Cheese in Unexpected Places

It's the end of March. The Final Four is this weekend. I'm a ride or die Jayhawks basketball fan, and I don't have a KU-themed homemade mozzarella pizza to talk about this year. So bear with me as I explain how basketball made me think about cheese during March Madness 2012.

Nobody, not even die-hard KU fans, expected my school, given its roster shortcomings, to make such a deep run in the tournament. Yet, even when things got sloppy, this team maintained composure and proved that big things can happen when you least expect them, as long as you believe in yourself. Final Four bound and making every KU fan more proud than any year I can recall in my two decades of rock chalking.

All this underdog/exceeding expectation talk got me thinking of my trip in February to the most unlikely of homes for cheese. How does a cheese business survive anywhere but big cities and foodie havens like New York? Is it destined to fail at some point, a slave to its market shortcomings? Fade to El Paso, Texas.

Licon Dairy in San Elizario: A surprise detour during a 24-hour trip I assumed would be occupied solely by tacos and steak. I hadn't really thought about the trip to Licon as anything but a fun excursion, until now. With the likelihood of finding myself in a similarly small market becoming more real as I prepare to leave New York, I have Licon to thank for renewing my confidence.

Did I tell you they had a petting zoo?!
Free to the public and school groups.

For 50 years -- fifty freaking years--, this family-run business has been providing high-quality, fresh Asadero (Mexican-style mozzarella or string cheese) to the local community. The offerings at the cheese counter are modest but utilitarian -- Asadero, flavored Asadero, tortilla chips, chicharrones, cream cheese, and whey. There's an oddly placed Payment Agency in the back, so only a fool would expect a day-laborer to buy a wheel of Camembert and fig preserves instead of wiring money to his family. Asadero and whey are often necessary ingredients in local cooking. Tortilla chips and chicharrones? The working class' cheese pairing.

Instead of getting fancy, Licon provides the essentials and does so well. For that reason, this dairy has survived in the most depressed of neighborhoods on the outskirts of a largely middle-class city. The family makes the cheese by hand, doing what they love for the last half century. It is damn good cheese at that (and fantastic sustenance during our ridiculously difficult hike the next day). Simple, but with the intangible quality completely absent from cheeses made without love.

I would never have thought to look for a dairy or cheese counter to visit in El Paso. How could that possibly survive? In El Paso?! I heard the same thing a few years ago. How could you leave a proper day-job after just one year, with so little to invest and so many companies to compete against?  Anything can survive with a little ingenuity, talent, street smarts, self-awareness, confidence, and love. El Paso and basketball taught me this.

Cheesemonger to the Stars

I'm not one to floss about grand achievements, but from here on out, I'm no ordinary cheesemonger. I'm cheesemonger to the stars.

There was this one time Spike Lee...was outside of the store filming a carpenter's protest. Or at least it looked like him from our side of the window. Ummm...okay, okay, so there was this one time one of the crazy clients from Millionaire Matchmaker came in... and loudly discussed the calorie content of our tomato soup and left after eating some samples...and, umm, yeah I guess reality tv does not a star make. Okay okay, I have a real one! This other time Jon Benjamin (who has some show on Comedy Central but is only relevant to me for lending his voice on Archer and various Adult Swim cartoons) hung out in the store...eating sandwiches. Right, so.... Oh, I have it! Once, Jimmy Fallon came into the store...and I mostly avoided eye contact because real celebrities make me nervous, and all he did was buy a bunch of frozen mac & cheese.

Alright so I haven't actually mongered to any stars. And truth be told, the greater the celebrity, the more I wouldn't know what to do with myself and just act a fool. But all these celebrity pseudo-encounters in New York, as well as the generally demanding nature of customer encounters in this city's service industry, got me thinking. Someday, if I own a business, whether it be in an important city or small town, my mission statement will be "to provide a service or product that is so innately awesome that I don't have to kiss a bunch of ass to get people to like me."

Both law and cheesemongering are service professions. Both industries have taught me that I would sooner re-live that day I had kidney stones than spend my life kissing everyone's ass and ingratiating myself in a gratuitously saccharine display of self-prostitution. Right, so that sounds a little harsh.

Okay let's put it this way: The stores and business in which I feel most comfortable are those that employ a normal amount of courtesy to the average customer, are totally free to bust your balls if you're truly being a rude cretin, joke with you when you do something silly, and treat everyone like a normal human being. Whether you're kind of a big deal celebrity or just an average joe, each customer is deserving of the same respect when it is returned in kind. If a store/business serves me up something phenomenal, delicious, comforting, or unique, then I don't care if I'm greeted with feigned friendliness, high-pitched queries, and painted smiles. I'd actually prefer not to be. Just imagine the customer is a friend you've known for years. At least that's what I do when I try to help people pick out cheeses from the case. I smile because that's what you do when you're having a good time with friends.

It's pretty easy to tell when a corporate customer service model has jammed a friendliness micro-chip into its employees' brains. And there's nothing more distasteful. If people like your stuff and feel at ease doing business with you because you're innately a nice person, then they will buy your product whether you're having an incredibly smiley day or not. That's what friends do. They welcome your varying and normal levels of joy because the most important thing they get from the relationship is you.  So obviously, I just need to approach the next celebrity that comes in and ask to be their friend. Yes, by god, that's the trick! I'll let you know how that goes.

Cash Rules Everything Around Me

Cheese is a business. So just like in any business, you'll find your everyday moron. Even in the cheese world -- a world I've described as home to some of the warmest people I've ever met -- there is a smattering of undesirable personalities.

Once I found myself trapped in a conversation with an otherwise well-intentioned cheese guy/business guy who was suffering from a severe affliction of self-involved verbal diarrhea and smarminess. Not only was he unable to stop talking about how awesome he was --the words "I'm a hustler" actually came out of his middle-aged suburban mouth--, but he also thought so highly of his sense of judgment that he took it upon himself to psychoanalyze me on our first meeting. To him, the cheese counter was a stage, and he proceeded to question whether I really had the stage presence for "cheese theater" if I were to open a potential store of my own.

It was completely idiotic. I felt dumber for having participated in the conversation. Cheese store guests should feel like a cheesemonger is their friend and cohort in an adventurous hunt for a delicious food experience. Customers shouldn't be treated like a detached audience while their cheesemonger makes a fool of himself by over-dramatizing the relationship. And while some people (me) can't get enough of cheese or may joke about running a black market raw milk cheese trade, I sure as all get-out don't want my cheesemonger to hustle the stuff on me like a dime-bag of dairy goodness. Having now spent many successful weeks behind the cheese counter, I see how full of crap that guy was.

Pretty much everything that came out of his mouth exuded the two character traits that have cast the artisanal cheese industry (foreign and domestic) in a pretentious and elitist light:  narcissism and vanity. When people vomit that kind of nonsense, it makes customers think the reason they're paying $30/lb for cheese is because someone with a big vocabulary and fancy attitude wants to make a buck on spoiled milk. They don't see the hard work the farmers and cheesemakers put in to develop the recipes, care for the animals and make the product, or the effort the cheesemongers should be making to help them discover something new and delicious. They just see a buffoon, a court jester, a dairy thug, trying to sleaze their way to some dollar-dollar bills.

On both sides of the counter -- among cheesemongers and customers alike, people who think they're members of some cool kids club because they know a thing or two about cheese make it really difficult for the other person to enjoy the experience and the exploration.

There are self-involved, sleazy types everywhere. Having seen plenty of that in the corporate world, a fear of turning into a cheese counter cretin has hindered my own self-promotion in the cheese world. Many dear friends and supporters have encouraged me to do more to "brand" myself, if you will. Post more on the blog, review products, teach classes, link to my posts on Facebook, give Cheesy Street information out to strangers and new contacts, advertise. Instead, I have yet to burn through a 100-count deck of business cards I printed for myself, and a lot of acquaintances and old friends still have no idea what I'm doing with my life. Telling new people what I do usually begins with a hesitant stutter that I use to fill the space I anticipate from the awkward silence that will ensue.

Let's be blunt, though, every business needs a palatable amount of hustle to keep enough green paper flowing through its veins to stay alive. I realize that talking about what I do with people is essential to long-term survival, and, really, not so terrible. I handed out a very rough first draft of my business card to former classmates at my 10-year high-school reunion -- the epitome of awkward situations. I even unloaded a card to a stranger on the Subway a few weeks ago -- a native Brooklynite who spent some time in Wichita and struck up a conversation with me about my Kansas t-shirt. His wife loves cheese, I'm told. I'll probably never see or hear from that guy or his wife, but at least my card and web address are floating out there somewhere.

Talking about my cheese life has gotten much easier, and led to some really great conversations. Even strangers can sense your character pretty easily when you start talking about yourself. I've learned that as long as you are genuine and enthusiastic, people are really interested in hearing about your craft - be it accounting, lawyering, painting, cheesemongering, what-have-you. Everyone wants to talk to real people, not hustlers, clowns, or showmen. As long as you keep the smarm out of it, business-talk ain't so bad.

This is also a long way of self-promoting two things: 1) So you might have picked up that I have a first draft on a business card. It's really DIY and needs a lot of changes, upgrades and updates. But it looks like:

Biz cards with pictures from the blog and info on the back.

I look forward to dropping it in fish bowls for drawings at various restaurants and hotels.

2) Cheesy Street is blowin up homies!! Soon....well as soon as I figure out how the hell to design a web page...it'll be moving to its very own Dot Com! Without the hyphen! The Cheesy Street url was something I tried to reserve over a year ago when Tad and I came up with the name. Unfortunately I wasn't aware of Internet trolls who poach urls and purchase them shortly after someone runs a search for the name on services like GoDaddy, with the hope of selling or auctioning the domain at a higher price to those who really want it. The day after I searched for cheesystreet.com and was ready to to buy it, I realized some fool in Utah had bought it from under me hours earlier. Eventually he realized there was no burning demand for cheesystreet.com and transferred it to my friend Chris who will be helping me figure out how to design the page...which will happen ...someday...in the future...Okay so I have no idea when it will happen, but at least the option is there now and it WILL happen.