Roast Mutton: the butcher’s built on a passion for local

Robert Unwin eats steak at least once a day. And often twice.

“I’ve always been obsessed by meat. I love cooking it, I love eating it,” he says, explaining a passion that led to him dropping a corporate career in the capital to open Roast Mutton, a butcher’s shop on the edge of the Lake District.

Unwin traces that passion back to growing up in a family of foodies on a smallholding in Lancashire.

“We’ve always been big carnivores – the Sunday roast has always been the highlight of the week,” he says. “We raised pigs and sheep and the odd cow, and had it butchered for us.”

Aged 18, Unwin left the smallholding for London, where he spent eight years working in insurance. He came to realise corporate life wasn’t for him – and had become irritated by the food he was served in the city.

“It wasn’t as good as I was used to having as a kid – there was never enough, and it was never of the quality I remembered and wanted.”

A life-changing moment came when Unwin had the opportunity to help a butcher cut up a pig for his family.

“I loved it, basically,” he says.

Quitting his job in London, Unwin moved back to the north west and worked at local businesses to learn the butcher’s trade.

“Because I was very interested, the old boys in the shops kind of took me under their wing, and I learned a lot.”

Then came an opportunity to run a small local farm shop, which gave him the experience he wanted of running a business.

“I’ve been very, very lucky,” he says. “I’ve had a lot of mentors and I’ve got people I can still call on for advice.”

‘I can look a customer in the eye and say the meat has come from a local farm and is killed at a local abattoir’

Unwin opted for the Lakes as the location of his own shop. It was an area he was familiar with, having spent four or five months of the year at his family’s second home at Ambleside in Cumbia.

When he found the former café in Kendal that would become Roast Mutton, a deciding factor was having two small, family-run abattoirs – Airey’s and Denney’s – just a few miles away.

“I have a belief in a small distribution chain and eating things produced locally,” says Unwin. “I absolutely love the fact that I can look a customer in the eye and say the meat has come from a local farm and is killed at a local abattoir.

“In today’s climate and today’s modern life, I think it’s awesome that I can do it still. It’s just farmer, slaughterer and me – and it’s been done that way for hundreds of years.”

He adds that customers also like the fact that a pound spent in his shop supports two other local businesses.

Unwin took on the shop’s lease in autumn 2020, as the country was gripped by the coronavirus pandemic.

“It was quite a good time to take a lease on because no one was taking on retail space and I got really good terms,” he explains.

Unwin had saved up capital while working in London, and spent his life savings on a £100,000 shop fit-out that included cream floor tiles, new serving counters and drying fridges in the shop window.

“It was terrifying at the time, it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done,” he says. “Looking back, it was money well spent. I could have done it probably 50% cheaper, but it wouldn’t have looked very good.”

‘Mutton has historically had a negative connotation but it can be a beautiful, delicious meat’

When it came to the sign above the shop, Unwin was determined not to take the traditional butcher’s route and use his own name. He opted for Roast Mutton partly because he is a huge fan of the meat, but also because it is a conversation starter that gives him an opportunity to explain that not all meat is created equal.

“Mutton has historically had a negative connotation, like it’s a cheap meat that not’s very nice, but it can be a beautiful, delicious meat.

“For example, if you take a 10-year-old sheep that has been bred commercially, fed grain and not looked after, then it won’t taste great. But if you take an animal that is three or four years old, has been bred on the fells and hung for three weeks, it is some of the tastiest meat you’ll ever eat.”

Aptly, mutton is one of the shop’s bestsellers, alongside beef and venison. Around 80% of sales are from fresh meat, sausages and bacon, with the remainder from pies that are made from scratch on site.

As a whole-carcass butcher, Unwin offers a range of products and price points to ensure he minimises waste.

“There are people who are interested in cooking things like short ribs, or osso buco, which is shin of beef on the bone,” he says. “As long as we have a couple of days’ notice, we can always get something that someone wants.”

He is careful not to become what he calls a ‘treat butcher’ that customers will only visit to buy steak.

“You have to offer a bit of value for people to come midweek – you don’t just want people who want fillet steak.

“I’ve always been conscious of that, so I’ve always pushed offers. Some people think this will downgrade your brand but you need that mix of custom in the butcher shop.”

Unwin has three-for-£12 deals on a range of products. These are popular with customers, who “know the minced beef on our shelf has come from just five miles away”.

Roast Mutton is located off Kendal’s main high street, making word-of-mouth publicity an important driver of trade, alongside social media activity.

“I’ve always been an avid poster of videos and that’s worked really well,” explains Unwin. “I won’t just do a video of a steak, because that’s boring. I’ll go to the farm where I actually get the stuff from and show people this is what we’re doing.”

‘You’ve got 20 people who are listening to you talk for two hours and you have direct contact with them’

Hosting events at the shop, such as butchery demonstrations in which Unwin will break down a deer carcass, have also proved successful. These are offered free of charge but he is confident they are worth doing as a form of direct marketing.

“You can spend £500 trying to get an article in the newspaper and people don’t look at it,” he explains. “These events might cost about £100 to run, and you’ve got 20 people who are listening to you talk for two hours and you have direct contact with them.”

Later this year Unwin is teaming up with his dad, Dr David Unwin, to hold an event in Kendal on the myths around red meat consumption and health. Dr Unwin is a GP who specialises in low-carb diets and their use in the treatment of Type 2 diabetes.

“Dad travels all over the world talking about lower carbohydrate diets and has quite a big following, so the event will be well attended.”

Looking further ahead, Unwin has aspirations to eventually open another shop in the Lakes area. The Roast Mutton brand has already expanded into Lancashire, with Unwin partnering with his friend Connor Farley to open a shop in Wrightington that is run by Farley.

For now, though, Unwin is loving running the Kendal business, which was this year recognised as butcher of the year in the 2024 Farm Shop & Deli Retailer Awards.

It’s an award he attributes in large part to the two women who run the shop, as he spends much of his time out and about. “I’m nothing without my staff – they are the pillars of the business.

“Winning the award was a thrill because we are not a fancy shop – the judges will have looked at shops that are bigger, and possibly tidier,” he adds. “But we have an ethos we believe in, and we do as we say, and that must have come across to the judges.”