Blessed are the cheesemakers

Blessed are the cheesemakers

La Fromagerie’s Patricia Michelson wants to banish the idea that cheese is merely an afterthought
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OCTOBER 13, 2017 by Natalie Whittle
Patricia Michelson is standing in a five-star bedroom for cheese. “This is their Claridge’s,” she says of the little glass space at the corner of her new cheese emporium in Bloomsbury. When it comes to affinage, or cheese-maturing, attention to detail counts: the cheeses are resting on untreated French straw, cooled gently by a bespoke refrigeration system adapted from a 1930s model, while new autumn deliveries from France are being carefully unwrapped by senior cheese technician David Jordanidis. “The cheeses couldn’t be happier. They’re not drying. They’re not cracking,” Michelson says approvingly. “All the rinds look beautiful. Even the Tomme de Savoie, which is ripened in a cave.”

There are some punchy aromas, but Michelson is more excited by what the cheeses look like. “You can tell just by looking at the cheese that it’s autumn . . . These lovely dark rinds, deep colours. When you look at the Saint-Nectaire” — she picks up a piece of the dappled-grey washed-rind Auvergne cheese — “it’s got what I call elephant skin: a velvety look that comes from the cellar, where there’s a huge amount of bacteria and humidity. And the Vacherin just arrived today. We’ll be washing it in a Savoie wine — it goes like clotted cream.”

She picks up the huge white wheel of unpasteurised Alpine soft cheese, big enough for a moped, pillowed with a fine fluffy layer of mould. “It’s officially autumn when I see this.” La Fromagerie will get through thousands of Vacherins in the coming months. “At Christmas we’re throwing them around.”


© Eleonora Agostini
That London can eat its own weight in cheese on special occasions is not a new phenomenon. Michelson’s mission is different: to bring fine, seasonal cheese into the casual dining age, and to banish the idea that it should merely be an expensive afterthought to a good meal. Think fondues and soufflés, fried fontina and melting raclette, or just a nibble of cheese to go with champagne: “You should consume everything in moderation. If it’s really good cheese, you won’t want too much of it anyway.”

This mission has been 26 years in the making, in which time Michelson has been quietly colonising London with outposts of irresistible dairy. It started small: a garden shed at the back of her Highbury home, where she aged imported French cheeses (ferried across the Channel by seasonal chalet workers) and sold them wholesale. Then it grew to a market stall, and from there into the first La Fromagerie shop in Highbury, taking over an old jeweller’s, where the cheeses were kept in the safe.


© Eleonora Agostini
Next came an invitation from the Howard de Walden estate to open a second La Fromagerie in Moxon Street as part of the regeneration of a then-dilapidated Marylebone. And now a bolder move to mature cheese’s image even further, with a shop-bar-restaurant on Lamb’s Conduit Street that feels like positive discrimination for dairy products. “Instead of being at the bottom, cheese is at the top. It’s the first thing you see on the menu. We are trying to open people’s minds.”

La Fromagerie really started by accident, on a “dreadful skiing day” in the French resort of Méribel, back in 1990. “I lost the party I was skiing with,” Michelson explains amid the weekday evening chatter at the new branch, “because the weather changed and I took a tumble. I got down to the bottom of the mountain eventually and walked through the village of Méribel, past the cheese shop — which was called La Fromagerie — and picked up a piece of the local Beaufort Chalet d’Alpage, the high-mountain summer pasture cheese which is particularly crunchy and lovely. I thought if something like that can revive me after four hours of misery, it has to be something special.”


Patricia Michelson (right) and La Fromagerie’s director Sarah Bilney © Eleonora Agostini
The next day Michelson and her husband drove to a nearby village to meet the cheesemaker — who misunderstood an order from Michelson in her “bad French” for a single piece. Instead a pièce entière — a whole wheel — was produced, and “I didn’t have the heart to say I only wanted a little bit.” And so the Michelsons drove home with several kilograms of Beaufort in the boot, and over the 16-hour journey she decided to launch a food business. “That’s how it started.”

The garden shed cleared, Michelson bought an old cellar cooler from a pub: “It was a rattly old thing, a bit Heath Robinson, but I think women can do these things. You make it work.”


© Eleonora Agostini
It’s hard to guess the humble origins of La Fromagerie when you’re in the stylish cheese throngs at Moxon Street or Lamb’s Conduit Street, the food-shopping experience at a high pitch of urban elegance, with many enticing pickles, butters and cold cuts calling for consumption, in spite of their robust price tags. Cheese still makes up most of the business’s profits, however, and the margins aren’t easy, Michelson says. She has visited almost all of the producers in person — barring those of some newer Scottish cheeses. ‘‘I have to know if they farm their own animals, and if they’re pasture-fed. What recipes are they using? Are they pasteurising? Are they using starters and rennets? I can’t just take anything.”

Michelson and La Fromagerie’s director Sarah Bilney make sure that the staff understand their philosophy as surely as they do. “The first rule is that you’re not going to learn a whole new language — which is what cheese is — overnight,” Bilney says, downstairs in the old Victorian bakery that has been painstakingly refurbished for a new cheese era. “Customers come to us for a level of information; our cheeses have an explanation, we try to take away the panic, to help people choose something they wouldn’t normally ask for.”


© Eleonora Agostini
True to Bilney and Michelson’s research trips to the continent, there is a long white marble counter with champagne glasses ready. “Some people might say, ‘For God’s sake, this is a cheese shop, what the hell are you doing with this fancy bar?’” she tells me. “And I say — we both say — ‘Why not?’ ”

Natalie Whittle is executive editor, FT Life & Arts. For more, go to lafromagerie.co.uk.

See related article for How to Build a Perfect Cheeseboard with Patricia Michelson

Photographs: Eleonora Agostini

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