Josh Turka is your favorite chef’s favorite butcher. Since he opened 5th Quarter inside Waitsfield’s Mad River Taste Place in late 2022, Turka’s rillettes, pâté, knockwurst, hot dogs and pastrami have become a not-so-secret handshake of the coolest restaurants in Vermont. If 5th Quarter is on the menu, it’s gonna be good.
At May Day in Burlington, Avery Buck — named a James Beard Award semifinalist last month for Best Chef: Northeast — serves 5th Quarter capicola with chile crisp. Ferrisburgh’s Starry Night Café has its dry-cured jambon on a ham plate. Café Mamajuana, which reopened last week in the former Guilty Plate Diner in Colchester, uses its pork roll on a breakfast sandwich, as does Morse Block Deli in Barre. Hen of the Wood chefs Nick Frank and Antonio Rentas are frequent customers, as is chef Bernadette Pearson at Prohibition Pig.
Practically everything meaty at Rogue Rabbit, Burlington’s Roman-inspired pizza and sandwich spot, comes from Turka’s tiny shop in the Mad River Valley: sausage, mortadella, capicola, pastrami, pork belly for housemade porchetta and a not-quite-traditional pepperoni. Some of those were things Turka and his team were already making, Rogue Rabbit co-owner Jacob Shane said. Others were added to the lineup at Shane’s request.
That’s part of 5th Quarter’s appeal. With a background working at high-profile restaurants in Boston before moving into butchery and charcuterie production, Turka speaks chef, and he loves to collaborate with them. As the new owner of the Mad River Taste Place in Waitsfield, which he purchased in late 2024, he’ll have even more opportunities to do so — and support local farms in the process.
“He’s just really excited about food,” Shane said.
Turka, 38, started his business making charcuterie in the Babette’s Table production space in Waitsfield in 2021. Soon after, he began working behind the cheese counter at nearby Mad River Taste Place. His rillettes, jambon blanc and pâtés joined the specialty food store’s impressive lineup of cheese, beer and other Vermont-made goods.
Turka and then-general manager Mary Tuthill cooked up a full-service, whole-animal butcher shop in an underused classroom space in the store’s back corner. The pairing filled a gap in the Taste Place’s offerings, giving customers another locally sourced, carefully crafted reason to stop in. Some came from as far as Middlebury or Burlington.
At the end of 2024, Turka bought the Mad River Taste Place and the building that houses both businesses from founder Robin Morris in a partially seller-financed deal for an undisclosed price. Despite current challenges in the specialty food market, last year was the Taste Place’s best since its opening in 2017, the Valley Reporter wrote in a December story on the sale.
Morris was looking to step away and retire, Turka told Seven Days. For 5th Quarter, it was a perfect opportunity to keep growing, he said, and to uphold the Taste Place’s reputation as a “food destination.”
With a new grant-funded production space that was in the works before the sale — and more storage space — 5th Quarter can now deliver even more mortadella to Vermonters, and maybe even a local version of a Slim Jim.
The 250-square-foot expansion into a former hallway, bathroom, storeroom and office has tripled 5th Quarter’s production and copacking space. It was funded by a nearly $160,000 Meat and Produce Agriculture Development Grant from the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets. Head butcher Justin Ricketts now handles much of the day-to-day retail and production.
In mid-January, the 5th Quarter team moved into the recently finished space, which features an additional vacuum machine, more refrigeration, an 80-quart Hobart mixer jokingly called “the hot dog machine” and a high-tech Unox ChefTop oven. The latter will be used for cooking capicola, pâté and new fermented sausages, including snack sticks that are currently in development.
By summer, Turka will rebrand the Taste Place under the 5th Quarter umbrella and add more dried and canned goods to the layout. The shop will also get an outpost of Middlesex’s the Local: Wine & Beer, with owner Sam Rosenberg curating the wine collection. The small-scale, sustainable ethos will remain, Turka said, though wine, cheese and grocery products with no local equivalents will be stocked from elsewhere.
5th Quarter has a certification through Vermont’s meat inspection program that allows it to ship products out of state. Its wholesale partner, White River Junction-based distributor Provisions International, now takes the meats to Boston, New Hampshire, New York and Maine.
Even as the butchery business grows, 5th Quarter will continue to source all its meat from small Vermont farms such as Triple J Pastures in Irasburg, Snug Valley Farm in East Hardwick, Knob Hill Farm in Marshfield and von Trapp Farmstead right in Waitsfield, Turka said.
His whole-animal approach encourages customers and members of 5th Quarter’s CSA-style Meat Club to try something new. In 2024, 5th Quarter purchased a total of 150 pigs, 10 cows and a dozen lambs from 14 farms across the state. That’s good news for the farmers, who often struggle to find outlets in a limited-capacity, tightly controlled meat-processing landscape.
Northfield’s Union Brook Farm is mostly a pasture-based meat bird operation, co-owner Rose Thackeray said. But she and her wife, co-owner Em Virzi, also wanted to raise pigs when they bought their small farm in 2019. They started working with Turka in a classic Vermont way: drawing on multiple connections through past workplaces and — completely randomly — shared real estate lawyers.
At first, 5th Quarter took on some of the processing for Union Brook’s pigs after slaughter. But as 5th Quarter has grown, so has the relationship. This year, Union Brook raised more pigs than ever before: 45. Turka committed to buying two per month for 10 months. The price covers the cost of slaughter and Turka’s processing fees for the pork Union Brook retails through the Capital City Farmers Market, Thackeray said, and spreads cash flow through the year.
The pigs are now one of the farm’s main enterprises, after meat birds and an on-farm Airbnb. The animals have transformed the farmland in a positive way, Thackeray said, and Virzi can now work there full time. In the next couple months, Thackeray expects the revenue from raising pigs to surpass its expense for the first time.
“They’re moving out of freeloader status,” she said.
Turka acknowledged that local meat is “always going to be more expensive” than industrial agriculture, due to its small scale. A 5th Quarter rib-eye or strip steak will run in the mid-$30-per-pound range. But his case also includes beef shanks at $8 per pound and ground beef at $11 per pound.
“If you want people to eat better, it needs to be accessible,” he said.
Outside of big commercial meat-processing facilities, Vermont was in “a butcher drought” before 5th Quarter, said Stefano Coppola, chef-owner of Morse Block Deli and co-owner of Pearl Street Pizza in Barre. That was especially true in terms of access to freshly cut meat from local farms such as Union Brook.
When Coppola saw Turka’s first Instagram posts of charcuterie and creatively flavored sausages — from Yucatán chorizo to Laotian lemongrass sausage to smoked andouille — he immediately reached out to get his hands on some.
“He’s really pushing the envelope,” Coppola said.
Now, Coppola serves 5th Quarter’s mortadella — think fancy bologna — piled on pizza at Pearl Street. The pork roll — a staple of the Philadelphia area, where both Turka and Coppola grew up — is an option on Morse Block’s breakfast sandwich.
“Pork roll is paramount,” Coppola said with a laugh. “You get a pork roll sandwich in the morning, then your day is a little bit better.”
Those seemingly simple foods are “actually much more challenging” when you make them without binders, additives or specialized processing equipment, Turka said. Hot dogs took a year and a half of testing and tweaking before they hit the case, “but it’s fun for us to flex our muscles and see if we can pull it off.”
And they were the top-selling product in the entire store for the month of July, said Jordan Schaefer, the Taste Place’s marketing manager.
On February 20, Coppola and his Pearl Street crew will join 5th Quarter and the team at Waterbury pasta spot Gallus for a takeover dinner. Menu details are still under wraps, but Turka’s looking forward to whatever the chefs dream up.
In December, as part of a collaborative dinner with 5th Quarter at Frankie’s in Burlington, Rogue Rabbit’s Shane made a special cacio e pepe pie to benefit Helping and Nurturing Diverse Seniors, aka HANDS, which provides food to low-income seniors in Chittenden County. Shane crafted the dough; Jordan Ware, Johnny Capitanelli and their team at Frankie’s made a Parmesan cream sauce; and Turka contributed the sausage from the pig they broke down together.
But this was no ordinary sausage: With Shane’s OK, Turka gave the meat its own cacio e pepe treatment, with Parmigiano-Reggiano, pecorino and black pepper. The pizza sold out within an hour each day, and the benefit raised at least $1,200, including matches from Frankie’s and 5th Quarter, Shane said. Now, the cacio e pepe sausage is in 5th Quarter’s regular rotation.
That dinner at Frankie’s also yielded mortadella-stuffed pasta and battered-and-fried headcheese served with cranberry butter, which then inspired one of Turka’s most oddball ideas yet: fruitcake sausage.
Made exclusively for a holiday market at nearby Lawson’s Finest Liquids, the seasonal sausage met initial skepticism from Turka’s butcher team. Pork sausage with sour cherries soaked in orange brandy, nutmeg and maple syrup with ground gingersnap cookies from the Goose Chase Cake Design shouldn’t work. And who likes fruitcake, anyway?
When head butcher Ricketts walked into Turka’s office holding a test batch of the cooked sausage and “just laughing,” Turka said, he thought it must be terrible.
“It was one of the best sausages we’d made in a while,” Ricketts said. So good, in fact, that its official name ended up being Fruitcake! — exclamation point included.