Guarneri - A Year in Cheese

We would go to the market with our mother and taste the produce straight from the farmers. And for our goter (thats an after-school snack), we were never allowed sweets or fizzy drinks like the other kids we had cheese, butter and homemade jam. We both grew up with exceptional food, but we took very different paths to becoming owners of a cheese shop. Alex After I left university all I wanted to do was travel the world. So I took a three-month position working as a cashier at Androuet fromagerie in Paris to raise money for my travels. I ended up falling in love with cheese: the trip would have to wait.

I trained as a fromager and worked in all the Androuet branches over a few years. Eventually (after some eye-opening travel), the call of English cheese became too strong to resist and I came to London to work for historic cheese merchant Paxton & Whitfield as an affineur (someone who ages and sells cheese). Lo At school, I would come home to cook my own lunch because cafeteria food was so bland compared to what Id grown up eating. I knew I wanted to work with food from then, so when I was offered an apprenticeship at the world-class Le Cinq restaurant at the Four Seasons George V in Paris, I jumped at the opportunity. After three years, Id become a skilled cook, but Id also spent time working front-of-house, learning about gold-standard service in a multi-Michelin star restaurant and five-star hotel. It was the perfect experience for setting up our own restaurant.

Our upbringing and experiences have made us passionate about cheese, passionate about seasonality and passionate about getting other people to feel like we do.

These places are still our most valued customers. Were the opposite of a traditional, perhaps stuffy cheese shop. Theres no counter, no barrier between the cheese seller and the customer its open service, and thats really important to us. We want everybody to understand what seasonal cheese is educating people is the most important part of our job. The original Androuet was founded in 1909 on the Rue DAmsterdam in Paris by Henri Androuet. He was the first man to travel across France to bring regional cheeses back to Paris and introduce the flavours of the mountains and the countryside to the city.