Butcher shop is a cut above, regulars rave

It's a long way to drive for a good steak.

But for its myriad and loyal customers, Double DD Meats is about more than plump pork chops and rib roasts, freshly made chorizo sausage, gourmet cold cuts or what's reputed to be the state's finest selection of hot sauces.

They toss out simple reasons why they keep coming back, making weekly or monthly trips from as far away as Oregon or Eastern Washington. It's the friendly and attentive service, they say, combined with an excellent selection and reasonable prices.

And maybe it really is that simple.

"It's like a little treasure-trove," said Ginny Rollett, who appreciates the Mountlake Terrace shop's personal touches.

When she chooses a piece of top sirloin for her beef stroganoff, for instance, Rollett knows the women behind the counter will cheerfully cut it into perfect bite-size cubes — even on weekends or during the late-afternoon rush, when the shop gets jammed.

"It's a throwback to the way things used to be growing up in the '50s and '60s," she said.

Signs on a wall behind the counter reflect the shop's basic character:

"If you are grouchy, irritable, or just plain mean, there will be a $10 charge for putting up with you," reads one.

Rick Ringstead used to drive from Seattle on a regular basis to patronize the butcher shop. Now he lives in Shoreline, so it's a quicker jaunt. He enjoys giving the women a hard time; they sass him right back.

"It's the best meat, and they've got ornery girls behind the counter. Where else can you get good food and a bad time, at the same time?" Ringstead asked. "It's the girls and the hot sauces. They've got everything you want."

Store owner Les Palaniuk was 18 when he took his first job at the Double DD. It was 1958, and the butcher shop — named for original owners Dan Murray and John Dallas — was in its third year. He worked his way up from "cleanup kid," he says, and bought the place in the mid-1980s.

"We used to have sawdust on the floor — it used to smell so good in here," he said, reminiscing about his old sweeping-up routine. "If I could have my way, I'd still have sawdust on the floor. The floors are nice and clean; you have that cedar smell."

Now he's 65, and his family is trying to wean him into retirement. Instead of working seven days a week — even on Sundays, when the store always has closed — he usually comes in now just on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays, deftly transforming sides of beef and pork into steaks and ribs, paying bills and writing paychecks for the shop's 12 employees.

Daily operations are slipping into the control of daughter Kim Nygard, 38, the only one of his five children to take a lasting interest in the business.

"If you ask my daughter, she'll say DD stands for Dad and Daughter," he said, and laughed.

A sense of humor is an important trait in employees, said Palaniuk, who sets a good example.

For instance, customers occasionally get suspicious about the intense ruby-red color of his steaks and demand to know why they look different from the meats often found in chain groceries. He has a number of answers he might offer, depending on his mood.

"Well, our beef hops like this — it has two legs," he recently explained, with a straight face, jumping on one foot to demonstrate.

But when Palaniuk steps up to his meat saw in the shop's back room, he's all business.

It takes him about 50 seconds to slice a 25-pound pork loin into stacks of pork chops, pushing aside the plump hind-end pieces, or pork roasts, which he later dissects into piles of country-style ribs.

Nearby, two young men are hustling — one grinding vast amounts of hamburger, the other using a cloth to polish bits of bone dust from Palaniuk's pork chops and then packing them for sale. They're too busy to talk; the only sounds are the whines and grumbles of their machines.

It's 9:30 on a weekday morning, and the shop's women are in constant motion, too. They slice deli meats, package hamburger for the store's "locker packs" — bulk assortments of frozen meats, sold at a discount (the big one is 115 pounds for $269.98) — while never forgetting to check on their customers. Their voices create a constant, pleasant chorus:

"Anything else for you?"

"Anybody need help?"

The regulars know their way around, walking behind the counter's refrigerated cheese display to help themselves to the pesto-stuffed brie (on special last week, $3.49 per pound) or perusing the narrow aisles for their favorite wing rubs, dipping oils and hot sauces.

The shop's impressive selection of sauces was an unexpected side effect of a 1990 arson, which destroyed the strip mall housing the Double DD. The formerly tiny shop was closed 20 months for a renovation and expansion that roughly doubled the size of its retail space.

Hans Lienesch, a Marysville hot-sauce connoisseur, operates the www.saucerater.com Web site. He heard about the shop's sauce offerings in 2003.

"I finally came in, and I was stoked," he said. "This probably has the best selection in the state of Washington."

Palaniuk said his shelves are crammed with 13,000 to 14,000 bottles of sauces.

The shop's 2,500 varieties of hot sauces constitute most of that stock, Nygard said. Also sold are 800 types of barbecue sauce, 250 marinades and at least 200 flavors of dry rubs, she said.

The Double DD's house specialty, however, is its sausage. Each Wednesday morning, the shop produces 400 pounds — 25 pounds each of 16 varieties — of plump specialty wieners. The choices from among 50 recipes vary from week to week. They usually sell out by Saturday.

It's a two-hour marathon, beginning to end, as workers grind the meat, measure and mix in the cheeses and spices required for each variety, stuff the casings, twist them into 4-inch, quarter-pound lengths and then cut them apart and stack them for storage.

Jon Durgan, 24, has inherited the job of chief sausage maker as Palaniuk nears retirement. Hired several years ago, Durgan started at the bottom, simply cutting and packing the finished product. Then Palaniuk began teaching him the art of handling the sausage stuffer, shooting the raw meat mixture into vast lengths — up to 50 continuous feet — of hog intestines.

It took six months to get good at it, Durgan said, and eight months before Palaniuk allowed him to stuff solo.

"I thought it would be easy, but it isn't," Durgan said, demonstrating his deft touch on the control lever. "Too much pressure, the casing will pop, and if it's not enough pressure it wastes the casing, and I get yelled at for wasting money."

When the work was done, Durgan popped a few sausages into a small store oven for communal consumption.

The store's "paper rep," Kevin Johnson, dropped by soon after and helped himself to bites as he wandered around behind the counter, talking to employees about how much butcher paper and plastic products the shop needed for the coming week.

Johnson's territory stretches from Bellingham to the SeaTac area. He times his weekly visits to the Double DD to purchase his personal meat stash.

He has learned to avoid late afternoons because the women are too swamped with customers then to talk to him. But if he comes too early in the day, his meat — usually rib-eye steaks, "big fat pork chops" and marinated oriental ribs — won't stay cold.

The women know what to do — packing meat for long car trips is part of their daily customer-care routine. They always pack Johnson's purchases in a sturdy cardboard box, protected with bags of ice, so he's set for another week.

"A guy called the other day and said, 'Do you have some ice? 'Cause I'm coming with a cooler from Oregon,' " Nygard said. "And a guy just wanted $100 worth of steaks for his dad, who lives in Hawaii, for his birthday. We froze it, and he took it on the airplane."

Nygard started nudging her dad toward retirement a few years ago. He has worked hard, and it's his time to enjoy life, she said.

He agrees, but the Double DD clearly is part of his home.

"It's been good to me, it's been bad," he said. "I like it — my whole life is right here."

Diane Brooks: 425-745-7802 or dbrooks@seattletimes.com