Butcher Talk at Clancey’s

For 22 years, Kristin Tombers has pioneered her own vision of community through whole-animal butchery paired with wholehearted hospitality.

by Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl

Eat & Drink

March 8, 2026 

Photos by Caitlin Abrams

Clancey’s owner Kristin Tombers is in her element.

Is a butcher shop actually a conversation hub, with a hundred people cycling through all day to chat? Is a butcher secretly someone whose skill with a bone-cutting band saw is secondary to her ability to remember the names of people’s dogs?

I jotted down these questions in my reporter’s notebook as I watched Kristin Tombers, butcher and omnipresent whirling dervish, swivel, dash, and literally run cups of water to customers at her 22-year-old butcher shop, Clancey’s. 

Clancey’s has been iconic in local food from the date Tombers took over an existing butcher shop in a slim slip of a storefront in Linden Hills and pretended, to the media and everyone, that there was some “we” of owners behind the scenes when it was really only Tombers alone. “In my mind, it’s always been a ‘we,’” said Tombers. “I took a second mortgage on my house to buy the business, but I always felt like a ‘we’ makes it happen.” 

Oh, that old Clancey’s! So tiny, so busy. You could raise your arms to span the entire floor space between meat case and refrigerator case, though often it was packed like a rush hour subway, and to do so would violate anxious customers’ personal space. Like a man eyeing a rib eye as dark as a Valentine’s rose glimpsed in early March—the age making it dense and winey, the rarity making every other customer a potential ruby thief. But Linden Hills changed around the original Clancey’s, as the butcher shop became overstuffed in rented space, so Tombers embraced a bigger future, purchased the former Grand Cafe spot off 38th and Grand, and moved in November of 2022.  

Since that day, Tombers has added grace note after grace note to Clancey’s, making it much more than a butcher shop—now it has tables and chairs, very well chosen wine and beer, glorious breakfast sandwiches available all day, house-made baked goods, and even live bands, now and then. So much has been added, in fact, that the developments have outpaced signage, so you currently have to know what’s going on to know what’s going on: For instance, you order egg sandwiches in the back corner near the open kitchen. 

I’d gone to the new location a dozen times before unearthing that Clancey’s makes glorious Parmesan potatoes—Yukon Golds roasted and turned and gilded with Parmesan till they’re tender and just that sort of fantasy potato any Hobbit wants after coming back from tribulations. I also learned you can simply point at any sausage in the Clancey’s case and have it grilled and served on a warmed plate beside those potatoes. Add a local beer? Now: Look at your sausage, soup, potatoes, and beer. Is this a butcher shop or Minnesota’s secret low-key, best all-day farm-to-table, city-country-connecting restaurant we’ve known about for 22 years yet find hiding in plain sight? 

I learned more hunching in a corner most of one Saturday, a well-fed spy. I discovered Clancey’s lard cinnamon rolls, the crispy base of the spiraling dough crackling with a whiff of bacon, giving new meaning to the idea of decadence. I learned of the all-day kids’ menu once a family popped in. (Grilled cheese and soup, plain burgers, or just ask!) I heard that Clancey’s fills up monthly Butcher’s Boxes of meats and various nonmeat elite treats for a mailing list through Table22 when regulars showed up to chat about what they had made. I learned that Tombers knows hundreds of people by name and tries to discover the names of simply everyone. “Tom, Tom! How have you been?” “I’m Kristin. You are?” 

I spied and spied. I watched a woman tuck every round of house-made pancetta in the shop into rolling luggage, the pink-and-white pinwheels of cured pork belly surely to be of abundant interest to airport TSA dogs. 

I watched an elegant woman dressed all in camel brown—trench coat, mock turtleneck, sweatpants, and Coach sneakers—methodically and carefully eat an entire Clancey’s roast beef sandwich using her fork and knife, never dropping a fleck. I call this an extraordinary feat because this sandwich, made of house-roasted beef top round, is a world. The beef, slathered with herbs and chilled so that the herbs and meat have time to blend, is piled high on a crusty Patisserie 46 baguette loaded with fresh horseradish, thinly sliced onions, lettuce, roast red peppers, pickled jalapeños, Swiss cheese, mustard, mayo—everything. It’s my favorite sandwich in Minnesota, and I have eaten it countless times, but ferally with two hands. It never occurred to me that you could eat it with knife and fork, any more than it would have occurred to me that you could scale the Eiffel Tower with knife and fork.

The Clancey’s roast beef sandwich is a find.

Equally astonishing: To make Clancey’s tuna salad, Tombers starts with an entire tuna loin, poaches it with herbs and lemon, and then does the usual tuna salad things, combining it with boiled tiny-diced eggs—which have often arrived just that day from a local farm—thinly sliced celery and onions and all. This is the general equivalent of deciding that the first thing you have to do to get to the grocery store is hand-build a car. Why work so hard? “It’s the best,” Tombers told me. “If I know there’s a best way to do something, I have to do it.” (Once, Tombers hired a consultant to render Clancey’s more profitable. Canned tuna, he advised. The poached tuna loin remains; the consultant was judged inessential.) 

Surveilling, I learned above all that Clancey’s is a very personal place. Tombers herself rushed two golden pints of beer to a couple in a corner as they studied the gray tablecloth they’d made of their morning newspaper. Tombers herself fretted to every regular about whether she could possibly continue if Jim Cone, the nearly 90-year-old legend behind Linden Hills’ very personal coffee spot Coffee and Tea Limited, retired. 

I recorded this whole very Clancey’s scene. The players: two wide-eyed 20-somethings new to the neighborhood and Tombers—small and strong, ever moving, earbuds in to catch the endless stream of business calls and sandwich orders, pigtail braids, and baseball cap. Tombers explained that they could get their breakfast sausage sandwich made with any sausage in the case—lamb merguez, bratwurst, chorizo, Irish bangers, sweet Portuguese linguica, or chicken-lemon. After she took them through the sausage case, she tapped on the picture of Hidden Stream taped to the case, the Elgin family farm that provides most of the meats at Clancey’s and also gathers produce and additional meats from nearby farms. If there’s a potato soup special at Clancey’s, it’s likely because a neighboring Amish farmer had a bumper crop of potatoes and asked Lisa Klein, Hidden Stream matriarch, to find a buyer.

Tombers watched the newcomers try to process all the information and interrupted herself. “It’s a lot,” she said. “It’s too much. I’m sorry. Most people get the breakfast sausage or bacon.” They got one breakfast sausage and one bacon. 

Hidden Stream, in the thousand-strong town of Elgin, halfway between Winona and Rochester, sends a van up to Clancey’s twice a week, sometimes with its on-farm-smoked bacon. I’d gladly nominate that bacon as some of the best in America—smoky sweet and pure—and you can get it by the pound at Clancey’s and also cooked crisp as potato chips on the breakfast sandwiches, eggy wonders that I didn’t even know about until I started skulking around. Enlightened, I would now also enter said sandwiches in any contest for the best, best unbelievably best. 

Made with scrambled eggs, fluffy as soufflés, soaring in a delicate tremble, these egg clouds are served with your choice of truly any sausage on-site, or with smoked trout or salmon, or without any meat at all. The Japanese milk buns from Patisserie 46, just down the street, make them exquisite. Of course, Twin Cities folks know about internationally awarded John Kraus, of Patisserie 46, the first American to lead a team to a U.S. medal at the so-called French pastry Olympics, the Coupe du Monde de la Pâtisserie, but his Japanese milk buns are a revelation. When the sandwich appears, the buns stand tall, a five- or six-inch tower, depending on how high the eggs are soaring and how the breakfast cook decided to patty the sausages. The milk buns themselves are soft as mist, so as you lift your sandwich, the buns sort of smoosh in your hands and become something there and not there, a tidy, delicious vapor, humbly enhancing. I had the pleasure of watching the two 20-somethings’ eyes go anime-wide at the sight as Kristin Tombers ran their egg sandwiches over to their table. 

Yes, she ran. She’s always running. 

“She does too much! She works too hard!” David Hepenstal told me. He lives a couple blocks away, and after his pension vested from a marketing career at Thrivent, he decided to join the Clancey’s team, working a few hours a day making sausages, preparing pickles, shoveling snow, running deliveries, and occasionally playing in his rock band or hosting a jazz band in the corner of the butcher shop dining room or out back in the parking lot.  

As I chatted with Hepenstal, I watched Tombers lift a white dish of marinated lamb kabobs as she helped a mother with a baby on her hip assemble a dinner. “These are going to be perfect,” said Tombers, nodding assuredly and sending her short braid pigtails bobbing in agreement. The mother had presented a challenge: instant dinner party, and she needed something effortless and impressive. Tombers led her to two matching quarts of soup from the freezer case. (Those are also farm-to-table—Clancey’s makes one or two soups every day to serve hot in the café and packages up whatever doesn’t sell for the freezer. Don’t miss the tarragon chicken—it’s full of celery and herbs and tastes like Provence, France, in a spoon.) The two rounded out the meal with bags of baguette slices turned into crostini; pimento cheese spread made with good Wisconsin cheddar and scarlet bits of pimento; olives blended with house-made pickled mild peppers; spiced nuts and good olive oil for a salad; a few giant brownies made with top-shelf Callebaut chocolate, Hope butter, and Autumnwood cream for dessert; Autumnwood cream for coffee; and the makings of a cheese course, too, with one of America’s most sought-after and hard-to-find cheeses for dessert, the bloomy-rind Rush Creek Reserve.

“She’s a personal chef,” I told Hepenstal.

“She does too much!” he said again. “You’ll never know the real Kristin because she’s always working.” 

In an effort to know the real Kristin, I called up Lisa Klein of Hidden Stream, who names Tombers as one of her best friends. The two have been on the phone coordinating orders all of Clancey’s years, though they’ve rarely met in person. “She works all the time,” said Klein. “Too much probably. But she pays a fair price to the farmers, to us, and to the produce farmers, and that’s rare. She’s always one I could count on. When I see all the other families that left farming, I’m grateful for Clancey’s.” When Klein’s kids were little, they’d get up at four or five o’clock in the morning to make the delivery runs to the Cities. “And now my baby is a father, driving that same delivery route. What people in the Cities probably don’t know is how many people they’re supporting when they go to Clancey’s. Two days a week, I’m on the phone with other farmers down here: ‘Can you sell this or that for me?’ The impact all around here is huge. Did she tell you that when all the chefs were laid off up there during the pandemic, she found a bunch of donations down here so people didn’t go hungry?” No, she had not told me about that. Klein was not surprised. “She’ll try to tell our story—Hidden Stream stuff is raised special; it’s better—but I don’t think she’ll probably ever tell you her story.” 

But I had leverage. Tombers is fiercely protective of her staff and worries for their future. A secret behind Clancey’s relocation was that after the pandemic, as Linden Hills grew packed with restaurants, Clancey’s revenues dwindled. “My customers kept saying: ‘I can’t spend fifteen minutes looking for parking to buy sausages.’” And while Tombers was part of a movement in the early aughts of farm-to-table butcher dreamers, most nationally have closed, leaving Clancey’s as one of the few still standing. (In the Twin Cities, we lost Heartland in 2016 and Lowry Hill Meats, run by chef Erik Sather, who helped open Clancey’s, in 2023—though in some sense, the once side-by-side butchers still work together, as Clancey’s carries Sather’s Lowry Hill Provisions’ salamis. Another notable whole-animal butcher also survived locally, the St. Paul Meat Shop near Macalester.)

Clancey’s home on 38th and Grand reveals wonders, tables, chairs, and a secret farm-to-table restaurant hiding in plain sight. 

With fear for her staff as my leverage, and hope for a wider customer base as her goal, I dragged Kristin Tombers out of Clancey’s to get the one food treat she can’t make better by herself: the crispy, salty, light, and perfect pickle fried chicken at Bull’s Horn. We settled into a corner. I already knew the story about the press rep she never hired upon learning they wanted her to be the face of her business. “Hard truths,” I began. “There’s no chance you’re going to be happy at the end of this, because you don’t want the story to be about you, but the story, unavoidably, must be about you, for you are the engine and vision of the amazing thing you built.”

Tombers let her arm be twisted and spilled the beans. She actually grew up on the grounds of Fort Snelling, in military housing, for her father was a flight surgeon—that is, a doctor who specializes in treating pilots and other flyers. Tombers now recalls this as a uniquely multicultural way to grow up in the Twin Cities of the time, with Black, Latino, and other families all together in a little cluster of homes far from the core of the Cities. She spent a lot of time in the woods doing kid things, like swimming at what they called G.I. Lake (properly Snelling Lake), keeping an eye on her two kid sisters, and cementing a lifelong love of dogs with the family collie. Her dad’s Catholic faith oriented the family around the Church of Christ the King in south Minneapolis and prompted a family missionary trip to Honduras, where Tombers now believes her senses of community and justice were shaped.

She followed in her father’s footsteps to the Jesuit university Marquette, majoring in journalism and falling in love with a fellow student with whom she planned to build a life. The two spent a few years in Chicago and then Los Angeles, where Tombers worked for the ad agency that ran the Singapore Airlines account and learned a few things about expense-account dining in the era of Wolfgang Puck. Then they spent a few years in New York, where her love pursued his dreams and every spotlight while tangling more and more dangerously with diverse addictive substances, which led to different rehabs, deepening troubles, heartache, and a worse and worse mess. All the counselors had conflicting advice: She should leave, she should stay, she was codependent, she was essential. Finally, she left, hoping that would help, and then the love of her life overdosed and died.  

In her grief, she renounced all things advertising and spotlight-seeking and returned to Minnesota to do something really simple and concrete, which took her through snowplowing, bartending, and fish selling for The Fish Guys. One day on her route, a butcher asked if she knew anyone who’d want to buy a butcher shop. 

Thus, Tombers put her head down and worked for 22 years, six days a week, till now. Clancey’s was named for the lucky dog Tombers had when she opened, a lucky dog followed by a succession of lucky rescue dogs, the latest of which has a delicate tummy and can’t enjoy Clancey’s bounty of bones, some of which are in the freezer case and many of which the Clancey’s staff roasts to turn into the best beef glace money can buy.

“What people in the Cities probably don’t know is how many people they’re supporting when they go to Clancey’s.”

—Lisa Klein, Hidden Stream Farm

Bones aside, Tombers told me, Clancey’s has really never been about the food. All of those little conversations—the butcher chatting with the couple over their newspaper, the butcher explaining the lay of the land to the wide-eyed 20-somethings, the butcher culinarily rescuing the mom with the baby at her hip—are in fact not the by-product of the main thing but the main thing entirely. 

“We’re not a community center, but that’s what I wanted to be, a community center,” Tombers told me. “If you want to start a conversation with a stranger in a safe way, what can you talk about? Food and kids. Those are the conversations you can have with strangers. I want people to come in and feel like they’re embraced. I hear people standing in line: ‘What did you get?’ ‘What will you do with it?’ Those are the conversations that make me so happy. I have always been compelled by one-on-one conversations and building relationships and getting to know people. I don’t think we do enough of that anymore.” 

“So you’re telling me that you’ve been secretly running a farm-to-table butcher shop for 22 years as a conversation starter? And Clancey’s is secretly the most old-fashioned place in the Twin Cities, just a public place for conversation between strangers, facilitated by you?”

“That’s nicely put,” said Tombers. 

And I considered that throughout my whole life, everyone has always said you don’t want to see the sausage getting made, but in the one place where they really do make yards and yards of sausage daily, the primary ingredient is and always has been conversation.

3804 Grand Ave. S., Mpls., 612-926-0222

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