Meet Chef Erik Niel

Restaurant: Easy Bistro/Main Street Meats/Little Coyote, Chattanooga, TN 

Niman Ranch Products: Beef 

Chef Erik Niel grew up hunting and fishing in Louisiana and says he took a lot of pride in being able to clean, prepare, and cook what he caught from beginning to end. His love of cooking and entrepreneurial spirit led him through culinary school and into the restaurant business with his partner and wife, Amanda. 

Niel said the creativity and art in cooking set him on his path. “I can write a little bit but I’m not really great at it, and I’m definitely not a musician,” he says. “But I can create food that people enjoy. Creating a dish is very ephemeral. It’s there one minute and it’s gone the next. I love that it’s not permanent.” 

When the Niels opened Easy Bistro, their first Chattanooga restaurant, in 2005, it was intended it to be an homage to the classic New Orleans French bistro of his youth with a menu focused on fish and seafood. While the menu has evolved from the early days as a strictly seafood restaurant, the bistro is still focused on shared plates and a raw bar with a variety of oysters and caviar. The menu also includes pasta, steak, and chicken. 

In 2014, the Niels had the opportunity to take over a local meat market, Main Street Meats, and learned the ins and outs of whole animal butchery. “It was so different than what I had done in most of my career,” he says, “and I fell in love with the whole process of bringing in whole animals and box beef primals, figuring out how to make an old Southern butcher shop make sense in this new world. But it was hard. Really hard.” 

At Main Street Meats, which also has a dine-in restaurant in addition to the butcher counter, the learning curve was steep. Niel and his team wanted to buy local carcasses, but sometimes the quality and consistency just weren’t there. Then his distributor, Evans Meats in Birmingham, AL introduced him to Niman Ranch. “Niman Ranch was really our first super-consistent supplier,” Niel says. “We needed a really good product that was raised in the right way and most importantly, tasted good. This is one of those proof-in-the-pudding kind of things where the product just speaks for itself.” In the intervening years, Niel has built a robust whole animal program with local farmers, in addition to the primals he buys from Niman Ranch. 

Little Coyote is the latest entry into the Niel’s collection of restaurants. Since the Fall of 23, Little Coyote has been the go-to spot in Chattanooga for smoked meats and fresh tortillas, food Niels learned to love during his time in Texas. One of the mainstays of the Little Coyote menu is brisket, and of course, it comes from Niman Ranch. “We started with Niman Ranch briskets and I’ve never looked back,” says Niel. 

Niel says his guilty pleasure is a Niman Ranch New York strip. “I was a diehard rib eye guy,” he says, “but I think the Niman Ranch New York strip is better than a rib every time. It’s got the perfect texture and the flavor is awesome. Rib eyes can be kind of soft, but you have to get your teeth into the strip a little bit. It’s not tough by any means, but it just has a little bit of tooth to it, and it’s just awesome.” 

Niel understands that with beef prices so high, buying one of his steaks is a luxury. “You want to have a steak and enjoy it without worrying about it, and it’s so nice to be able to buy one and just know it will be awesome. I think that’s why the shop is still so successful even as the beef market has gotten so pricey. But the best compliment I can give a product or brand is that you just know it will be good.”