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Cheese Whiz
January 5, 2007
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Rich was in the process of working on a business plan to open a cheese shop in New Orleans when his father called him in London and said there was a hurricane headed toward the city.
The Times-Picayune Lagniappe
Cheese Whiz
Friday, January 05, 2007
By Brett Anderson
Restaurant writer
Asking Rich Sutton to choose his favorite cheese is, by his measure, “Like asking a squirrel to choose his favorite nut. I taste so many.”
That said, there are infinite varieties that Sutton admires greatly. Near the top of the list is a Comte he cradled under his arm as he took a plane to slice off a thin sample.
“This one comes from a place in France called Fort Saint Antoine,” he said, handing over a taste of the firm, cow’s milk cheese. “I wish I had some pictures.”
If he did, he said he’d hang them on the wall of the St. James Cheese Company, the shop he opened with his wife Danielle just before Thanksgiving. It was a visit to tour Saint Antoine’s vast aging facility — “50,000 wheels of this cheese, it’s just amazing” — that sparked Sutton’s affection for Comte, and the store offers a boiled down approximation of the sensations that grabbed his lapel: the funky, almost corporeal aroma of cheese emanating from a display that contains too many varieties for Sutton to count.
It’s a good thing, too, because Sutton likes to talk about cheese, and when he does, he’s liable to grab another, and then another, often to make a point about the one that came before.
“It has a certain style about it. It’s not trying to be too much,” he said of the Comte, although we’d moved on to trying, as points of comparison, a hard cheddar with a grassy finish and then a Cantal, which Sutton described as “more rustic” than the Comte, with “a very honest nature about it.”
“A lot of people say it’s like a French cheddar,” offered Danielle, who called the Cantal a “behind- the-plow sort of cheese.”
Rich, 35, and Danielle, 33, sat at adjacent sides of a table that by conversation’s end held 15 different cheeses, a dish of walnuts drizzled with Tupelo honey, a basket containing slices of baguette from La Boulangerie and an empty bottle of 2004 Heartland cabernet sauvignon purchased from the Wine Seller next door on Prytania Street. Pare back the cheese by 10 or so varieties and it was precisely the sort of evening the Suttons hope their customers will make a habit of staging at St. James.
“What we are sitting here doing, eating cheese and talking about it, is something anyone can do when they walk in here,” Rich said.
The selection is enticing. Boards behind the counter list daily salad and sandwich offerings, which on a recent visit included one on grilled ciabatta filled with chevre, baby greens and pumpkin- sage pesto. Pates made by Peter Vazquez and ham-like smoked pork shoulder from Cochon are among the offerings of salumi and charcuterie.
But cheese is, of course, St. James’ raison d’etre. It’s what compelled Rich Sutton to ditch his banking career to take a job managing Paxton & Whitfield, a two-century-old cheese shop in London. The experience confirmed what the Delaware native suspected after graduating from Tulane University: He wants to work around food. It’s a passion that was nurtured during his years in New Orleans, the city where he met Danielle and where the couple ultimately planned to settle after marrying.
Rich was in the process of working on a business plan to open a cheese shop in New Orleans when his father called him in London and said there was a hurricane headed toward the city.
The couple decided to move forward with their plans regardless, and Rich says he feels “guilty” about their good fortune.
“We came to New Orleans in February, and we saw it almost as a blank slate,” he said. “I was sort of amazed with how much it wasn’t destroyed, how much life there appeared to be. We sort of see it from the other side. People are struggling to find a way back and we’re like, ‘We’re just gonna come.’ ”
They landed softly in a city with an abundance of restaurants but relatively few specialty food shops. In time, the Suttons hope to feature a deeper selection of regional cheeses, perhaps even cheese classes. The educational aspects of the job already come naturally to Rich, who’s begun selling to local restaurants as well.
Before closing up the shop last week, he grabbed a wheel of Pleasant Ridge Reserve, a farmstead cheese made in Wisconsin from non-pasteurized milk. Sutton thought the Pleasant Ridge, a hard cheese modeled after what’s found in the mountainous regions of France, helped illustrate a point he was trying to make about a couple of Gouda he served before it. “It’s got some of that sweet, caramel flavor to it,” Sutton said. He paused for a moment to concentrate on another bite. He concluded, after reopening his eyes, “It gives you something else to try.”
… … .
Restaurant writer Brett Anderson can be reached at (504) 826-3353 or
banderson@timespicayune.com.
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