About Pat LaFrieda
Not many jerky brands trace their story to a lost fight. Pat LaFrieda’s does: by the family’s telling, great-grandfather Anthony lost a quarrel outside a butcher shop in Naples, Italy, and the butchers took a liking to him and offered him a job. He turned out to have a knack for the trade, and by 1915 he had opened his first shop in Brooklyn, New York. In the 1960s, Pat Sr. was hand-hauling 200-pound sides of beef up multiple flights of stairs. In the 1990s, Pat Jr. passed up a Wall Street career to revolutionize the family business. Along the way the brand developed the Shake Shack burger blend and built a dry-aging room it says holds over 12,000 primals, the biggest in the industry. Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors now describes itself as a fourth-generation operation that has supplied restaurants and hotels for over a century, with its address in North Bergen, New Jersey. The Butcher’s Reserve Dried Beef Steak Slices are part of its retail lineup, alongside steaks, burgers, sausages, a hot dog and a steak sauce.
What makes Pat LaFrieda different
Pat LaFrieda sells its jerky under the name Butcher’s Reserve Dried Beef Steak Slices and frames the line as a tribute to butchers, past and present. The process, in the brand’s words, is sliced beef, seasoned with flavors that zing, then slow-smoked. The slices are made from hand-selected cuts and minimally processed with no artificial ingredients; the brand lists them as all-natural, deliciously tender, with no nitrates and no MSG, and labels them gluten-free and Made in the USA. The site does not name the cuts or say where the slices are produced. Each bag is 2.5 ounces.
Pat LaFrieda flavors we carry
The range is all beef, and it runs from a savory steakhouse profile through teriyaki to a sweet chipotle. If you want the butcher-shop baseline, Steakhouse is seasoned with garlic, onion, paprika, brown sugar and honey, with natural hickory smoke flavor in the seasoning blend; it sits comfortably among the original-style beef jerky picks. Sweet Chipotle leans on chipotle paste and chipotle powder balanced by cane sugar, honey and brown sugar, which puts it squarely in chipotle beef jerky territory. Teriyaki is built on a soy-based teriyaki sauce with ginger puree, sesame seeds and sesame oil, sweetened with cane sugar and honey, and you can line it up against other teriyaki beef jerky styles. No flavor page calls out a heat level. All three come from the same slow-smoked beef, so if you like one, the rest of the beef jerky from across the store is the next place to look. Everything currently in stock is in the grid above.
Who it's for
You’ll like this lineup if you want flavor rather than fire: none of the three is pitched as spicy, and the brand’s own texture word is tender. If you avoid gluten, the brand labels all three gluten-free, but the Teriyaki ingredient list includes a soy sauce made with wheat, so read the bag before you buy. Teriyaki also contains soybeans and sesame, while Steakhouse and Sweet Chipotle list no wheat, soy or sesame; all three contain honey. The product pages carry no separate Contains line, so these notes come straight from the ingredient lists.
JerkyBrands is an independent retailer; the Pat LaFrieda name and logo are trademarks of their owner.
