Chef Sense
The Art and Science of Cheese with Matt Rubiner
Listen as Matt Rubiner recounts nearly two decades in the cheese business, evolving from the early days at a Boston cheese shop to his own store's growth, including the opening of a café to handle seasonal market challenges. His dedication to old-world cheese care methods and high-quality grocery offerings shines through, painting a vivid picture of Rubiner's Cheese Mongers' unique identity. The episode also uncovers the meticulous process behind aging a special Gruyère cheese from Switzerland, exploring the science of crystalline formations in aged cheeses and the artistry involved in cheese judging.
Matt's insights into the artisan cheese industry's growth and challenges are a testament to the passion and perseverance required in this field. From navigating import regulations post-9/11 to the surge in culinary craftsmanship since the 90s, the conversation provides a comprehensive look at the evolution of American cheese culture. The episode wraps up with the inspiring story of Jasper Hill in Vermont and their innovative educational initiatives, reflecting the dedication needed to thrive in the artisan cheese world despite economic hurdles and the impact of COVID-19. Tune in for an engaging and informative chat with a true cheese maestro.
Thank you to our listeners!!
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Podcast Disclaimer:
We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host, guest or the management. All right reserved under Chef Sense Podcast and Chef Massey, LLC.
Listen as Matt Rubiner recounts nearly two decades in the cheese business, evolving from the early days at a Boston cheese shop to his own store's growth, including the opening of a café to handle seasonal market challenges. His dedication to old-world cheese care methods and high-quality grocery offerings shines through, painting a vivid picture of Rubiner's Cheese Mongers' unique identity. The episode also uncovers the meticulous process behind aging a special Gruyère cheese from Switzerland, exploring the science of crystalline formations in aged cheeses and the artistry involved in cheese judging.
Matt's insights into the artisan cheese industry's growth and challenges are a testament to the passion and perseverance required in this field. From navigating import regulations post-9/11 to the surge in culinary craftsmanship since the 90s, the conversation provides a comprehensive look at the evolution of American cheese culture. The episode wraps up with the inspiring story of Jasper Hill in Vermont and their innovative educational initiatives, reflecting the dedication needed to thrive in the artisan cheese world despite economic hurdles and the impact of COVID-19. Tune in for an engaging and informative chat with a true cheese maestro.
Thank you to our listeners!!
Contact & More Info:
https:/www.chefmassey.com
https://www.instagram.com/chef_massey/
Other Sponsors & Discount Programs:
https://www.chefmassey.com/services-9
Podcast Disclaimer:
We are not responsible for any losses, damages, or liabilities that may arise from the use of this podcast. This podcast is not intended to replace professional medical advice. The views expressed in this podcast may not be those of the host, guest or the management. All right reserved under Chef Sense Podcast and Chef Massey, LLC.
Hey everyone, welcome to Chef Sense. I'm your host, Chef Massey. Alright, so welcome to the podcast. We have Matt Rubiner here from Rubiner's Cheese Mongers Next door. And this is probably the longest I've sat with you. This is probably the most time we've spent. I feel bad. No, I'm teasing. What are you talking about? This goes both ways right. So how are you? I'm good, you're good, yeah, nice. So you are, you're the cheese wizard.
Speaker 2:I am a cheesemonger by. I rarely throw around the W word.
Speaker 1:I'm telling you I mean because you know, talking to Jasper Hill and people you know, and I've talked to some other amazing people on the podcast, there's people that I feel are predestined for something special. I think you're in that category in my book.
Speaker 2:When's it going to happen? Right?
Speaker 1:Oh, Scott, come on. No, I mean, but it's inspiring. It's like let's kind of delve into, Matt Rubner, where this started for you and how this took off.
Speaker 2:I hope my wife's not listening, because if I tell, this story one more time she's going to fall asleep driving oh, uh-oh. So I got into this business. I mean, my mother claims that as an early child I showed hints of future cheesemongerism. She says I declared at some point six, seven, eight years old that someday I'm going to own a cheese shop. That's awesome. I have no recollection of that. Okay Right, and then my grandfather was in the food business.
Speaker 2:So I always had an appreciation I always felt at home in kind, of the food retail world. I loved supermarkets. Still love supermarkets which is weird because you know in so many ways the anti-supermarket. But he was anyway. But I didn't get into this until I was nearly 30 oh wow, yeah, maybe even 30.
Speaker 2:Well, who knows, um, I was doing other work, not super satisfied, you know, not entirely dissatisfied, but feeling like there was something that might, you know, satisfy a different, different interest, different passion. And I was in living in boston at the time, okay, um, and I was working at mit and I decided I was just, you know, I was very interested in food, I was kind of bored with my mit friends hope you're not listening, um and so I would you know, don, I was a single, you know, youngish man, so I would doll myself up and, uh, you know my finest attire, and I'd go to the fanciest restaurant, restaurant I could find in town and nice, and, you know, caring, as pretentious as a book I could find in some language I couldn't read and I'd sit at the bar and um, or get a table and order a bottle of wine, imagining myself to be some connoisseur which, looking back on it, was absurd.
Speaker 2:Um and um, I just started to meet people. I met chefs and I met, you know, sommeliers. I met, you know, front of the house people. I met chefs and I met sommeliers. I met front of the house people. I met wine sales people. I met producers and it just became clear to me that these were just incredibly. You don't go around throwing around the passion word too much, but these were just deeply passionate people who just seemed, I think, they were really satisfied with their work, with the common denominator being, you know, artisan food and grapefruit. And I kept doing that and I got a, you know kind of a whole group of friends in that business.
Speaker 2:And then, once, um, a friend who's a wine sales guy at the time, um, was like hey, we're, we're sitting in the north end of boston, you know the italian neighborhood, and sitting in Cafe de la Sport, which has to still be there, you know, watching soccer on TV and musing we really should just go to Italy, we really should just go to Italy. So he's like, well, you know, I can probably wrangle a trip, you know, through work. You work for this company, so a lot of it will be paid for and you can just tag along. So, so a lot of it would be paid for and you can just tag along. So he set up this trip and you know, I swear to God, it was, you know, within a couple hours off the plane as we're settling into his friend's wonderful pink hotel on the shores of Lake Como, where I was like I'm missing out on something here. You know, I want this to be part of my job.
Speaker 2:And then, you know, the next day we went to this restaurant where his brother was doing a stage. He was a chef, still is and was doing a stage at a restaurant in a town called Magrate, I think it was called, on the other side of Lake Como, okay, where we were treated. We didn't know we were being treated. Thank God we were. We would have blown the budget for the entire trip. But you know, I don't know if the restaurant's still there, but michelin like two-star restaurant and the, the. We were out on this porch and it was a cliff overlooking lake como and it was the most gorgeous day and um, and and the food just kept coming out. It was just absolute. Everything was perfect. You know trout from the local stream and you know this rabbit kidney salad from the. You know the and and beautiful, beautiful wines from the region, and I was like you know the and and beautiful, beautiful wines from the region, and I was like you know what that's it.
Speaker 1:That's it, I'm done.
Speaker 2:We have to. I got to get in this business.
Speaker 2:So right then, and there I boldly declared I'm getting in the food business. And then I, you know, I came back and I was like all right, now, I got to get in the food business. You know, I said it in front of people yeah, open the door, exactly. And so I kind of um, did a little research, tried to figure out well, what do I want to do in the food business? Do I want to be in the wine business? Maybe, but I really don't want to be a salesman. I'm not much of a salesman. Um, do I want to be a chef?
Speaker 1:god, no, there's just not a there's not a bone in my body that could tolerate that.
Speaker 2:No, I just yeah, it's best for everybody that I never attempted to be a chef, yeah, or do I work for an importer? Do I do this, do that? And then a friend of mine said you know what about cheese? You know there's a great cheese shop in town. This place called Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge, very famous now. Oh yeah. It was famous then Wow. But it was a very different world back then In the appreciation of cheese and food in general, I think.
Speaker 2:In restaurants and retail was on the ascendance and so a friend arranged she was having a wine dinner a winemaker dinner, I don't remember the maker and had me sit down next to you know, sat me next to the owner of this store and I chatted with him a little bit and then, you know, a week or so later went into the store and was like, hey look, I'm thinking of leaving my job. You know, think you might hire me here.
Speaker 2:And I think, you know, well, I know, now that you know people come into your store all the time and they're like, hey, you know, this looks fun, I'd love to pick up a couple of shifts. And you're like it's not fun, dude I mean it is fun, but it's also grueling work, right, you know, um.
Speaker 2:And so I'm sure he felt like that. You know, he has some kid, you know, coming in here. He's got a perfectly fine, presumably higher paying job than what I could get. And he's like, yeah, you can work here, um, but I need you full time and I'll pay you six bucks an hour, which was the minimum wage at the time. So I was like, sure, let's do it. Yeah, and I don't remember how long after that point, but within a month or so, started work at the cheese shop, quit my other job, got out of my not fancy, out of my not fancy, but you know, my, my little, uh, um, my little garret on top of a building in a beacon hill in new york and had to bail from that because I'm not new york. Boston couldn't afford that. So I moved in with a bunch of med students in a flop house and you know, the central square, not precisely a flop house, but anyway, yeah. And then I was in the food business. Wow, and that's it.
Speaker 2:And so I was there, that store, for, you know, six years or so, okay and it was just at a time um, where not just that store but, as I was saying, the food business in general and you know, you know it's like this is we're talking now the early 90s, oh, yeah you know, and and celebrity chefs became a thing yeah, food tv became a thing and people were.
Speaker 2:And food TV became a thing and people were more traveled and maybe people were wealthier and beginning to understand food and you began to see things like you know, artisan cheeses and other foods being produced at a level, albeit on a smaller scale, but at a level similar to Europe. Yeah, and so it was just this kind of very sharp curve and rode that for a while at the store and then I was bodily thrown from the premises after six, seven years and you know if I, if that's one of the reasons I started my own store if I had to work for anybody, I'd be fired in five, five minutes.
Speaker 2:Um, anyway. So then I did a little consulting, you know, actual consulting, not just I'm unemployed, so I'm a consultant.
Speaker 1:You're right.
Speaker 2:Consulting, yeah. And then I had this opportunity to move out here and open a store, which isn't the store I'm in now. Okay, it was a store in Richmond, oh yeah, in the only commercial building in Richmond where Jim's got his.
Speaker 1:Is that where Gop's at now? Yeah, used to be Marty's Local.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, marty's local, yeah, so before it was marty's local and before it was whatever the hell else was there? Right, it was the richmond store, okay um, which I opened with some partners, okay, um, they had a cafe in the downstairs kind of back called a mono, and they were former and there's a story as to how I found them, but I knew them as they were caterers in b.
Speaker 2:We used to work with them at the store where I worked and we became friendly and they were like, hey, we got this old general store up there. There's nothing in it, we just use it for storage next to the post office there, where gym stuff is now. And they were like, hey, do you want to come out here and open a store? And we were like sure. And we did a little quick back, uh, back of the envelope math.
Speaker 1:You know how much money could we make here? How's the clientele?
Speaker 2:And we took one look at that and threw it in the trash and was like, yeah, we'll do it, cause that doesn't make any sense. Um, and we moved out. My wife uh left her job and became a freelancer she's a clothing designer, yeah and uh. So he opened that store in richmond and that was in 2000 2000 should know this, because it's it was right about the time we got married so 2001. Okay, um, and then that the relation with the partners there lasted, you know, a few weeks, for, you know, went to hell, and then we uh managed to stick it out for a couple of years and then left there and we're like, okay, no more bosses, no more partners, we're going to open up a store and we lucked into that space on Main Street. We've been there for we're coming up on God next week, two weeks from now, coming up on 20 years.
Speaker 1:Oh, congratulations, that's huge.
Speaker 2:I mean it's huge. In the sense that I mean it's huge, I guess, but it's huge in the sense that you know it hasn't been smooth going. You know it's not, it's a neat, it's one thing. I'm looking back and I'm like, wow, I'm kind of proud of that.
Speaker 1:You know it's like you, gut it out for 20 years.
Speaker 2:I know, but it's like you know, plugging away, Wow, trying to stay alive, yeah. And the next thing you know, you're an OG.
Speaker 1:You know you've been there for a generation, right, jeez, no, that's amazing. And you have rubies in the back right.
Speaker 2:We have rubies in the back, yeah.
Speaker 1:So you I'm assuming just cross-utilization of inventory, you'll see it.
Speaker 2:I mean, I've gone over there times and yeah, yeah, I mean the cafe, which is they open about the same time. We knew we couldn't open both right at the same time, so the cafe opened the following july um and the cafe was something you know. We'd never been in the in the um, you know the restaurant quote-unquote business. But we really felt, and just based on my experience, both as somebody who worked in the cheese business at that point for seven or eight years, but also somebody who knew people who had restaurants and clients of mine when I consulted, I really felt that a store like mine where you're selling these rarefied, often extremely perishable ingredients, you need some kind of food service outlet. And that could be. If you had the right facilities for it and the right skills, you could do a prepared food program.
Speaker 1:But that's so difficult, especially out here.
Speaker 2:And the other thing is we had no idea the seasonal. I mean, we had been told about the seasonal cycle in the Berkshires. It's a difficult place to run a business. Give people as many reasons as possible to come in. We needed something that would make some money when the store was never going to early in the morning, yeah, you know um Wednesday midday kind of thing. So we realized we need a cafe. Yeah, so we opened the cafe and it was kind of hilarious. We had, uh, alex Platt, you know from South.
Speaker 1:Oh, yeah, okay, A couple other people were our. He worked for me in Richmond when he was one of our first baristas. Oh, okay, that makes sense now when I see him gunslinging back there, Right exactly.
Speaker 2:He was a great one. We felt we needed this cafe.
Speaker 2:And it more, or less worked according to plan and the store was, you know, in the time of year where the store just wasn't going to make any money. People still need their coffee, people still want their sandwiches, and then it has the very mundane function of, um, kind of preempting waste. You know, if we're going to sell fancy hams, that's we need to move more of that than we can actually probably sell to customers. Right, to keep it pristine. Yeah so we have a program where everything's not like.
Speaker 1:We're using butt ends for the cafe no, quite the opposite, where they're taking all their meats and stuff directly out of our inventory.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I was so it keeps everything super fresh, um and uh, and it works like as a restaurant.
Speaker 1:I think we have really little waste yeah, that's phenomenal, that that's a you know, top discussion nowadays in the last few years. So, looking at your store, do you want to share with the listeners kind of actual, the actual gourmet variety that your store? Because, because you recently got your liquor, like you have wine.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we got a wine and beer license after a decade and a half trying.
Speaker 1:That was a big deal too. Well, that was the biggest.
Speaker 2:I mean, with hindsight, that was the biggest deal Like we're doing much better now as a business now in the last few years since we've gotten that license, than any of the years before, and that really rounded out the picture and that was our intent to get that license when we moved here 20-something years ago, but it just wasn't going to happen. We tried periodically. It just wasn't going to happen. You know, politics and kind of competing competitive interests were shutting us out of that.
Speaker 2:That kind of fell apart in the last few years, and so we were able to finally score, you know, a very deft legal argument, and so we thought that we made over and over, and, over and over again as to why we should get a license.
Speaker 2:Just fell on deaf ears for a long time and then finally things opened up. So, you know, the store has like we. You know, we call ourselves um cheesemongers and grocers and we call it, you know, rubiner's cheesemongers and grocers, and we had a whole list of cutesy names for the business, um and. But in the end we were like you know what this is going to be my store, um, everything in the store is going to be however you want to put it. You know, some people say curated or whatever. I like to think of as more as kind of um, filtered or tested by my palate yeah, I'm only absolutely in a lot of that that's just not like entirely just kind of pomp and ego.
Speaker 2:Certainly is to some extent, I'm sure, but but it's uh, it's um, I can't sell stuff I don't like. Yeah, you know, I can't customer, I can't. You know, I can't have a customer come in and I'm, and I'm pushing a product that I think the market will like, even though I myself don't believe it right. I just can't do that you know I just physically cannot do it right. I'm just not gonna lie to the customer.
Speaker 2:So it's much easier for me, it's much easier for my staff to just sell things that we truly believe in. So I was like, all right, well, I'm just gonna put my name on the, I'm just gonna call rupiners, yeah, you know. So people just know this is me, this is my taste, this is my palate. I want you to come in, I want you to try it. Maybe you'll like the same things that I do, maybe you won't, um, but it's all I know, it's, I'm gonna do it. So. And then we were like well, we're going to use cheesemongers because instead of cheese shoppers, you know something like that and it was a term that's in much more currency now, but it really wasn't then.
Speaker 2:I mean, obviously it's an old, old, old expression, you know cheesemonger, ironmonger, whatever.
Speaker 1:Fishmonger.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but it means somebody who, you know, gathers a product or commodity and brings it to market. Yeah, and we felt that the way we were going to go about this business was going to be as traditional as possible. You know, our mentors and our inspirations were old European shops and a few American stores that were really doing it in that very old fashioned hands on, cut to order, caring for the cheese, ripening the cheese.
Speaker 1:So we decided to call it.
Speaker 2:Cheesemongers, and then we decided to append to that grocers because we didn't want to limit ourselves to that. There's so much more in the food world that was of interest to me. Obviously, for business reasons, you want to diversify somewhat, but also we take that role very seriously of kind of old school roll up your sleeves.
Speaker 1:We're a grocer.
Speaker 2:I think we sometimes get branded, you know, as kind of fancy or elite or whatever, and it's just. It's just the nature of the biz and the sort of products that we sell, even though I can say as an aside here that the most expensive cheese, the most expensive olive oil are that way because of the virtually peasant tiny scale at which they're produced, which is an expensive proposition. It's not like we're just selling kind of frilly right of the virtually peasant tiny scale at which they're produced, which is an expensive proposition.
Speaker 1:It's not like we're just selling kind of frilly fancy stuff for the most part.
Speaker 2:But we want people to think of it. Not everybody's going to, but we want people to think of it as a grocery store, Not just a museum of food, not some boutique that has kind of this and that on the shelves we want it to be a grocery store, albeit kind you know kind of a fancy grocery store, but a grocery store. So that guides, that principle guides the sort of areas that we you know of food that we sell. So there's obviously cured meats and things like that You're excellent at all of it.
Speaker 2:And then there's you know lots of ingredients, and then you know candies and cookies and now wine. You know lots of ingredients, and then you know candies and cookies and now wine. Um, the only thing we never really pulled the trigger on, and never will, is, uh, fresh meat, um, yeah, fresh produce, except in an extremely boutique way. You know there's yeah, somebody brings in some gorgeous like moon in the pond dom yeah, well, dominic, yeah, so that's a we we kind of just give him our front porch there.
Speaker 1:He's awesome. He's such a.
Speaker 2:He's one of my best friends out here in this business, love it, yeah, he's great. So we say you know it's Rubiner's, it's kind of filtered through me Cheesemonger's, we're an old world cheesemonger, we're an old world cheese merchant. And grocer's, because we consider ourselves to be A grocery store, even if not your everyday grocery store, but you know groceries, but you also have a finishing or ripening room too.
Speaker 1:that you added. Is that right?
Speaker 2:We did yeah, so that's a big deal, that's a really big deal. That's still a that is something we're learning to harness. You know, right it's. You know the space, as you know, is a bank.
Speaker 1:Yeah, originally it wasn't a bank. It was a bank.
Speaker 2:Originally it wasn't a bank, it was the town newspaper. Oh, okay, it was a butcher courier, oh cool, okay, and I don't know if the courier became something else or just disappeared and that building was built. I should know this because the dates are literally carved in the building, but I can't remember what they said. I drive by it too. No-transcript, I drive by it too. So 1867, 1869, maybe it was built and it didn't have the pillars, okay, the overhang and the pillars.
Speaker 1:Oh really, yeah, no kidding I'll show you pictures.
Speaker 2:But there were like wrought iron balconies. Oh, there's this great picture with people in like you know, women in like hoop skirts. On the second floor.
Speaker 1:Oh, there you go.
Speaker 2:And then these kind of ghostly figures, because presumably this wasn't the quickest shutter camera in 1869 or whatever. So you know, you see these kind of weird ghostly images of people walking by.
Speaker 1:It's just plasma. Yeah, exactly, it's just plasma.
Speaker 2:And then at some point the courier moved. I think it moved just across the street, across the alleyway there, oh, okay, and there was actually a house. There was a tiny little house in that alleyway.
Speaker 1:Oh there, oh, okay there was actually a house.
Speaker 2:There was a tiny little house in that alleyway, oh okay, and that house is now. It was moved and it's now like right off of route seven, like on one of those roads that cuts back to the courthouse there oh really, it's this tiny little house it used to be at least that's what the historians tell me yeah, anyway um and then it became a bank in 1917, I think okay, um, that's the other date.
Speaker 2:A grave on the side of the building which I can't remember and you know. So we took over this space and the space had been all but abandoned. You know it was going to be a. If I got the story right, it was set to become a toy museum. Oh Of all things, oh my gosh. And there was a guy who was this music impresario you know, wrote a few Elvis songs guy named Aaron Schroeder, um owned the building and I'm I'm sure I'm getting the story wrong. I never actually spoke with him, but bought the building, started decking it out as like a museum for his collection of toys.
Speaker 2:You know if there's any relatives of the Schroeder family and I got this wrong. I apologize Um and uh, but then he got sick, um and never completed but held onto the building forever. So the building was more or less abandoned. So we were able to. When we left Richmond we were able to lease it. But you know it was an old bank so it had a vault in it. Yeah, and you know the first thought was like, hmm, how can we get that vault out of there?
Speaker 2:Oh, wow and we thought about that for five seconds and then everybody was like you can't get that vault out of there. And then so we're like, well, someday we'll make use of it. And in fact it was funny another Southfield coincidence, like Alex Rich Holbin who lives there oh, okay, the bookstore, he was our designer, he designed the space, okay. And we were actually when we moved into the space we were like we got to find a designer who's who you know can put this together the way functionally we want. But that, um, kind of celebrates the space. And we were scouting around talking to friends and we we went to a friend's bakery in boston high-rise bakery, cambridge, I should say and we loved the way that they'd use this kind of nondescript, industrial-looking old liquor store into this super cool space. And so we were like, hey, who designed your space?
Speaker 2:And he's like oh, the guy who lives out by you now is Rich Holbin. So we contacted him and then it turned out he had been contacted by the then owner of that building about turning it into a boutique hotel of some kind. Oh and so where? The front where the store is, was like the lobby.
Speaker 1:There used to be an elevator in there. No.
Speaker 2:Yeah, wow, I think the reason the place never sold is because the elevator was so out of code and it would have cost an absolute fortune to rip out the elevator and put in a new elevator, but without that the rest of the building couldn't be made like disabilities compliance oh, it was kind of this uh you know, just this kind of unsellable space okay anyway, um, but he had already specced out the whole place you know, oh, okay, and he was he had a, if I'm remembering correctly, and there was going to be a little martini bar in the vault oh wow you know um and where the where the cafe is now was going to be a little, you know a little, coffee shop hotel and oh, anyway.
Speaker 2:So I figured what the question was, but uh oh, just the cheese.
Speaker 1:The cheese, oh the cheese.
Speaker 2:So we always wanted to turn that into a cheese vault. I mean, it's perfect for it. It's got three foot thick reinforced concrete walls and in fact early on I asked some contractors like what would it take to put a drain in here? And they're probably still laughing Because apparently the under the vault is a 13 foot thick slab of concrete All the way down to the basement floor and is reinforced with, I'm told, railroad rails. Oh wow, Because they had to keep, you know, the Three Stooges from burrowing underneath.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so much for Ocean's Eleven. I guess Exactly.
Speaker 2:So, but we never had any money. You know business, small business in a small town, is tough, yeah, so you know we didn't have a ton of money to put into that, but then finally in the last few years we've been able to do that. So we've turned that into our. It's so much a cheese ripening cave, I think. You know. We call it, you know, like the word in the cheese mongering trade. It's a French word affinage. Yeah, okay, you know meaning to age and ripen cheese. To finish. The word means like to finish cheese.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and even English-speaking countries they'll often use the word affinage just because you know in English you don't have a great word. Mature doesn't rule off the tongue like affinage, not even close. Yeah.
Speaker 2:So and I don't think we do that, except kind of playing around you know, what we do is we provide a storage space for the cheese that mimics the sort of caves the cheese would have spent its early days in Okay.
Speaker 2:And then, or early, many months, or early years for some of these big cheeses, that will allow the cheese to continue to develop. You know, if you buy a cheese and you just pop it in the walk-in, yeah, kind of it, kind of, you know, retards its development and growth, it's not, uh, the cheese doesn't continue to develop. But if you have it in a, um, a humid environment, a slightly warmer environment, yeah, um, that kind of mimics, you know, uh, cellar temperatures or cave temperatures like that 50 yeah, it's, like you know, mid, mid, lowish, 50s, um, and really high humidity for the stuff that we're putting in there.
Speaker 2:So in the 90s it's a little hard to control. We're still tweaking it, yeah, um, but uh yeah, and we had a kid build the shelves, you know we're looking around for it looks really cool.
Speaker 1:It's really nice in there. I mean he built the most.
Speaker 2:It's funny that you know some people, you know some of these like uh, I think I'd be offending anybody, but it's like. It's like these steiner kids, you know the ones that go like oh, yeah, yeah it's like they're born with, like advanced german joinery techniques and stuff like that. This guy's's like, yeah, I'll build shelving for you, and then we look at his prototypes.
Speaker 1:I'm like oh my God, that's the most beautiful thing. That's beautiful.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it looks so cool and so he built us the shelves and it's great. You know it's a lot of work, yeah, but it really does something that you can't do without it. That's kind of a vapid sentence, but happenstance, but you know, just for example, we got I posted this on instagram but we got a very special gruyere. So a big wheel of alpine cheese from bern and switzerland, um, uh, made by a creamery called fritzenhaus, and it's a cheese that two years, um running, and then every other year very close to winning the world cheese awards, wow, I mean, in which are a serious set of I. They're absurd, of course, to call something the best cheese in the world.
Speaker 2:But that said it was called the best cheese in the world you know, and it came in and this was their Der Reife not their most ripe, but their second to most ripe. But we bought it last November, maybe, you know, ordered it many months in advance, comes more or less straight from switzerland, and we put in the cave and we we didn't set out to say, hey, let's age this for another six, seven months. But you hit the off season, we hadn't cut it yet and we're like you know what, let's just leave it in there and see what it does. So we just cracked it open two days ago, yeah, and it's astonishing. I mean, it's astonishing and we tasted it when it came in and was astonishing then. But but so now we have this 20-month-old Gruyere.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's just absolutely perfection. All we did to it was you know, we have this horsehair brush that we kind of scrape the mold off and flip it every couple of days.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And for many months and then crack it open and hope you didn't mess up this many thousands of dollar wheel of cheese.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no pressure.
Speaker 2:And it was perfect.
Speaker 1:And you know, we could never, we couldn't have done that until we got that yeah, that's the room, or cheese vault as we call it, and that really sets it apart. So in your mind, in tasting the two differences, what were the key components that you found? Were they more complex and kind of further along in the palate and hung out? Yeah, I mean, you know it's.
Speaker 2:You know, I'd love to say we're more scientific about kind of taking notes along the way, yeah, but we're not. But the cheese was clearly. I mean it was basically it was firmer. Obviously it had lost some moisture, the flavors, and we know this cheese well in the sense that we've sold Gruyere from that producer for many years. So we have a good sense of the overall profile. Yeah, everything was much more intense, but without losing. You know, sometimes you get a cheese or wine or anything where it's like really intense but it's kind of monolithic. You know you get intensity but at the expense of breadth and richness and complexity, but none of that it had managed to become more and more intense, firmer, but still as complex.
Speaker 2:And arguably, in those final several months of its ripening, as fats break down, proteins break down, new, you know to their kind of constituent components that give it aroma, give it flavor, you know, new things are coming out of that cheese which simply weren't there before, would never have come out. In fact, the importer emailed when he saw the picture.
Speaker 2:he's like, uh, he's like I'm coming up there, I want to taste it because he's never tasted one, that old oh wow, um and um, and then also, one of the charms of those sorts of cheeses is that they get very uh, crystalline there we go, these little, these little crunchy bits, and they're not really salt there, but they're, although my chemist cousin, you know, she was like well, technically they're, they're assault, but um, she's like everybody, when they hear salt they think sodium chloride. But you know, this is this crystallization it's.
Speaker 2:It's a um. To the extent of my still weak technical understanding, it is a crystallization of the amino acid tyrosine. Oh, okay, which also with tyrosine, tyro, tyros is is greek cheese and tyrosine is you know amino acid ends in that I-N-E, but you'll see tyrosine in. Do you ever cut a slice of prosciutto?
Speaker 1:and you'll see a little white crystal in there saying the same thing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's actually considered a. I'm not really sure why, but it's considered a flaw.
Speaker 1:It's considered a cheesy flaw.
Speaker 2:Wow, I've had the pleasure and the honor of judging cheese competitions for a long time. And in a lot of these competitions they pair a so-called aesthetic judge which would be like me, where you're judging a cheese on its look, its flavor, its aroma, maybe its kind of prospects for the market, that kind of thing and then a technical judge who's judging it based on you know kind of industry standards. You know this is flawed because of this you know kind of industry standards.
Speaker 1:Oh, okay, you know this is flawed because of this.
Speaker 2:You know, this imperfection in the rind is a flaw. Ding, you know, take off the point there. This particular flavor is considered an off flavor. This aroma is considered an off aroma. Ding, ding, you know, take a couple ticks off. Crystallization ding take off.
Speaker 1:I would have never thought that, thought no, and I remember having this conversation.
Speaker 2:I'm sure he told me um very lucidly why it's a flaw. I still don't understand, but it's so popular it's maybe the most sought after component of cheeses. When somebody comes in the store they're like we like hard cheeses with those crystalline crystals. Yeah, and um, and people like it for the crunch. Yeah, I mean, people imagine it's like. Some people come in and they think it makes the cheese sweet. They think the crystals might be sweet because when you age the cheese carefully and in the right conditions, um, it will often bring out a character of the cheese that is something like sweetness. Yeah, you know, and um, and some people imagine it to be salt because it just looks like salt.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's like they threw in a bunch of salt crystals, and a cheese that's that aged will necessarily be saltier than a younger cheese. You know pretty much all cheese has salt in it for a lot of good technical reasons, not just flavor, and so they imagine these are kind of the salt crystals coming out because the cheese is notably salty.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because it's been aging for so long. But no, if you were like to clip out a little one of those crystals with the tip of a knife and put it on your tongue and bite it, it just tastes like you're biting into a piece of chalk or something like that. Okay.
Speaker 1:It doesn't taste like anything.
Speaker 2:Wow, okay, yeah, but yeah, it's crazy and you can see it, you know you look at the cheese and people are like what are your Christelius cheeses? And we're like this one, this one, this one. But you can look, you know, all those little white spots are what you're crushing.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's cool, wow, as you're kind of gauging, because there's so much amazing selection and going in there is it really is such a beautiful craft that you do. It takes you on this journey that like I'm not even in Great Barrington, like I'm not even as a chef the minute, even walking in there, I can smell and it just kind of there are certain attractions to certain things when you look at cheeses and you develop your broad selections. How do you work through all of that? I mean it's probably monotonous and with a team and travel and None of that sounds monotonous Travel Well, I mean.
Speaker 1:We dash off to Switzerland.
Speaker 2:And no well, the cheeses I mean going back to what I was saying before the cheeses are I sell. I buy and sell what I like and believe in. And so much of that is not just the quality of the cheese, the flavor and so forth. It's the people who make it.
Speaker 2:Or in some cases, the people who import it. And so, though, the basis for what I do is based on having worked in Southern store in Cambridge, but also done a good deal of traveling to the places these things were made and meeting the people both throughout the United States and some of not as much as I would have liked of Europe. But you know, when you open a store in a small town or anywhere, it kind of ties you down. Yeah, it takes up all your money.
Speaker 2:Right, and you can't just go dashing off for a couple of weeks, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So a lot of that is based on the relationships that I made and the networks that I made and I stay in touch with these people, yeah, and well trust is crucial, trust is key.
Speaker 2:So, and that's not just the cheese, that's everything in the store. You know we have certain kind of actually written down principles to our buying. You know sometimes we violate because it's getting harder and harder, but you know we'll never sell anything we say that is owned by a parent company. Say, you know, which is getting tested? Because big companies keep buying American artisanal and European artisanal cheesemakers. Okay, okay.
Speaker 1:So it's getting.
Speaker 2:It's being sorely tested right now. But no, that's actually, you know you say monotonous, but that's to me the most fun thing is finding new stuff and getting it here however possible. And you know there's a lot of restrictions and it's much harder now than it used to be. That's what I was going to ask you. It used to be very loosely enforced. If you played ball and were doing anything stupid, yeah, so you know you could bring in raw milk camembert, as you could bring in raw milk rib lechon, things like that. Um and but after 9-11, when there were all new layers of administration put onto the movement and import and selling of food, in the name of like bioterrorism protection and stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, suddenly everybody at every level has got to fill out all these forms and it became really hard. So it's hard to bring some of the things that we used to bring in, but but, uh, okay, but you know. Again, it's like I have to love the cheese, I have to know how it behaves. Yeah, you know the thing about being a cheese monger and this is true in so many jobs but the key skill, I think, is building in your head, in your senses, like a database of how a particular cheese or particular style of cheese should behave. Yeah, so that you can tell by looking at a young cheese how it's going to develop before you get into it, before you get into it Before you get into it, in the sense that it's not real science, but in the same sense that a wine importer might go to a vineyard and taste a barrel sample that's not going to be bottled for years.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:But be able to, based on how many barrel samples of that type of wine or maybe even that particular vineyard, you'll get a sense of how it's going to develop and you'll base your decisions on that and that really you know as a cheese monger, that really guides everything you're doing with the cheese.
Speaker 2:You know there's some cheese I love but I just know they're not going to hold up in the environment that I would have to put them through. And there are many things you know. When cheese comes in the door, the first line of defense and I look at it and be like you know it looks fine now.
Speaker 1:But there's something about the way, something I see in the rind, something in the aroma, something that I can just feel. And I'm like no, I got to refuse this one, this one's not going to work, or if I imported it myself more or less.
Speaker 2:Can't really refuse it, but there might be a particular way to handle it.
Speaker 1:Okay, very interesting, but yeah, wow, and so I know that there's competitions out there.
Speaker 2:More and more every day.
Speaker 1:I mean, are these going? Are they once a year? Is this going on all year?
Speaker 2:long. What competition? I didn't mean the competition.
Speaker 1:Like cheese.
Speaker 2:Oh oh oh Well, there are competitions. Well, there's one big one in the United States. I guess there's another one. There's like a world of cheese thing that I've never participated in, but the American one is put on by the American Cheese Society and that's where I've done all of my judging. Okay, and that started out when I first started judging, there might have been, I think, 70 or 80 cheeses entered. Yeah, now there's thousands entered into these competitions.
Speaker 1:As I talk to people in our industry as a whole, it's so interesting that our skill set as chefs, our tools in our kitchens, our people, you know, our craft people. It almost was like early 90s, you know, maybe a little late 80s, but early 90s it just started erupting and it just took off.
Speaker 1:I think that's amazing to see, because in our country you know I'm trying to wrap my head around. Well, in the first place, I know we're relatively a new country. Why was there such a stall between our founding and as we grew as a country that our food scene kind of just was there like stuck in a sense? And then all of a sudden there was this eruption for everyone in our industry to go, you know, wow, this is a whole new world. And adding all these cheeses and all this product, I mean that's, how do you feel about that? I mean it's, it's interesting.
Speaker 2:I mean, to me that was a thrilling time and I don't know that it's ascending at the same kind of rate or angle. But you know, like you were saying, starting in the early 90s, maybe in the 80s, I don't know I got in the business in before. You know, like I was referring to before, you suddenly saw like when I was a little kid, going to a fancy restaurant meant going to like an old chop house.
Speaker 2:You, you know, and your parents would dress you up and you know you'd have a filet mignon or a big potato or right and then, uh, you know, or there was surf and turf and you have a chunk of crab or lobster, something like that, and that was fancy and it was fancy but then where you know, I'm really not much on like the history of restaurants and stuff but you began to see people, you know, kind of breaking out of that sort of traditional mold and I always thought that this was, you know, kind of just by sheer force of the personality of some, you know, real genius chefs, right as far as restaurants goes, supported by a population that I don't want to wax on too much because I really don't know, but it's to me, because I
Speaker 2:got in the business around then and it just seemed like people from the time that I started in that shop to even just a year or two later the knowledge that customers had the birth of the foodie, the travel that people had done, the chefs who were. You know, I was living in Boston or Cambridge and there were a couple chefs who did things that were just so opposite of like the, you know, the nouvelle cuisine or something like that, jasper White or Todd English and Barbara Lynch and people like that who were just like just piling on incredible flavors and you know doing stuff.
Speaker 2:You know, yeah, exactly, and um, and it was like that in my business as well. Like people, a lot of the cheeses that we found quote unquote were because a customer would come in and they were like oh, I was skiing and you know wherever people ski.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I found I had this cheese and we'd be like, all right, we're going to get it. Yeah, so you know we'd make the calls and we'd do this and we started importing ourselves this is back in Cambridge and just bringing in these wild things that we would not have known about. And then there was an audience for them willing to pay the premium that it would take to get these things into the country. But also, suddenly, there's movies about food, you know that are wildly popular.
Speaker 1:You know, big Night. You know, and exactly.
Speaker 2:And food TV. Right and yeah, exactly, and then and and food, tv right, and you know a different generation of, you know people's, you know appreciation of, maybe more authentic, you know what we unfortunately still call like ethnic food and stuff yeah, it's like suddenly italian food didn't mean just the red sauce joint you know, there might be a tuscan place.
Speaker 1:There might be exactly. It was a really golden time, yeah and uh and then the store.
Speaker 2:Just you, you know, not because of me, certainly, but I was participating in, you know, transformation of that store. Yeah, the way that cheese shops did business, there were a few stores around the country that we worked with or were doing similar things Not many. Then, also, at the same time, there were factors that that led to the development of a very high quality american cheese industry. Yeah, you know, there was a time when there were simply no. I mean, there were a couple there were. There were a few goat cheeses, you know simple things out there.
Speaker 2:Um, capriol in indiana, laura chanel, I mean some of these old school, yeah, you know these hippie chicks, you know, I remember one from capriol who was like you know there are, there are chicks. You know, I remember one from Capriole who was like you know, there are, there are two people, two types of people, who make cheese. You know the, the hippies who don't mind poverty and the rich guys who don't mind losing money. Yeah, and, and she's like, when you see those big, you know German guys in Wisconsin start making artisan cheese, you'll know we've made it and you know, sure enough.
Speaker 2:And but you began to see, because I think there's so many factors, but there was this movement away from the cities, like people who you know wanted to kind of take to the country, whether they were people who had money or people who were just kind of sick of the rat race. Yeah, and, and started making cheese and, though a very difficult business to be in, for the first time maybe ever there was an understanding, or an increasing understanding of what they were doing and therefore an increasing market for what they were doing and it's a slog, but I think you know I've never been a cheesemaker but I know it's a slog of a business, but it's a business where people can make a living.
Speaker 1:It's a lot of work, Whereas before it really wasn't something like that.
Speaker 2:It was you know, you made a cheese and you took it to the farmer's market. You made a cheese and if it was really good and you lived in LA or something, you sold it to you know a chef, or you sold it in Northern California.
Speaker 1:You sold it to Alice Waters or something like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or in New.
Speaker 1:York. You know similar things. But now that vibrant industry filled with, filled with really wonderful cheeses that you know are are, you know, shoulder to shoulder with the best European cheese, which is phenomenal, which is great to see, incredible, we're doing it. So do you have any words of wisdom? I mean anything, none, none them. I mean anything, none, none. Oh, my god, don't do what I did. Kids, yeah, yeah, you know, but I mean, like somebody that has this, you know, affection for cheese and wanting to these finer things and want to get into the industry. How do you nurture someone along? I mean, you have ben, yeah, which I actually have ben in my cell phone.
Speaker 2:It's ben rubiner, by the way, yeah, yeah, a lot of people think he's my son.
Speaker 1:But yeah, what are your words for that? Like cutting your teeth and how? I mean it's a lot of studying right, a lot of tasting.
Speaker 2:I mean depending on how deeply you want to go into it, like there's no way to go into it and really learn it, whether that be as a cheesemonger or a cheesemaker. You know without. I mean there's a there's a great deal of knowledge that needs to be, if not mastered. You need to have a enough of a framework of the knowledge, whether that be you know more technical or aesthetic components of it or business components about the cheese, that you can actually tell a good story.
Speaker 2:You know, I don't the reason I went. You know I may have skipped this, but the reason I chose cheese over all these other professions was, you know I was in kind of academia before this and you know, and kind of a student of history and and and and very interested without you know kind of jack of all trades and you know all sorts of academic interests you know, interested in science just enough to want to read a few books about.
Speaker 2:You know this and that and and when I went into. You know and that and and when I went into. You know cheese for me, and wine is the same way, and many other things, I'm sure. But you can look at a cheese from so many different angles. You can look at it, um, you know just straight up kind of the history of that cheese. You can look it up scientifically. You can look it up from, you know, a geological perspective. You can look it up as. You can look at it through the lens of like the history of like conquest. You know the movements of people, the. You can look at it through the, um, you know through through the. You know the history of animals in a particular region.
Speaker 2:I mean there's a million different, um, ways to look at, yeah, a piece of cheese. I always said that a really good cheese monger might just be making this up, but a really good cheese monger could look at a cheese like a whole cheese. Yeah, come up with a plausible story on how that cheese developed just by looking at the cheese. Okay, doesn't really work in america because, like you were saying, our traditions here are so young. So if you're making a cheese in america, you just make whatever you want.
Speaker 2:Basically, um you know whatever your land will give you, whatever your animals will give you how much space you have, how much staff you know, whatever capital, whereas in europe these traditions are so old. That's why you know in one place they're all making a similar cheese and this particular cheese developed in the mountains and this particular cheese, developed in the hot islands in the mediterranean and you know everyone and every cheese in this region is made with sheep milk.
Speaker 2:You know no cheese above the loire valley, with some exceptions made of goat's milk. You know, um, you know the richer places, big monastic land holdings and stuff were cow's milk because you know the, the peasant, the poor couldn't afford a herd of cow, you know, or the land to graze them. So again, I think I've wandered off on a cheese tangent but oh no, so getting in the business.
Speaker 2:So if you really want to get in the business as a career, yeah, um, which a lot of people do, but not as many as you need um, yeah you really got to, um, you really got to dig in okay pretty deep and try to understand this stuff right, there's no shortage of avenues into it.
Speaker 2:You know there's no such thing as a cheese shop in this country, a good cheese shop in this country that's not looking for help, and there's no such thing as a cheesemaker that you know, or at least a decent sized one that doesn't take an intern or always need some help, or it takes a certain type, just like it takes a really weird type to go become a chef, you know yeah, right. Sign up for that, and it's like yeah right. Now the chance of you making great money doing it is right. Probably not great overall.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know the hours are absurd and there's all kinds of pressures, and then the actual running of a restaurant or a small cheese shop or a cheesemaker, something like that is pretty brutal, no matter where you are. I see more stores in big cities going out of business than I do little country cheese stores, because it has its own pressures, so I think anybody wants to get into it. There's no, there's no shortage of kind of entryways, yeah, into it.
Speaker 2:Um, you know, find a good cheese shop or find a good um. And then there's lots of you know support out there these days, right, um, they're the american cheese society, which has gotten quite big, maybe a little too big for my taste, but, like anything else, you've got to fund it. If you've got to fund it, you've got to run it with people with money. The people who make money are like you know craft.
Speaker 2:I'm probably being unfair, but there's lots of resources. There's now actually a certification which I don't have. Maybe someday I'll get, but it's one of those like I've been doing this for 30 years. I don't need some kid telling me how. Yeah, but there's a certified cheese professional like certificate I guess you'd call it that is administered by the American Cheese Society. Okay, and so a lot of young cheese mongers are preparing for that and getting into that young cheesemongers are preparing for that and getting into that.
Speaker 1:So it's great business. Jasper Hill, I think. I think I remember them mentioning something about some classes or education they do up there.
Speaker 2:They do a ton of stuff, they're unbelievable. Seven volts and insane magic. I was just up there a couple weeks ago. They had a summit. It was Northeast Retail Summit. They chose a few shoe shops. Yeah, come up there and just kind of hash it out. Yeah, talk about the state of the business.
Speaker 1:Talk about what concerns, us. Oh wow, very cool.
Speaker 2:Them telling us in a very candid way what their pressures are. But they're I mean, they are the benchmark. They're amazing. They're amazing on just every level, man. I was up there just for a weekend and it was like. It was like I just felt like everybody. I met, not just the employees of Jasper Hill, from through and through, from. You know, mateo, the, the people they're buying their milk from the people you know, working in their satellite farms or whatever.
Speaker 2:Everybody just seemed like a genius to me. They're just on it, you know. They just know their craft so well so through and through. You know it was wild Like we were. You know we were visiting their main farm. You know where the milk is made that they use for their raw milk cheeses and you know they got a couple guys working there, and there's this one, kid Bubba who local guy, and this is a deeply impoverished part of Vermont.
Speaker 2:You know I think I can say that the Northeast Kingdom, you know oh yeah, it's just you know, middle of nowhere and it's, you know, a lot of downtrodden farms and real, real pressures, um and and you know, and this guy I think it was very much of that from that that difficult upbringing, that difficult world he was just like, as Mateo put it, I've never met somebody who loves cows as much as this guy and he somebody who loves cows as much as this guy, and he just knew very cool and he could like they never.
Speaker 2:They didn't give the cows names, a few had names from previous lives. But he could just look at a cow and just tell you, you know exactly the volume of milk it was giving, exactly what it ate, exactly its weight, exactly everything about it, what its genetic makeup was. And, without thinking about it, without checking a list, you know it was just of him. You know, yeah, and everywhere we went it was just like that and it was almost like they. They spoke in this kind of poetry.
Speaker 2:It was weird yeah, it was just everything they said you know it's like and especially when we were touring places where, um, like the creamery and the caves and stuff at jasper hill, yeah, you know, and they, it's very hygienic, so they and it's also very proprietary, so they frown on you whipping out your phone.
Speaker 1:My brain is like shit.
Speaker 2:How am I gonna remember this? I'm trying to think of mnemonic devices to remember all the brilliance that I'm hearing. Yeah, trip.
Speaker 1:But yeah, jasper hill is a is a remarkable organization yeah, no kidding, it was great talking to them and kind of hearing more about you know what they're doing and, like you said, I'd love to get up there someday.
Speaker 2:Um, maybe that'll be a field trip fantastic, but they do like a cheese camp. Ben's going up to cheese camp. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, we went a few years ago, sophie works in the store, she went up to cheese camp okay, um, well and that's something they do, which is great.
Speaker 1:I mean, that's amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I know, like cricket creek, I would take. You know, we'd go up there and do some cheese. Yeah, you know, make I think we were tinkering with their Maggie's Round or something, right, so you know. Yeah, but you get an appreciation where it's mind opening. Yeah, that you're, now you're. It's more than just grating it, yeah, you know. Or shaving it.
Speaker 2:It's like oh wow. I mean, you know people will lament the prices of artisan cheeses. You know what 25, 35, 45, 50, $55 a pound. You know how can you charge that for this? I'm like you know what the margins on this stuff are it's so slim.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the work that goes into it. I mean, jasper Hill, you know they because of economic pressures and if I have the story straight in COVID they had to sell their herd. I mean they couldn't the economics of doing all that they do and being their own milk suppliers. Now they've since bought a farm and supply a great deal of milk actually from cows that they own.
Speaker 1:But it's no longer on Jasper Hill Farm.
Speaker 2:And there's talk that, you know, if they are able to expand, if there is a market for expansion of what they're doing, um, then maybe reintroducing cows, but um, but um.
Speaker 1:And you see what goes into this and the circumstances and the risks and the yeah, and then you know, like the equipment, you know they're artisan cheesemaker, I mean, they're they're getting big for an artisan cheesemaker, but they're still very much an artisan cheesemaker.
Speaker 2:But I'm like, looking at this stuff, I'm like, hey, what's this set you back? And it's like that's a half a million bucks. Yeah, you know that unit right there. Or you know, hey, we got this tractor. Our lease is running up. You know, yeah, tractor to use for hay and stuff, right, and they're like half a million bucks.
Speaker 1:Yeah, these things cost you know, unbelievable, yeah, crazy, yeah, no, and that's, I mean that's, and that's the tough thing. I think people need to have that level of appreciation goes a long way.
Speaker 2:We talked to the cheesemakers like so what time did you get in this morning? It's like 1 15 you know, and it's like 11 in the morning. Now, yeah, I'm just wrapping up my shit, yeah where you been.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, yeah, it's. You're wasting a day getting up at, you know 7 am, wow. Well, so what you? What are favorite cheeses? Is it one of those things where it's like they're all my children so I have to love them all equally? I would say absolutely not. Well, as in real life.
Speaker 2:No, yeah, I don't have a favorite cheese.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And it's maddening for customers because it's a common question what's your favorite cheese? Yeah, and what I should do is lie this one. Yeah, yeah, you know, but it's so difficult, and it's difficult in a way, in the same way as, like, you know which one's your favorite kid? Yeah, yeah, but I think most parents will tell you they do have a favorite kid, but it's you know. You're talking about moving targets. You know there might be a cheese that, generally speaking, is among my top 20 cheeses. Okay, that doesn't mean that that cheese on that day is going to be my favorite cheese. I mean, these things are changing. The cheese that you know we brought in at 13 months old or 15 months old is a very different cheese when we pull it out of the cellar at 20 months.
Speaker 2:That's when we cut that wheel, that's one cheese. When we put it out for the day, at the end of the day, it's subtly another cheese and as it goes, you know, it changes One batch of a very soft, let's say, jasper Hill, harbison or something like that, because it's an artisan cheese, closely tied to the land and the lactation cycles of the animal, and stuff like that. It's going to be different, right, you know, the composition of the milk is going to be different, so it's going to yield a different cheese. This isn't an industrial product, right? So there's and that's to me the charm of artisan products there's variation. Yeah, hopefully within a certain range of quality. Yeah, but I can't just say harbison's my favorite cheese.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because, there may be days where that specific Harbison isn't my favorite cheese.
Speaker 1:Ordering it. This is Okay, I know.
Speaker 2:And so I mean I tend to nah, you know.
Speaker 1:I don't have an answer for you. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:There used to be kind of types of cheeses that I didn't like. You know there was a. There's a style of cheese that is typical in Western Spain, Eastern Portugal, the so-called Serra cheeses. Every time, western spain, eastern portugal the so-called sera cheeses. Every time I try to pronounce anything remotely portuguese and then I hear a portuguese person pronounce it, I'm like, wow, I didn't get anything right, but um, sheep milk, cheeses, raw milk.
Speaker 2:The milk is coagulated, not through rennet, which would be typical or another way to coagulate it's yeah, it's done through an extract of a thistle seed and a very ancient way of doing it which does all kinds of things to the cheese but creates this among other factors, creates this very, very rich, quite strong, depending on how you look at it, both aromatically and in flavor. Very animal, you know. Oh wow, Not in like a gross way, but like you know, Like a barnyardie.
Speaker 1:No, yeah, a barnyardie, yeah, like barnyardie.
Speaker 2:But like you know the, you know the bedding in a sheepfold, you know oh yeah, you know it's kind of like wet grass. Yeah, just enough of the smell of the lanolin, yeah but it has a real sweetness to it and then sometimes it has this odd like kind of almost like berry note to it like strawberry note kind of to it.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's cool. I thought it was just the grossest category of cheese, like I don't know how anybody eats this?
Speaker 2:I'll sell it yeah, but you know, over time I just learned to love that just as much as the others. Yeah, of course I always hated fennel and now I like fennel and couldn't eat cilantro, and now I like cilantro so so like the redheaded stepchild exactly, but so so uh yeah, I, I don't think I have a favorite, yeah, unless you, unless you ask me what's your favorite at this second. Yeah, and it's probably you know, I taste a bunch of cheeses every day, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:So, it's probably the answer is going to be the one of those cheeses that was doing the best that day and you ask me, tomorrow I might not have the same answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, maybe people need to see you every day then. Yeah, come on in. Yeah, enjoy it, we're here daily.
Speaker 2:there you go well, so how can they website, and for both the cafe. Now, you know we're working a lot of stuff right now. We're we're um, so our website, which was, you know, feeble and I think that's actually a diagnostic term in the tech industry um, to just horrible, to outdated. Somebody was like hey, I bought a sandwich in your cafe and it says on your website it was seven dollars, but it was 20. I was like, because I haven't changed the price in 10 years or something, oops so we're working that now.
Speaker 2:So you know the best thing to do is just come on in yeah, and you look at our instagram and stuff because that's where anything new, anything cool, anything that makes, takes a pretty picture and you guys do boxes, built boxes and all of that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so set up an order.
Speaker 2:But we're really very much cut to order. I'm amazed how many people just kind of need to go out and buy a quarter pound of this, quarter pound of that, quarter pound of that.
Speaker 1:Wow.
Speaker 2:As a kid I never went to a cheese shop to go buy cheese no. But it's very, very hands-on. We're very in tune with what's going on with our cheeses at any given time.
Speaker 2:So hopefully we're able to deliver to a customer a cheese that's in perfect condition, um and uh, handled properly, wrapped properly, yeah, um. But yeah, best thing to do is is come in and you know, I would say a pretty big portion of the people who come in are maybe a little intimidated by a cut to order cheese shop, because they're there are weirdly few of them. A lot of stores kind of look like a cut-to-order cheese shop or they'll cut a bunch of pieces and put it out and whatever. That's a cheese shop. But they don't realize they could come in and ask these questions and taste most everything and really get the advice of the people so that we can put something together. And there's no substitute for customer satisfaction than you know better than actually tasting it.
Speaker 2:Right, exactly, you know when you get it home, you're going to like it if, before you bought it, you tasted it.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:So that's awesome, that's the best thing to do. Come in, taste a bunch of stuff.
Speaker 1:Nice, yeah, okay, any sort of cheese classes in the, the future, or I think so.
Speaker 2:You know we were doing them and covet hit, we weren't doing a ton because you know, staffing, staffing, which basically means if we're doing a cheese class, I'm doing it. Which? Means I'm not making dinner, you know yeah, um, yeah, and, and I've just worked a double, for you know, 20 straight days or something so right, um. So we didn't do many of them and the ones we did, we were doing mostly for charities. You know, silent auction. Get a cheese glass for you and your friends.
Speaker 1:We're going to be easing back, and then covid put an end to that.
Speaker 2:You know the for a while, especially because the we closed the cafe for two and a half years, so there was really no place to host these things and uh, yeah, I mean, yeah, destroyed economies and global disaster. Yeah, um was pretty good for our business, you know, yeah, in ways that you know real two edges of a sword ways for that we all experienced living in the burgues, some of the local farms.
Speaker 1:I mean that was a shot in the arm. Yeah, I mean you know it's like it was a lot of people moved up here, which of course has some adverse effects.
Speaker 2:You know, we got no place for any of our staff to live because you know everything's uh, it's tough, but but on the other hand, it brought up a clientele that was very interested in what we're doing so it's kind of juggled in my brain.
Speaker 2:It's like yeah how do you manage this? You know we gotta, you know we need. We need affordable housing, we need affordable places. Yeah, um, but I need a couple fancy people in town to come, you know, buy my fancy cheese and stuff. It's a tough mix. But yeah, covid was between getting the wine license just before COVID.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, and then COVID hitting and people you know rapidly, you know, increasing their alcohol intake.
Speaker 2:Yeah Right, you know, before it was you know, oh, I'd like a. You know looking for a bottle, for I'm having a steak tonight. Whatever, I'm looking for a bottle Now. It was like 11 in the morning what white wine goes good with an 11-year-old.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, you got any Corbett Canyon? No, I don't think so bud.
Speaker 2:So yeah, it was and the plateau is very different. I mean, there's just more people up here now, yeah, so it's not like during the middle of COVID, when kids were out of school and people were just flat out living up here were out of school and people were just flat out living up here but oh, yeah, but still, but it's.
Speaker 1:uh, it's a thorny issue, but yeah, but it's been a good stretch, yeah, yeah, well, you know, for business. Thank you for your passion, man. I you know you're you're very humble, but I think it's just, it's great to you know to go into what you are so passionate and the team that you have it. It is an artist at work, right, you know it's not.
Speaker 2:I always say art dealer.
Speaker 1:There you go. I'm not the artist, just selling the art. Well, I don't know Finding and selling the art. Your name is excellence, and that's why it's where you put it.
Speaker 2:So thank you, pleasure.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all right, everyone, that is a wrap. You can check us out if you like that. Subscribe Also the Instagram Chef Massey. Let's keep it simple, chef Massey dot com. Have a good one. Bye for now.