Looking over the Meatopia menu gives its founder an almost immodest pleasure; it must be how Wayne Gretzsky feels when he looks over his eight Hart trophies, or a Davos magnate when he looks at his trophy wife. Such skill, such virtuousity, drawn from across the whole range of gastronomy. Unlike your average meat-fest, which invariably features a dozen or more barbecue cookers all serving identical pulled pork, our menu ranges from the tandoori mastery of Hemant Mathur to the Escoffierian majesty of Harold Moore’s squab. But when I look at it as a whole, it is the “city of meat” concept that pleases me the most.

New York, Meatopia’s home, is the most cosmopolitan of cities. Any one motif, whether it be barbecue or beefsteak, would be too limiting. This was a problem for us last year. It will be remembered that previous Meatopias had particular themes, such as “Lamb Bam Thank You Ma’am!”, “Baconnalia,” and of course the immortal, infanticidal “Slaughter of the Innocent.” But that was back in the halcyon days when Meatopia was an invite-only, VIP event, the culinary equivalent of Truman Capote’s black-and-white party. Last year we had almost fifty chefs. What concept could accommodate such diversity?

Enter the City of Meat. I was inspired by the idea of David Dinkin’s already-forgotten concept of New York as a “gorgeous mosaic,” and even have gone so far as to draft the nation’s greatest mosaic artist, Laurel True, to create an actual meat mosaic. (Unfortunately, Laurel can’t create it with actual meat, as it is wasteful, and also will start to rot.) The neighborhoods of the City of Meat are such as one might find in the hollows and back alleys of my own mind. In Offalwood, the “inner organs of beasts and fowl,” as Joyce called them, are handled; “The Quarter” is an all-beef district, so called both for its illicit connotation, as well as because that’s how beef arrives at the butcher shop. There are a number of other neighborhoods, such as Beaktown (poulty), Carcass Hill (whole animals), and Meatopia Heights (haute cuisine). But they all have in common the love of meat and the skill of chefs.

My question to you is, what neighborhoods did I forget? Because this concept is so good I may have to replicate it out-of-town, like a touring company of The Lion King (but edible.)