Belcampo restaurant and butcher shop in Santa Monica is permanently closed five months after meat mislabeling scandal.
Don’t mess with an angry hog chopper!
A butcher terminated last week from Belcampo on Wilshire Boulevard has dropped the cleaver on his former bosses, exposing them for duping customers with lower-end grades of beef.
Belcampo — with outposts in five California cities including West Hollywood and Los Angeles — frequently charges more than $30 a pound for its finest cuts, which are presented to customers as top-of-the-line.
“At our restaurants and butcher shops, you’ll find Organic, grass-fed meat that’s raised on our own CA farm, processed by us at our own butchery, hand cut by our expert butchers, and prepared by our talented chefs,” the company boasts on its website.
>> SEE ALSO: Belcampo Boss Apologizes, Customers Forgive and Forget
But the former employee — identified only as Evan — took his beef public and may now have slaughtered the company’s carefully curated reputation in one viral Instagram post.
“They’r f—ing lying to you,” he alleges. “Their s–t is not local. It’s not grass fed. It is not organic… The filet you’re buying for $47.99 a pound is from Tasmania!”
The malcontented meat cutter also shares a series of snapshots which appear to reveal pre-packaged beef and chicken delivered to the Belcampo butcher shop and restaurant.
“It is ordered from West Coast Prime and Rocker Brothers,” he says in a typed message. “They do not care about your health, they care about money.”
“I apologize to all the customers that I lied to for the past 2 1/2 years in order to keep my job.
“I had to hold on to it for health insurance reasons, as I was recovering from an injury.”
The Sun reached out to Belcampo for comment but has not yet received a reply.
In a statement to KABC, the company’s co-founder, Anya Fernald,said it allows individual locations to have some freedom to source products from different vendors in the event of a supply shortage.
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Fernald believes the inconsistency is limited to one store and accounted for only a small portion of sales.
“The preliminary results of our investigation show that unfortunately protocols both for sourcing and communicating product origin to customers were not being followed in our Santa Monica location,” she said.
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