Different kind of meat store is game if you are
A couple hung back with their hands clasped to their mouths, unsure what to think. Others hesitantly reached for slices.
"It's very lean and healthy," said McCurdy, the owner of Seattle's Finest Exotic Meats. "Try it with some of the red sauce, and you won't even taste the meat."
Free food samples at most stores would be eagerly gobbled up by hungry customers. But at McCurdy's shop, where he sells kangaroo, snapping turtle and ostrich, among other items, he struggles to win over tasters.
"Everyone looks and wonders if it'll kill them," McCurdy said. "But when they try some and realize they're still standing, they change their minds. Everyone has this misconception from their Uncle Joe's deer that it's going to be really disgusting."
But McCurdy's tastings must be working. His sales have risen 20 to 40 percent a year for the past five years, he said, and he expects to hit $3 million in sales — 80 percent from his Web site — this year.
Last month, McCurdy opened a store in Bellevue and is shifting his business to the Eastside. By the end of February, his Shoreline store will be closed as Aurora Avenue North is expanded and improved.
"We're going where our customers are," McCurdy said. "People on the Eastside ... travel a lot for business. They're exposed to exotic meats and develop a taste for them. That makes it easier for us because it means we don't have to educate them."
Although the Web is his primary sales source, McCurdy keeps a store to introduce people to exotic meats and attract new customers.
"I like exotic meats, especially buffalo," customer Roger Best said between mouthfuls of venison and buffalo. "It's a quality meat that is organic and doesn't have a lot of fat. But you can't find buffalo, so when I find it, I buy it."
Best's wife, Jasmine, does not agree. Exotic meats are too, well, exotic for her.
"No, no, I can't bear to try it," she said as her husband tried to give her a piece of buffalo.
After retiring from the U.S. Small Business Administration in the early 1990s as a regional advocate, McCurdy turned to something he had always wanted to do: import products from New Zealand. When he was in the Navy, ferrying scientific researchers to Antarctica, he fell in love with New Zealand and vowed to return.
Twenty years later, he did, scouring the country for products he could sell in Seattle. He found ranchers who would sell him venison, buffalo and wild boar.
"I wanted to find something to import and I didn't want something ordinary, like apples or wool," McCurdy said.
More than 100 of McCurdy's friends said he was nuts, that people who liked exotic meats were often hunters and wouldn't buy from him.
"I told my wife, 'Ninety-nine people said no, [but] we have to try this,' " McCurdy said.
He brought in 100 pounds of venison tenderloin and found plenty of customers at local grocery stores, restaurants and distributors. He quickly added wild boar and buffalo. Within two years, he was selling to more than 50 local restaurants.
By 1995, the work was wearing him down, and he wasn't making as much money as he liked. He turned to the Web and put together a site to sell his meats direct.
"There's no book on the exotic-meats business, so you have to make it up as you go," he said.
McCurdy's store is the only one in the Seattle area that focuses exclusively on exotic meats. Some grocery stores carry buffalo, venison and Kobe beef, but none of them carries the full range of meats that McCurdy does.
Anthony Donatone has shopped at Seattle's Finest Exotic Meats for 10 years and uses its products in the Italian restaurant he opened in Seattle in 2001. The variety keeps him coming back.
"People loved it and kept asking me, 'When are you going to make this again?' So I started a list of customers who wanted to know when I was next making rabbit, elk, buffalo or boar," said Donatone, chef and owner of Casa D'Italia in Ravenna.
"Wild game has really helped my business. I can't imagine not serving it."
Kristina Shevory: 206-464-2039 or kshevory@seattletimes.com
