Butcher continues to grow in Niagara Falls
Norcini & Co. Ltd. opened during pandemic, expanded into kitchens and is preparing to open its own pizza-focused restaurant and food truck
While some businesses were trying to survive during the COVID-19 pandemic, 23-year-old Robbie Aggarwal not only opened a sustainable, whole-animal butchery and deli in Niagara Falls, but the business took off, expanded and is about to grow further.
Norcini & Co. Ltd. opened in 2021 in the former KFC building on Portage Road.
Specializing in dry-aged and 100 per cent grass-fed beef and custom cutting, the company is owned by Aggarwal, who grew up and still lives in the Stamford area where Norcini is headquartered.
He attended Niagara College’s culinary program and went on to represent Canada in the Culinary Olympics in Germany in 2016.
“We also now run the kitchens at Silversmith Brewing in Virgil and at Reif (Estate) Winery in Niagaraon-the-Lake,” he said. “Coming this spring, we will launch a wood-fired pizza concept, Lela Park Pizza, in the Norcini parking lot out of a transformed U-Haul truck.”
Norcini’s sister company, Beniamino Meats, has been around for five years, selling wholesale.
“When Norcini opened, we were able to then sell directly to customers,” said Aggarwal, now 27 years old.
“We specialize in Italian cured salumi and have recently launched a line of pork pepperettes and 100 per cent grass-fed beef pepperettes. We are working on a jerky line now that will launch in a few months.”
He said the Beniamino Meats name came from his grandfather, who immigrated to Canada and “did all his own curing.”
“I feel like throughout the generations that all that stuff has been lost, so I was very passionate about keeping his tradition alive.”
Aggarwal said while the pandemic led to some logistical issues and delays, Norcini’s vision and goal saw it through.
“It ended up working out because grocery stores did very well during COVID and that’s what we pretty much are, we’re a grocer. It was something that really came together through many years of planning and many years of training.”
He said Norcini is made up of a team of chefs and butchers.
“I’m a chef and a sausage maker. My passion is sausage and curing meats. The best way to describe us is chefs opening a butcher shop.”
Aggarwal said Norcini is “very famous” for its deli sandwiches.
“Our sandwiches are $14. That’s probably one of the higher (priced) deli sandwiches you can get in the city, but there is a reason why we sell 200 of these a day, because we use high-quality ingredients,” Aggarwal said. “We use arugula, roasted red peppers, pickled red onions that we do in-house. We make all our own dressings and spreads. We make our own roast beef. We make our own pastrami. That’s stuff you can’t get on a $7 sub.”
He said Norcini’s fridges and freezers are filled with soups and meals people can take home and heat up for dinner.
The business has been planning to build its own restaurant attached to Norcini. Aggarwal said Lela Park Pizza will be a southern Italian design concept, including traditional, authentic Neapolitan-style pizza with light tapas.
“What we’re doing now is we’re testing the waters. We’re opening our pizza truck on May 1 as a soft opening,” he said. “We’re going to go truck first and then hopefully all goes well, in about two years’ time, we’ll be building what would be a patio and a second-storey rooftop terrace.”
Aggarwal said while in the past the concept of “whoever can sell it the cheapest” won over consumers, that trend has changed.
“We opened up with the concept of we’re high quality and we’re going to charge more and that’s OK and everybody is not going to be our customer,” he said. “We want to put out the best quality we can, we want to keep it fresh. Everything we do is antibiotic-free, hormone-free. Some stuff is grass-fed, some stuff is dry aged. We’re attracting a different clientele — someone who wants a very high-quality product and we’re not charging an arm and a leg for it, but we have to charge appropriately for it.”
Aggarwal said he’s proud of how far Norcini has come in such a short time.
“We started out as four employees, including myself. We didn’t know anything about retail, we didn’t know anything about really opening a business, but we put out what we thought would work, we put things on our shelves that we liked, and we thought people would buy and it’s been a learning experience,” he said.
“Slowly we grew, we learned, we got more equipment, we saw what the people wanted, we saw what worked, we grew on the culinary side, we do more meals and soups and stocks and then two restaurants approaching us, wanting us to run their kitchens, and then we were like, you know what, this is great, but we want to run our own kitchen.”
Aggarwal said he and his team have “a lot of eagerness” to keep expanding and growing.
“We’re trying to make money where we can take that and reinvest, so like Silversmith was good and Reif was good, we were making money and then we were taking that money and we’re just reinvesting it in better equipment here, obviously the pizza truck, the pizza restaurant,” he said.
“I just have an ambition to grow and create a name and create a brand and create something that’s different.”