Our Story
Three generations, one block.
Mathew Bonnici is the third generation in his family to wear the apron. His father David before him, and his grandfather Nicolas before that. The Bonnici name has been on a butcher's shop for as long as Mathew can remember, and the craft has only grown.
Where it began
Nicolas.
Nicolas came out of the Maltese tradition. His Maltese sausages, free-range pork with salt, pepper, coriander, garlic and parsley in a natural casing, are still made the way he made them. So is the Mazzit, the sweet blood sausage most butchers stopped bothering with two generations ago. Mathew and his father still make both by hand today.
That recipe is the spine of the shop. It is not on a card in a folder. It is in the family.
Second generation
David.
Mathew grew up in the back of his father David's butcher shop in the western suburbs. He would perch on the old block out the back and watch the work happen. Whole carcases broken down. Sausages linked by the metre. The slow rhythm of a shop that opens at first light. The smell of brine and pepper and cold meat.
Third generation
Mathew, on Racecourse Road.
After his apprenticeship, and several years working with David, Mathew opened his own shop just down the road from the historic Newmarket Sale Yards. 308 Racecourse Road has been a European-style butcher for over fifty years. It became his home.
He kept what mattered. The Maltese sausages. The Mazzit. The Bull-Boar, an old gold-rush recipe from central Victoria made with free-range pork, beef, red wine, cloves and nutmeg. And he built on it: a purpose-built Himalayan salt-brick dry-aging room out the back, Australian Wagyu from scores 7 through 9+, free-range pork from rare-breed Berkshire, free-range chicken on FREPA-accredited birds, lamb from leading Victorian and NSW producers.
The old way is not a slogan. It is a dry-aging room you can walk past. It is sausage made on-site, in the building, by hand, this morning.
What we mean by artisan
Artisan is a tired word. We mean something specific by it.
We mean whole carcases broken down on the block, not boxed cuts trimmed from a tray. We mean smallgoods cured in-house, ham slow-smoked over eight hours, dry-aging measured in weeks not days. We mean a relationship with the farm long enough that we know the person who raised the animal, and they know our shop.
Plenty of butchers sell good meat. Not many still do it this way.
In the shop
The craft, day to day.
The dry-aging room runs cuts up to forty-two days. The sausage bench is busiest in the mornings. The ham takes over eight hours. None of it is rushed and none of it is outsourced.
If you want to see how a thing is made, the counter runs the length of the room. Stand a moment. Ask. We will show you.
The shop is the experience.
Come in, take a look at the counter, ask us anything. We are happy to talk through cuts, cook methods, and what is in the dry-aging room this week.