Dreaming About the Best Steak? Tampines Has It!

On an unassuming corner of Tampines Street 11 stands a modern glass-covered white-and-red-brick shop. Anyone can misconstrue this place for an upscale café given its quaint exterior. However, this is actually ‘The Meat Up Butchery’, a premium halal butchery in the heartland of Tampines.

‘The Meat Up’ Butchery was founded by Mr. Cantarella Cesare, an Italian chef with over 20 years of experience in Singapore’s F&B industry. While most butchers provide fresh beef, The Meat Up specialises in dry-aged meats. In addition to various dry-aged meats, they also carry Italian condiments, Italian herbs, vinegar, olive oil, and French dairy products!

“We want to provide high quality and remarkable meat products with the highest food safety standards to suit everyone’s needs at a competitive price” said Mr. Cesare.

‘The Meat Up’ is a well-established meat butchery in Singapore, and continually strives to be Singapore’s No. 1 halal certified premium dry aged meat producer and supplier. Given its eminence in Singapore’s meat culture, you would expect the butchery to be at a high-end street. However, you would be surprised to know that Mr. Cantarella chose to have his premium butchery in none other than Tampines Street 11! But why Tampines? According to Mr. Cantarella, Tampines “has a vast number of people from all sorts of backgrounds and it is a very large and mature estate”. He went on to say that Tampines “is relatively easy to do business in because certain costs such as rental can be maintained easily, given its lower cost of living”. Mr. Cantarella is also a Tampines resident and has been for the past 25 years!

“I noticed that no one imported dry-aged meat anymore, so I came up with this idea of going back in time and bringing back the old way of treating meat and having an original product” says Mr. Canterella when asked about his premium dry-aged meat butchery. Ultimately, “quality and execution” is the butchery’s “upmost priority”. Meat trends are constantly changing. However, Mr. Cantarella’s intention will always remain the same: to bring a sense of nostalgia to his customers through his authentic dry-aged meats.