Popular SLO County butcher and deli closes. The reason? ‘Uncertainty and turmoil’
Morro Bay has lost an outlet for quality meats and other products.
Morro Bay Butcher & Deli officially closed at 911 Main St. on Sunday, according to co-owner Geoff Montgomery. He and his wife Jillian Montgomery first opened the store in December 2020 to provide high-quality meats not usually offered in the fishing city.
“If you’re looking for a good steak or pork chop or some chicken, things like that is a little bit harder to come by as far as the quality that we were looking for,” Geoff Montgomery told The Tribune. “We saw it as an opportunity ... to open up a business and bring that to people here on the Central Coast.”
The couple served clean cuts and sandwiches for five years with their “right-hand man” John Jara, but said costs and the difficulty of getting products with USDA regulations and additional taxes have forced them to close.
“People are going to have to, or they’re already choosing, between buying groceries and paying their rent,” he said. “So costs across the board have gone up. Not just for us — for the general public as well.”
Montgomery said going through channels to source meats from specific companies with high taxes put the nail in the coffin for the shop.
“Unfortunately, with all of the current uncertainty and turmoil going on, it just made it very difficult for us to continue, and so we decided not to continue anymore,” he said. “But it was really great to see that, these last three days that we were open, we got to see a lot of our regular customers. Even our semi-regular customers made specific trips just to come say goodbye to us.”
The Montgomerys announced the closure on Facebook on April 4, with an influx of saddened comments accompanying the post. The business’ success was in part due to the owners’ mission to go beyond a traditional butcher shop, Montgomery said.
“It had a lot to do with my wife and I and John being there, talking with people, building relationships with our customer base and not just being, you know, a face behind the counter that cut steaks for you,” Montgomery said.
As for the future of the butcher shop, Montgomery said there is interest in the space, but he does not want to get anybody’s hopes up, or his own.
While Montgomery is calling the closing “bittersweet,” he said that he and Jillian and their one-year-old child are moving to Scotland, with its “great history of butcher shops.”
“The goal is to go there, and I’ll hopefully be working for some of these well-established butcher shops that have been around for 100 years or so,” he said.