Venerable Paulina Meat Market Now Serves Sandwiches | Eater Chicago
"This 71-year-old North Side institution, Paulina Meat Market—one of the city’s most popular butchers—has begun serving sandwiches after an effort that started in 2017 and finally debuted during the pandemic. Long favored by home cooks and chefs (Doug Sohn of Hot Doug’s had his restaurant’s custom sausages made there, and those Hot Doug’s meats still sit in the case), the shop pivoted to curbside pickup and revamped its website to handle 200–300 orders some days during the stay-at-home order before reopening to the public with a new sandwich counter. Co-owner Bill Begale says the butchers, not sandwich artists, prepare seven or eight sandwiches with pastrami and corned beef as the headliners; while there’s a grill, the famous sausages will likely wait until next year because there’s no seating now, though Begale hopes to add patio seating next summer to fire up the grill. Paulina has also started carrying fresh seafood as a trial—salmon, whitefish, mahi-mahi, shrimp, scallop, and canned lump crab meat—and Begale emphasizes strong hygiene practices (“Everybody here is healthy,” he says, noting they wash their hands about 60 times a day and constantly sanitize counters and scales). Customers have been respectful of social distancing rules, and masks are mandatory: “if they’re not wearing a mask, they’re not going to shop here,” Begale says." - Ashok Selvam
