The Grand Opening Report

I know I've been a bit derelict in my posting duties. The weeks since store opening have been action-packed. But I'm going to try my best not to leave Cheesy Street to the wayside going forward.

BOOM, Food Safety Certified, Blouses!
Ok, so it's not a picture of the store.  But I had
to take a test to get this card! And for now,
 it's the best I can do on pictures. 

Three weeks in and being an official cheesemonger and manager-on-duty at a giant cheese store feels like second nature. That didn't take long. Beecher's is huge, and we do a lot. We have a cafe area, an evening lounge/restaurant area downstairs, a charcuterie case, a coffee bar, a cheesemaking facility...a petting zoo. It's a carnival of cheese and cheese-related fun.  Not only did I need to quickly learn the cheese case, but I also needed to know the ins and outs of the cafe area, the charcuterie case and meat slicer (love cured meat but I know nothing about it), the espresso machine (which freaked me out at first), and various miscellaneous tasks that arise like receiving orders, building sandwiches and cheese plates, and answering customer questions that baffle me.

The first day was a non-stop explosion of customers and curiosity. I ended up working an opening to closing shift. Fifteen hours, and a I loved every second. My feet, not so much. Since then, things have been a steady but sane flow of people.

I know names, locations and stories of domestic cheese and cheesemakers pretty well. Yet, I've never had the opportunity to try many cheeses. So describing the flavor of each cheese is a completely different matter. That included most of the cheese in our case when we first opened. I felt pretty confident about being able to direct people to the right cheese. But the first couple of days was a lot of looking at cheeses and guessing what they would taste like and hoping for the best.
"Do you have anything similar to a manchego?"
(To my self) "Gah, I have no idea."
Scanning labels frantically; finding one with a picture of a sheep.
(To myself) "Mmmeh, this one looks like a semi-firm sheep's milk cheese. I bet it'll work."
"Yes we do actually. Here try this one. I think it comes pretty close."
Nom, nom, nom.
"Man alive, this is delicious! I'll take a slice."

I would try the cheese with the customer or after they left and discovered that my guesses were usually pretty accurate. Not always, but surprisingly often. It worked well. I guess lawyering taught me a thing or two about making things up on the fly.

It only took a few days of tasting and exploring along with the customers before I learned 90% of the cheeses in our case and didn't have to rely as much on panicked assumptions. Now, I can look at a wheel of cheese and know which cheese it is without seeing the label.  Plus it didn't take long to know the cheeses that are crowd pleasers and the ones that aren't.

In a nutshell, I love my job. I love conversations with random excited customers and regulars. People in NYC love cheese. I knew that from my farmers market days. But now I can explore up to 100 different cheeses with them and figure out which is the perfect cheese for each person, and this may sound strange, but that is inexplicably fulfilling. And if my brain is ever fried from figuring out which cheese hits the mark for every single person, I can always escape to the solitary, focused zen world of the espresso machine or sandwich press. Waking up for an opening shift at 5:00am can be difficult, not to mention the alarming introduction to an early morning/late night cast of characters on the subway. Once I'm at work it flies by and I love being there.

One of the best aspects of the job is continually trying, discovering and re-discovering new cheeses I love ...or even ones that I don't love so much. As I keep going, I'll try to share as many as I can with you. Just because not all of you can come into the store and find out directly from our cheese counter, doesn't mean you should be sheltered from new and delicious cheese discoveries.