holiday planning that catches people. Thanksgiving falls on Thursday, November 26. From Thursday, November 12, through the day before Thanksgiving, the shop has ten weekdays. If your weekdays are taken up by work, there are even fewer chances to stop by.

Here's a simple way to work around that:

1. Call this week. The number is 541-773-1585. Ask about seasonal turkeys, prime rib or whatever your table needs, and what size and pickup day will work.
2. Be specific about the cut. The counter is set up to trim to order. Bone-in or boneless, brisket whole or flat, how many people you're feeding: details like these are worth having ready before you call.
3. Pick a pickup day that fits weekday hours. A lunch break or a day off works better than counting on a Saturday trip.
4. Add the extras at pickup. Stock bones for gravy, Oregon sausage for stuffing, sliced ham for the leftovers tray. One stop covers it.

To find the shop, use the shop's own directions. Head down Stewart Avenue between Columbus and Lozier and look for the bend. Or call, and the shop says it will give you more pointers.

For the December list

The meat packs make sense as gifts, since they're priced up front. The Steak Sampler is $149.95 for twelve steaks: two each of filet mignon, top sirloin, ribeye, New York strip, porterhouse and tri-tip. The Couple's Pack is $189.50. The Variety Pack, at $369.95, is built to stock a freezer, with 10 pounds of ground chuck, four whole fryers, hickory-smoked bacon and deli meats. The shop welcomes substitutions and adjusts quantities to keep the price the same. With 1 to 7 business days to fill an order, a December gift is best ordered in early December, not the week of.

For smaller gifts, there's the house jerky. It's cut, cured and smoked in-house, in Original Brown Sugar, Peppered, Jalapeño and Joey's Hot.

Shops like this are part of what makes a neighborhood work day to day: a counter that has been on the same bend since the fields around it were farmland. When I help families settle into West Medford or anywhere in the Rogue Valley, I make a point of sharing local spots like Cherry Street Meats along with the house keys. If you'd like a local's list for your corner of Medford, Mayra Valencia is happy to put one together for you, in English or Spanish. Let's Connect.