|
Article Excerpt
Before I met Rob Kaufelt, the owner of Murray's Cheese Shop, in Greenwich Village, what I knew about cheese could be wrapped in a chestnut leaf. When people came to dinner, I bought Brie to have with drinks. At Christmas, my aunt, an Anglophile, supplied Stilton. I made grilled-cheese-and-apple sandwiches with supermarket cheddar, and wrapped the leftover cheese in plastic. (For cheese, this is roughly the equivalent of putting a plastic bag over your head. Use waxed paper.) Years ago, I'd had a glimpse of a different world, where cheese was treated with the easy reverence that might otherwise be reserved for a home-town starlet. It was in Sperlonga, a seaside town south of Rome. On our first two mornings, we bought buffalo mozzarella at a tiny latteria. The animals were milked at dawn; the cheese was made fresh every morning, in a formidably clean kitchen behind the shop. It was sublime nursery food, tasting of grass and clouds. We ate it on the spot. The third morning, we went for a swim. When we came for our cheese, the girl behind the counter shrugged. The cheese was no good now. It was done. Finished. When I mentioned this episode to Rob Kaufelt one morning, drinking coffee at the Grey Dog, on Carmine Street, he said, "Fanatics. There are people who think there's only ten minutes in the life of a Camembert when it's a point, when you should eat it. Anything else is junk." At fifty-six, Kaufelt is a wryly handsome, jumpy man. He grinned and added, "But they're right."
Murray's Cheese Shop is at the corner of Cornelia and Bleecker Streets. (There is also an outpost in the food market in Grand Central.) 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 full-spectrum color, and in that world Kaufelt is key. Steve Jenkins, who is the cheese expert at Fairway, the food mecca on the Upper West Side, says, "Rob's a hipster. He's magnificent. The incredible thing is that he found some deep peasant virtue in what we do. Murray's is a vehicle for Rob, and it's driven by him. He was tapped on the shoulder by a fairy who told him cheese was magic."
Four years ago, Murray's had only ten or fifteen restaurant clients, and only a handful served a separate cheese course: Le Bernardin, Jean Georges, Lutece. Murray's now supplies cheese to seventy-five restaurants in the city; the wholesale division accounts for half of Kaufelt's business. If you go out to supper and eat cheese at the likes of Gotham Bar and Grill, Town, or Daniel, it's probably from Murray's. Even so, the Grey Dog is Kaufelt's breakfast and lunch joint. It's also where he holds meetings with his staff. At Murray's, there's nowhere to sit down--it measures just nine hundred square feet. The crammed, narrow shop is redolent, heady, a miniature city of cheese. At any one time, three hundred cheeses--squat, tall, pyramid-shaped, cylindrical--pack a sixteen-foot display case on the left side of the shop. Five staff people, wielding knives, work behind it, bumping into one another. On the right wall, bakers' shelves hold bottles of olive oil and vinegar, jars of jams and chutneys, and boxes of artisanal pasta and crackers. Murray's sells, on average, between five and six thousand pounds of cheese a week, primarily cheeses imported from France, Spain, Italy, and the British Isles, as well as a growing number of American farmstead cheeses. At Christmas, the amounts triple. Kaufelt has found some of these cheeses himself, in Welsh villages, Alpine hamlets, and on farms in Vermont; many are unavailable anywhere else in New York. In two hours one spring afternoon, I counted eighty-five people--locals, tourists, cheese lovers--who came in to browse, take deep whiffs, and carry away shopping bags marked with the red-and-yellow legend "This Is Murray's Cheese." The store's basement office is reached by an almost perpendicular flight of steps: the most benign adjective that the twenty-five people Kaufelt now employs use to describe it is "submarinelike." But more space is forthcoming: in September, for the second time since Murray's opened, in 1940, the store is moving.
At the Grey Dog, Kaufelt was on the phone with the architect for the new store. In conversation, he repeats crucial thoughts three times; it's a verbal tic that he shares with his father, Stanley Kaufelt, the New Jersey supermarket mogul, who can say in one sentence--in this case, about his reaction when Rob bought Murray's Cheese, in 1991--"I was amazed, I was astonished, I was flabbergasted."
"Look," Kaufelt said into his cell phone. "We need to think about the walls. We need to think about the floor. We need to think about the storefront. Do you have any cool lights? No, not cool-looking. Cool temperature. Yeah, special bulbs. That make cheese look cheesier?"
The move is just across Bleecker Street, twenty-five steps if you bear a little to the south-southeast. The shop will go from very small to somewhat bigger: twenty-seven hundred square feet, including upstairs offices and a conference room. There will also be a climate-controlled storage space in the basement. Kaufelt is buying the retail...
|
