Omnivore - $20 Dinner with Angus Brown
Octopus Bar’s executive chef creates one last meal and bids farewell, for now
“That’s where we did it,” chef Angus Brown says. He’s standing over a tree stump in the backyard of his friend and local farmer Hudson Rouse. Nearby, more than 30 chickens in two separate enclosures cluck and peck and eat. Brown half-shudders/half-laughs as he and Rouse recount the gnarly tale of their most recent exercise in backyard butchery, complete with disembodied chickens squawking through severed necks. Moonshine was involved.
In the last three months, Brown has butchered three live goats, a lamb, and two chickens. He says his first kill, a goat at an area farm, was intense. “But then after you do it a few times, it gets easier,” he says.
On this particular visit to Rouse’s backyard chicken operation, however, Brown is in the market for some eggs. In fact, he made the special detour through East Atlanta to procure what he’s found to be the best eggs he’s ever worked with. “They have super bright yolks and I think it has a lot to do with the feed and the way that they’re treated, no stress,” Brown says. “Hudson’s eggs are the bomb.”
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