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By Beth Saulnier
Photographs by John Abbott

It was 1990, around Christmastime. Rob Kaufelt '69 was waiting his turn at Murray's Cheese, a little Greenwich Village shop as quirky as the neighborhood that had sustained it since 1940.When he got to the counter--it took a while, because glacially long waits were part of the Murray's ethos--he found out the place was about to close for good; Luigi, its second owner, had lost his lease and was going home to Italy. Kaufelt decided to buy it, partly because he wanted the store to survive. But he sums up his major motivation in one word: "Unemployment."

Kaufelt grew up in a family of food purveyors.His grandparents had owned a butcher shop in Perth Amboy, New Jersey; his father was a co-owner of the Foodtown supermarket chain in the central part of the state. Kaufelt himself had had a celebrated run with the company, pioneering the concept of supermarket as colorful, full-service food emporium, but a solo foray into gourmet shops hadn't gone as well. By the time he walked into Murray's that fateful day, he'd been out of work for two years.

A decade and a half later, Kaufelt has become the ultimate cheesehead--not one of those foam-hat-wearing football fans, but a connoisseur of all things aged and rindy, bloomy and semi-firm. Looking for a job, Kaufelt found a calling. "What I love about cheese is so many things," he says, sipping espresso from a paper cup in the classroom of his newly renovated store on Bleecker Street, just across from the shop he ran for fifteen years. "I like peasant foods generally, and when I went to Cornell, a part of that time was a ‘back to the land' thing. It was the Whole Earth Catalog and down jackets."Also, Kaufelt notes with a grin, he has the physical gifts to appreciate his product. "I think one of the peculiarities of my particular biology is a very acute sense of smell," he says. "I realized quite late in life that I tend to smell things more than most people--in some ways, perhaps, like a dog."

If Kaufelt is lucky in inheriting a top-notch proboscis, he was equally fortunate in his sense of timing. He got into the business just as America's artisanal cheese-making scene was starting to ripen, and before the cheese course had re-emerged as a hallmark of fine dining, at least in the nation's foodie capitals. "It's a new trend," says Gina Mignon '02, events and education planner for Manhattan's Artisanal Cheese Center, one of Murray's few competitors in the city. "I notice that when I go to restaurants, my friends are even ordering cheese plates as opposed to dessert. It seems like it's the hot thing to do in New York."

American cheese has come a long way since, well . . . American cheese. According to the California Milk Advisory Board, Americans are eating more cheese than ever. In 2003, we consumed 8.8 billion pounds of the stuff-- that's 30.6 pounds per person, four pounds more than in 1994 and a whopping 19.5 pounds more than in 1970. It's a $40 billion-a-year industry, with 440 producers nationwide, 350 of them small-scale.

Hotel school lecturer Barbara Lang says Kaufelt has tapped into a trend that began shortly after World War II. "It really started," she says, "when soldiers came back after being exposed to the specialty foods of Europe." The earthy, intense cheeses they had tasted were in vivid contrast to the ones that had traditionally been made in this country--the Swisses, cheddars, and edams that German and Danish immigrants brought to the Midwest, which eventually spawned those bright orange bricks in your supermarket. "You had this dairy industry that became a manufacturing industry, so they started to make huge quantities, and they made them in ways that became a lot more mechanical because of production needs," Lang says. "In America, the way you judged cheese seemed to be on sanitation or purity--a cheese got high marks because it had no flaws. But in fact when you look at artisanal cheeses, those flaws for one person could be assets to another."

Lang should know: she's the former president of the American Cheese Society, a 1,000-member organization started in 1982. The society's founding followed the California Cuisine craze of the 1970s, when chef Wolfgang Puck put goat cheese and caramelized onions on pizza, and chèvre slowly began to enter the American palate. As more people started small cheese-making operations, groups like the American Cheese Society and the New York State Farmstead and Artisan Cheese Makers Guild formed to support them. Now dozens of fine American cheeses sit side by side in Murray's case with their European counterparts. "You can compare the cheese industry to the wine industry," Lang says. "They both require science and art, and you also need a person who really knows how to do it, not just the raw material."

One of the country's most honored artisanal producers is the Old Chatham Sheepherding Company, founded in 1997 by Tom Clark '63, MBA '64, and his wife, Nancy Williams Clark '63, MS '64. Their sheep's milk cheeses, which Murray's sells, include a Hudson Valley Camembert that was named Best Cheese in America at the 2001 U.S. Championship Cheese Contest in Wisconsin, and a feta that took first place at the 2002 American Cheese Society competition. Organic farmers, the Clarks have a herd of 1,200 sheep and produce some 200,000 pounds of cheese a year. "More people are starting to eat good cheese," Tom Clark says. "We have a hard time keeping up with the demand." Clark, a Cornell trustee, credits shops like Murray's and Artisanal, as well as the upscale chain Whole Foods, with broadening the average American's cheese vocabulary. "In the last five years," he says, "the public has become much more aware of the fact that there are a great many artisanal cheeses available in--and made in--the United States."

Because Old Chatham makes relatively young cheeses, it needs fresh milk year-round--but sheep traditionally lamb only in the spring.With the help of animal husbandry experts at Cornell, the Clarks have developed techniques to make them lamb in the fall as well; they've also gotten advice from experts in the University's food science department, and from geneticists who've helped them improve milk production.

In addition to aiding producers with the science of cheese, Cornell researchers are helping them with marketing as well: in the applied economics and management department, research associate Angela Gloy is working on a yearlong, USDA-funded project on potential distribution areas for specialty cheeses from New York State and elsewhere. "Farmers are very good at producing milk," Gloy says, "but they might be less inclined to look down the supply chain and ask, ‘What are some of the distribution and marketing concerns once I have a finished product?' "

The story of cheese probably started with a fortunate accident. "As the myth goes," Rob Kaufelt says, "if somebody used the stomach of an animal as a canteen or a flask, and it had milk in it--well, the rennet would cause it to curdle. And with a little heat and a little rest, you might open it up and have cheese."

To walk into Kaufelt's store, located on a stretch of Bleecker Street that has become something of a mecca for specialty food purveyors, is to experience the opposite of that famous Monty Python sketch--the one where John Cleese goes into a shop in search of a "cheesy comestible," only to have proprietor Michael Palin tell him he's fresh out of every variety.

Cleese: "It's not much of a cheese shop, is it?"
Palin: "Finest in the district, sir."
Cleese: "Explain the logic underlying that conclusion, please."
Palin: "Well, it's so clean, sir."
Cleese: "It's certainly uncontaminated by cheese."

At Murray's, the cheese confronts you before you even walk in the door: there's a window cut into the sidewalk outside giving a view down into one of the aging caves. Inside, cheese overflows onto tables and countertops, fills shelves in two glasswalled rooms on the first floor, and is crammed into the custom-designed caves in the basement. Behind the counter, salespeople in smart red coats and caps wait on customers, advising them on the store's more than 250 varieties-- as well as prepared foods, charcuterie, and myriad accompaniments, from cornichons to quince paste.

In November, Kaufelt brought a sampling of his wares to the Cornell Club–New York for a tasting: fresh buffalo milk mozzarella; La Serena, a creamy Spanish offering made from raw sheep's milk; Humboldt Fog, a chèvre with a layer of ash in the middle; taleggio, a soft, piquant cheese made from unpressed curds of cow's milk; piave, with a nutty flavor often compared to Parmigiano Reggiano; and Roquefort Vieux Berger, which Kau-felt described as "arguably the world's greatest blue." His audience went home veritably engorged--and that was just a small sample of Kaufelt's cheese case. As Cynthia Zarin put it in her 2004 New Yorker profile of Kaufelt: "In the past few years, the cheese landscape in New York--what kind of cheese you can buy, who makes it, who's eating it, and where--has changed dramatically; it's like the moment when black-and-white TV turned into fullspectrum color, and in that world Kaufelt is key."

When Kaufelt first bought the store, he spent a fair amount of time just watching and listening. Luigi, the previous owner, stayed on for a while, and many customers had no idea it had changed hands. "I was reluctant to change anything, because I was afraid we would lose what it had," he says. "I just stood behind the counter and kind of kept my mouth shut." The new store--the third location in the shop's nearly sixty-five-year history-- opened in November, doubling its retail space to all of 1,200 square feet. (The old Murray's wasn't just legendarily slow, it was also legendarily tiny.) In addition to the retail trade, the shop supplies a who's who of fancy Manhattan restaurants, including Alain Ducasse, Chanterelle, and Jean Georges.

In the expanded location,Murray's has started offering more take-out foods like panini, as well as classes in a program called the Cheese Course. (If that also sounds like something from Monty Python, consider that the evening classes that Mignon oversees at Artisanal, on such subjects as wine pairings and seasonal accompaniments to cheese, have been consistently selling out--some five dozen people paying $75 each.) Murray's also does a brisk mail-order business, with a website and a cheese-ofthe- month club. The customers who take a number at the counter come from all over the New York metro area and beyond; many have been shopping there for decades. Says Kaufelt: "We still get people who knew Murray."

At fifty-seven, Kaufelt has been married and divorced twice. He lives in the Village, plays the acoustic guitar, enjoys solitary sports like cycling and swimming. Zarin described him as "a wryly handsome, jumpy man."He does seem to convulse with energy, and he can work himself into a lather: attendees at the Cornell Club tasting got, among many pearls of cheese wisdom, an earful about the manifold evils of the Wal-Mart meat department. He spends a third of his work time on the road, seeking out new cheeses throughout France, Italy, Spain, England, Ireland, Switzerland, and the U.S. "It's generally in small villages, small producers--peasant history," he says. "Those places have the oldfashioned elements that are the antithesis of modern life. I have a pretty good understanding of modern life--I live right in the middle of Manhattan--but I'm drawn to the old-fashioned ways."

In the store, there's a photograph of his grandparents outside their butcher shop, Kaufelt's Fancy Groceries. The continued health of such small, independent businesses is Kaufelt's other abiding passion. "The fact that there are actually service people who know your name and what you like to buy, your favorite cheese or whatever it is, might be considered a good thing," he says. "I think the loss of diversity is probably not a good thing, whether it's in ecology or in shops. There's not so much difference between being a small cheesemaker up in the Savoy or in Wisconsin, and preserving the old Murray's in the old neighborhood. To me it's all the same thing."

Cheese 101

In November, Rob Kaufelt gave a lecture and tasting at the Cornell Club–New York. Several dozen attendees sampled six offerings selected from the hundreds available at Murray’s Cheese and got a primer on all things cheesy. Some basics:

Contributing editor BETH SAULNIER lives in Manhattan. She wrote about bread in the July/August 2004 issue.

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