Wesley Adams & Patrick Davidson
Butcher/Owners | Bare Bones Butcher | Nashville
May 2022
Wesley Adams started working in restaurants to pay the bills while in college at Louisiana State University. As a line cook, his favorite prep task was to break down meat for service. So he went to work at Maxwell’s Market, where the owner, Ross Barclay, passed on his butchery expertise. Adams later became a manager of Maxwell’s and started a catering business with his then assistant manager, Blake Jackson. They ran the business together for over a year, but with most of his life spent in Louisiana, Adams needed a change. He moved to Nashville for a role at Porter Road Butcher in 2014, where he met his future business partner, Patrick Davidson.
Davidson, who grew up in Arkansas, left his small town to attend Duke University. He relocated to Boulder, Colorado after graduation and took a job in the Whole Foods meat department. Davidson enjoyed it so much that he enrolled at Johnson & Wales University, Denver Campus and shortly after he received his diploma, moved to his wife’s hometown of New York City. Davidson briefly cooked at farm-to-table restaurant Left Bank but missed the South and wanted to move closer to family. He and his wife decided Nashville was a good compromise between their two home states.
Both co-managers at Porter Road Butcher, Adams and Davidson shared the same dream—to open their own community-driven, neighborhood meat market. When the Porter Road brick and mortar closed in 2016, the duo joined forces to open Bare Bones Butcher, a whole animal butcher shop that supplies cuts from local farms and sandwiches made from their house-cured meats. Together they’ve built a comprehensive training program to help bring up the next generation of young butchers.
