Photo: Manilla’s prizewinning butchers Russell Burrows and Catherine Northey congratulating each other on their recent successes.
11th October, 2023
By Vinnie Todd
How fortunate are the people of Manilla and surrounds to have two prizewinning butchers in their midst.
Catherine Northey’s Red Door Meats recently won the Inaugural Commercial Butcher SnagQuip at Somerton Hotel while Russell Burrows’ Cheeky Butcher not only made the finalist list of Tamworth Business Awards’ Small Business Hospitality Food & Beverage category but also finished third in 92.9FM Radio’s Best Butcher In Tamworth competition. He was outvoted in that by Kootingal Meats and Attunga-owned Westdale Meats. The popular radio’s competition was decided by people’s vote on its Facebook page.
This was the third year Russell and Danielle Burrows’ popular outlet has been nominated for the Tamworth Business Awards, but this year was the first they’d made the list of eight finalists, according to Russell.
“We’ll just keep going onward and upward. It’s a great little shop, but that’s all thanks to our many customers who were full of congratulatios. Without the customers, we just wouldn’t have a shop,” he said.
“Our sausages are very popular, we even have people coming out from Tamworth and down from Barraba to buy them.”
For Catherine Northey at her newly-acquired Red Door Meats, winning the SnagQuip at Somerton was a bit of a buzz, according to the jovial Kiwi.
“There weren’t a lot of competitors, but we had a ball, and got plenty of feedback from the public. People loved the snags, some of them even saying whenever they’re near Manilla, they’d be calling in to get some,” she said.
“It’s the first competition we’d ever entered, and we won it. Jason (publican Jason Steele) rang around asking butchers to support his inaugural SnagQuip – a bit of a take on AgQuip – which he wanted to make an annual event. I’d just started out on my own (recently purchasing Manilla Meats from her employer Rod Sevil), and thought ‘Why Not’. I had a banner made up and just put myself out there. We took over three flavoured sausages (butter chicken, smokey bacon/maple and Moroccan lamb), plus a plain one. The voting was done by people purchasing them and voting on which one they liked best. They also had a mystery judge to assist.”