By 9:15 on a Saturday, the west parking lot of St. Martin's Episcopal Church at Sage and Woodway has already filled in with folding tables, coolers of cut flowers, and the smell of something baking. A few blocks over on San Felipe, a smaller line is forming at a butcher counter where a man who used to run supply chains for a living now hand-cuts ribeyes and remembers how you like your steak trimmed. Neither business existed five years ago. Both now anchor how a lot of Tanglewood residents start their weekend, and the reason each one is here has less to do with market research than with who happened to live next door to whom.
That detail matters more than it sounds like it should. It's the through-line connecting a farmers market inside a church parking lot and a franchise butcher shop on a commercial strip, and it says something specific about what this neighborhood rewards in a food business.
A Market That Exists Because a Rector Lived Next Door
Sterling's Market runs every Saturday from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in the parking lot at 717 Sage Road, rain or shine, with a short list of holiday closures. Vendors rotate, but the market has become known for reliable regulars like Janis Waffles, who shows up with a griddle and a following. A portion of every Saturday's proceeds goes to St. Martin's Outreach Ministries.
The market is named for Sterling Reckling, a young Tanglewood entrepreneur who had started his own dog treat and dog food company, St. Hubertus, before he lost his life in 2021. His parents, James and Elise Reckling, worked with Rev. Dr. Russell J. Levenson Jr., the rector of St. Martin's, to build a market in his name. Levenson wasn't just the church's rector. He was the Recklings' next-door neighbor. That proximity, not a business plan or a demand study, is why the market sits on a church parking lot at the corner of Sage and Woodway instead of somewhere with more foot traffic or a bigger draw.
It's a small fact, but it explains a lot about how the market behaves. It isn't chasing scale. It isn't trying to become the biggest Saturday market inside the Loop. It exists because a grieving family and a neighbor decided to build something in a specific person's memory, on a specific piece of ground they already had access to. The market has stayed exactly that size and exactly that local ever since.
A Butcher Who Spent Fifteen Years Building the System He Now Walks Away From
The New York Butcher Shoppe Tanglewood opened at 5886 San Felipe in November 2025, run by local residents Mike and Kamile Prochaska. Mike spent fifteen years as a Chief Information Officer for distribution and manufacturing companies before he left that career to open a franchise butcher counter. When asked why he picked Tanglewood specifically, he pointed to market demographics and real estate availability, but the reason he led with was that the local residents have an appreciation for high-quality food and great service.
There's a particular irony in a supply-chain executive opening a business built entirely around the opposite of supply-chain logic. Distribution systems exist to remove friction: standardize the product, automate the reorder, minimize the human decision at every step. A butcher counter does the opposite on purpose. Mike hand-cuts the Certified Angus Beef himself. The High Choice ribeye runs $35.99 a pound right now, up from where it sat before beef costs climbed as much as $2 a pound on some cuts, and he'll tell you that number to your face rather than let it show up quietly on a receipt.
The shop stocks close to 100 wines between $12 and $75, built out with a franchise wine specialist and then expanded through his own relationships with distributors, pulling in bottles from California, Oregon, and Texas alongside imports from Italy, France, Spain, South Africa, New Zealand, and Argentina. The freezer case holds duck breast and whole duck, heat-and-eat meatloaf and chicken parmesan, wild game, house-made crab cakes, foie gras, caviar, and Wagyu beef jerky, along with limited-production Row Bear wines from Sonoma that route part of their proceeds to causes supporting kids with autism. The top seller, though, is something simpler: a freshly baked sourdough loaf sitting right by the register, which he'll slice for you on the spot.
There's also a rotating hot-meal case for people who don't want to cook that night. Smoked chicken, pot roast, and baked spaghetti move through the rotation, and Fridays bring Certified Angus Beef prime rib. Most meals serve two and come with sides, starting at $20.99. Order by 2 p.m. and it's ready for pickup at 5. He's catered groups as small as ten and as large as fifty, smoking brisket and wings for backyard parties, and built full family-style dinners around whole tenderloin roasts for smaller gatherings.
None of that reads like a franchise playbook. It reads like a guy who spent a career optimizing other people's supply chains deciding that, in this specific pocket of Houston, the thing worth optimizing for was the opposite: knowing your name, cutting to your order, remembering that you like the fat trimmed a certain way.
What Both Stories Tell You About This Neighborhood
Put the two side by side and a pattern shows up that neither story tells on its own. Sterling's Market exists because a rector happened to live next door to a grieving family. The butcher shop exists because a man who spent fifteen years automating other companies' distribution decided the opportunity in Tanglewood was personal attention, not efficiency. Neither business got here through the kind of market analysis that predicts where a national chain expands next. Both got here because someone made a specific, personal bet about what this particular set of residents would show up for, and both bets paid off enough to still be running.
That's a different kind of food economy than the one built on national retail chains and expansion algorithms. It runs on proximity and reputation rather than foot-traffic studies, and it rewards the kind of business that remembers you rather than the one that processes you fastest. For anyone who already calls Tanglewood home, that's not an abstract observation. It's the reason a Saturday morning here can include a market built in memory of one neighbor's son and a butcher counter run by another neighbor who gave up a career built on the opposite instinct.
The Loop Itself
For anyone plotting the morning out, both stops sit inside the same easy Saturday errand:
- Sterling's Market, 717 Sage Road (west parking lot, corner of Sage and Woodway), Saturdays 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., rain or shine, closed on select holidays
- The New York Butcher Shoppe Tanglewood, 5886 San Felipe, open daily with same-day order pickup if you call ahead of 2 p.m.
Neither requires a special trip off your usual route through the neighborhood. Both are worth treating as a stop rather than a drive-by.
There's something fitting about the fact that a dog-treat entrepreneur's memory and a career changer's second act both landed inside walking distance of each other in this neighborhood. My own work with clients here tends to start long after the market closes and the butcher counter is cleaned down for the night, but I pay attention to what keeps a neighborhood's small businesses running, because it tells you more about a place than any listing sheet does. If you're thinking about what makes a specific block of Tanglewood work the way it does, or you just want to talk through what a home here is actually worth in today's market, JD Adamson is a call away.
