Pat LaFrieda, known as America’s most celebrated butcher, has listed his waterfront Riverdale house at just under $6 million.
The four-story Bronx residence, with nearly 6,000 square feet, is one of the biggest and priciest dwellings in Riverdale. It’s located on a private street with postcard views — appropriately named Scenic Place.
“This is the only single-family house available in Riverdale that is directly overlooking the water,” said listing agent Adam Bachner of Coldwell Banker.
LaFrieda — who is in charge of his family’s century-old wholesale meat business, Pat LaFrieda Meat Purveyors — was dubbed “the magician of meat,” by New York Magazine, so it’s no surprise that the house has not just an indoor kitchen, but also an outdoor one.
The kitchens are “luxurious but still approachable and relatable,” Bachner said.
The indoor kitchen allows for plenty of cooks. It has two sinks and two dishwashers, a steam oven and a regular oven, plus a gas range and an induction range. The appliances are all high-end and digital, “so you touch the screen and it opens, touch it again and it closes,” Bachner said. “You are not grabbing handles and getting oil or sauce on everything.”
When the LaFrieda family redid the kitchen, they included child-friendly features.
“We are always in the kitchen and the children like to help,” said Jennifer LaFrieda, who works with her husband in the meat business, overseeing the warehouses. (LaFrieda is also known for his eateries, such as an outpost at Dumbo’s Time Out Market New York — whose burgers are second to none — and another for travelers at Newark’s airport.)
“It’s our culture to cook as a family,” Jennifer told The Post. “A lot of holidays were cooked in that kitchen. The kids never were allowed to use the gas burners — only the electric cooktop so they can’t get burned.” A Gaggenau microwave is knee-high — easy for a child to reach.
The outdoor kitchen includes a pizza oven, a refrigerator, a griddle and grill, “and we used the outdoor space just as much, even in the winter,” Jennifer said. There’s an outdoor fireplace, too.
The house includes a movie-theater room on the lower level, as wall as a heated travertine driveway and a two-car garage.
“My husband and I put our heart and soul into the house, and whoever the next owner is will truly enjoy it and make great memories there,” Jennifer said. “It is a rock-steady place, an overbuilt house made with high-end finishes. All the materials are custom-made.”
The brick Georgian Colonial has changed hands twice since it was built in 1915, Bachner said. Eight years ago, the LaFriedas bought it for $2.55 million from the estate of opera singer Irwin Densen, who had lived there for decades.
The 11-room house was listed briefly last fall for $6.18 million, taken off the market for the winter, and relisted for $5.99 million. Annual taxes are a little less than $18,000.
The LaFriedas did a “down-to-the-studs custom renovation,” Bachner said. “The footprint remains the same. They kept the architectural integrity of the original home and part of the foundation.”
The house is perched on a cliff and secluded on a cul-de-sac with an unparalleled view of the Hudson River and the Palisades beyond. The address, 3061 Scenic Place, is located in a Special Natural Area District, or SNAD, which protects the area’s unique ecology. Metro-North’s Hudson Line train tracks run along the river.
Visitors say, “I can never imagine ever getting sick of this view,” Jennifer said. “Every day it’s like a new painting.”
In Riverdale, there are currently a handful of houses listed at similar price points, all of them in the controversial Villanova Heights development, just north of Fieldston, where construction started around 20 years ago.
Those luxurious houses, with swimming pools and elevators, are on relatively small lots. They had been rented in the past, but are now for sale. The two priciest Villanova Heights houses are each asking $7.5 million.
In 2010, the LaFriedas left their company’s headquarters in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District and moved to a bigger facility in North Bergen, NJ. Recently they expanded again, to another property two blocks away.
Manhattan nostalgia remains: The corner of Leroy and Washington Streets is signposted “Pat LaFrieda Lane.”
The LaFriedas bought the Riverdale house to be closer to their children’s school, Horace Mann. Their son has graduated and their daughter is still in attendance. Now they are moving across the river to Alpine, NJ, to be closer to their company’s facilities.
They also have a country house — a 70-acre estate in bucolic Blairstown, not far from Pennsylvania. It, too, has an outdoor kitchen.
“It got to be too much for my husband to go back and forth, because he works very long hours,” Jennifer told The Post.
“Now I am going to have to drive my daughter over the bridge in the morning, which is fine,” she said, “and then drive back and cry and say, ‘I miss the house!’”
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