Blinded by the Light 15: Belonging

I wore my medal to work one day after receiving it. Wallace and Gromit approved.

Blinded by the Light 15: Belonging

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free from deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

When I left the cheese business in 2014 to become a craft beer professional, it was the very definition of a bad breakup. I had spent 30 years in loyal, passionate service to the cause of making artisan cheese a part of New Yorkers culinary lives. I was proud of my work, and I was beginning to receive exceptional recognition for it via lengthy coverage in the New York Times and New York magazine. Yet, that summer, during my job search, I had been told by one industry leader whose products I plugged in the Times that I should take a minimum wage job and work my way up and a Brooklyn based store that was looking for someone to manage their new Manhattan location told me during what I presumed to be a job interview that they didn’t consider me as I was “so not the type.”

Eight years later when the ironic vagaries of the gig economy plunked me down, back in the cheese business, I was a little bit in denial. There were certainly applicable metaphors about returning to an abusive partner that I had to dance around. Early on, I told people that I worked for a wine emporium; my job just happened to be running the cheese shop that they opened. That bit of denial was reinforced when an industry professional took a look at my first month’s inventory and told me I should visit Murray’s Cheese and see what a real cheese shop looked like.

Acceptance issues are a cornerstone of my psyche. My siblings were born 12, 10 and 10 years before I hit the scene, so I was always trying to catch up. In the cheese world, I was of three African Americans that I worked with, and by the time I reached Bedford Cheese Shop in 2004, I was a generation older than most of my coworkers too. This never particularly bothered me; I excel at being a free-floating electron, but it felt unnecessary; amongst a cohort that desperately sought outsider status, I was the real thing, not a hipster imitation. When I was in the craft beer world, there were formal and informal networks of people of color and older workers too. I remain a little surprised that those bonds didn’t enable me to advance in the field, but unconscious bias is everywhere.

Signs of change in the cheese world began to arrive in early 2023. Bedford, which was under new management and ownership, began a monthly series called Monger Mondays, a networking event for cheesemongers, and unlike the early days of Bedford, and the crowd was often diverse. It felt like the world of cheese was growing up.

Then another remarkable occurrence happened in the autumn. I was inducted in the Guilde Internationale des Fromagers, kind of a Hall of Fame. The induction ceremony came with dinner at Daniel, one of the city’s top restaurants, where in addition to remarkable food, extraordinary wine flowed for hours,

While my coworkers and customers were impressed, I wasn’t sure what to make of the award. Then a few weeks later, when I went to the next Monger Monday gathering and entered the room, everyone stopped, stood and applauded.

I had always felt that my 30 years of experience, race and age, made me a weird outlier in the cheese business. In that moment, and ever since, I don’t feel so weird, so outlying or so old. It’s kind of nice. After all, I have so many other battles to wage, fitting in doesn’t need to be on the agenda.

Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, NPR, Tidal, Bandcamp, Wine Enthusiast, Jazz Times, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Huffington Post, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com.

Blinded by the Light 14: Is This It?

Cooking was part of the solution, movies were another part; movies about cooking more than doubled the solution.

Blinded by the Light 14: Is This It?

One of the things that I do in the first few months of every year is make a specific effort to reach out to friends that I’ve lost touch with. The economic vicissitudes both of New York City in particular and of the 21^st Century in general have scattered my pals, some to far flung destinations like Poland, Germany or Mexico, others to near flung spots like Hudson Valley, North Carolina or Maryland. Usually at some point in a recent catch up, they’ll gush “it’s great that you’re doing so well!!”

This always gives me pause. I do like the juncture I’ve reached professionally and financially, but I think there are bigger goals than just paying the rent comfortably. Their response makes me wonder if our economic choices have dwindled to drowning in financial uncertainty or not drowning, i.e. being in the water but with your head just above the line.

I mean, really, is this it? No one ever promised me a beach house, but in this metaphorical context isn’t that at least a reasonable ambition.

It’s more than a rhetorical question because I’ve begun to wear down. Starting in late 2014, I began to work seven days a week: four in retail, running the craft beer section for a fancy grocer, then three wholly devoted to journalism. In early 2020, my schedule was cut to three days a week in retail. At first, I pursued journalism four full days a week, then I cut Saturdays to half a day. Then after moving uptown in 2021, the combination of lower rent and a relentlessly booming journalism inbox led me to start taking Saturdays off altogether.

Those were the good ol’ days.

When I took my present job, my retail obligations doubled. OTOH, I went from successfully living paycheck to paycheck to actually having a small bit of savings. And even though the journalism inbox—against all odds—continued to boom, I managed to get good work done. For instance, I did this piece, by waking up at 6 a.m. three straight days to write then heading to retail at 10 for a full, stressful day, and returning at 8 to continue writing. Of course, that kind of pace isn’t sustainable for a 33-year-old, much less a 63-year-old, and after a couple of years, I felt the strain. My prose for publication wasn’t as crisp, the sentences and paragraphs lacked their usual rhythmic edge, and the insights were shallow. I realized that I didn’t have to say yes to every writing assignment, so I began saying no. I even turned down a bio assignment on a piano player that I’ve been following closely for the last 18 months. I’m not fond of recognizing my limitations, but sometimes those limitations don’t give me a choice.

I spent most of the winter stewing over the situation. I was haunted by the voices of so many potential employers who doubted my work ethic. Suddenly a solution presented itself. My boss was upset at the payroll margins in January and demanded cutbacks. Well, I like to lead by example so I decided that I’d take a couple of Fridays off while I could (sales were gradually increasing already). During the first week, with an extra day off, I took the afternoon off and went to a movie. There’s something that feels like cheating when you go to a movie and come out to daylight (well dusk, but still). I felt refreshed to a degree that I hadn’t felt in many months. The feeling reminded me of my life when I was 33; I worked six and a half days a week, and I devoted the first half of the split day to leisure (this was pre e-mail, so it was easier to ignore work). I won’t have an extra day off for long, but it made me realize that making a movie and a trip to the gym a routine occurrence might result in a better work/life balance.

If it does, then I really will feel like I’m doing so well.

Blinded by the Light 12: Cheesy Economics

The fantastic French butter we sell is a mere $2 cheaper at Amazon. The good stuff is sometimes expensive.

Blinded by the Light 12: Cheese Economics

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free of deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

It was a midwinter Monday night, and the store was winding down when a cheerful young woman came in. She perused the cases and arrived at the register with a big round of an amazing French butter and a triple crème, both from the great French cheesemaker Rodolphe Le Meunier. I was mostly on automatic pilot as it was the last hour of my Thursday-Monday retail work week, but my defenses rose when she asked me the price. Sticker shock took hold and she huffily returned the butter to the case, heaved a sigh and bought the triple crème. Before leaving, she said, “I don’t know how you’re going to make it like this.” I smiled performatively and told her that we were doing just fine.

On my way home, I looked up the prices of what she bought. The butter can be found for about $3 less a unit in Boston and $2 less online. Some retailers were selling it for as much as $5 more than our price. Overall, what struck me was the scarcity of the butter. It wasn’t available at oh say Whole Foods. You need to go to a specialty shop like mine where we buy in small quantities, which drives up the price. The triple crème was ever scarcer, and every online retailer was more expensive than our price.

Yet our chagrined customer isn’t exactly wrong. Artisan cheese (and butter) is expensive. There’s no way around it. It takes many pounds of milk from specially fed dairy animals to produce a rather small amount of cheese. In addition, the production of that cheese is very labor intensive and since there are no artisan cheesemakers in Manhattan, most of that cheese has to travel, further increasing the costs. Lastly at the retail level, cheese markups are more aggressive than routine grocery markups. Unlike paper towels, most artisan cheese needs daily care and expert introduction.

I often hear the expression “don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good,” but what I fear is going on here is that the good is the enemy of the superb. When artisan cheese became prominent in the American market 30-40 years ago. Its primary attraction was that it tasted so much better than the industrial cheese that had dominated our diets. And indeed, Cabot Cheddar, St. Andre and Caved Aged Gruyere and the like were a marked improvement over Velveeta. But as cheesemakers continued to make better and better cheeses, it seemed like the market got stuck at St. Andre (the triple crème from that Monday night is like St. Andre but waaaaaay better).

About 15 years ago, an acquaintance in the music biz opened a venue that would feature fine wine and music. He had a cheese case too, both for cheese plates and in case anyone wanted to take some fromage home. A mutual friend invited me to look at it. It was full of midlevel cheeses. I thought a place offering high caliber wines would want comparable cheeses. He simply cited the vendor and declined my offer to upgrade his cheese case. Later that year, I had a similar experience at a restaurant hangout near me even after I showed the proprietor that his vendor was charging him more than they did their retail customers.

The catch is that these midlevel cheeses cost substantially less than the high-end ones that I sell at my store and advocate for. But a little ambition goes a long way. In 2011, I did the cheese program for a new outlet of one of the city’s top wine bars. I didn’t hold back on quality, and the owners loved it. 13 years later, several of the cheeses I chose are still on the list and the ones that have been replaced are just as good.

Part of my pay in 2011 was a $300 bar tab, which I drank up in a few weeks. Then a coupla months after the place opened, I brought a sommelier there on a date hoping to get a little bit of a discount. Instead, the bar manager told me that I had another tab to spend. The owners were astonished at how well the cheese program was doing. It illustrates that it’s always a good idea to advocate for the highest caliber food.

Blinded by the Light 11: Who Are the Cheesepeople?

Who are the constituents for this deliciousness?

Blinded by the Light Episode 11: Who Are the Cheese People?

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free of deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

It was a joyous occasion. Two dear friends, Scott and Kathy, whom I’d known since they were high school sweethearts trading dorm visits during each other’s collegiate spring breaks, were celebrating their 40^th wedding anniversary with drinks and snacks at café near their home.

I was settling in at a table with other pals from college when one of them, Steve, asked me, “who are the cheese people?” This was something I’d been thinking about a lot. I’d been back in the cheese business for a year by then, enough time to cycle through a variety of staffers and I was impressed by the changes. In the ‘80s and ‘90s, cheese people weren’t really cheesemongers; they were delicatessen counter people who had traded Prosciutto and salami for Emmenthaler and Brie. In the ‘00s, my coworkers were the new bohemians: gap year (or decade) kids, young adults figuring out what their long-term plans were, and a handful of chefs who tired of kitchens (one memorable dude was transitioning from cheffing to becoming a brewer and he brought homebrew to drink after some closing shifts). My colleagues now were substantially older; I thought of them as fellow refugees of advanced capitalism. People with a professional specialty that they were passionate about but no longer paid the rent, so they were eager to invest their passion into deliciousness.

I thought this was a good answer, but Steve cocked an eyebrow and a half smile. I knew immediately that I’d missed the point. Steve doesn’t drink, but he was immensely curious about my clientele, when I worked at a wine shop (2011-’13) and in craft beer (2014-’21). In the case of wine, my customers were much younger than the stereotype, and on the beer aisle, the clientele was older and more diverse than the image of a craft beer drinker. Steve had an MIT MBA and seemed to enjoy hearing of marketing inefficiencies and inaccuracies. I realized in short order who he meant by “the cheese people.” I thought quickly and said, “I don’t know.”

Steve cocked a skeptical eyebrow. He knew I’d been in cheese almost since the time that we were studying the core curriculum, not quite 40 years.

“No, seriously,” I told him. “It’s not an image thing; it’s hard to classify.” A few tracks in my mind continued to ponder the question for the rest of the evening, and long after I’d gotten home, I began to formulate an answer.

It’s kind of a paradox; artisanal cheese is a luxury product; simply put, there is no way to make great cheese on the cheap. It takes a lot of milk from specially fed animals to make a little artisan cheese. The scale of production drives up the cost. Then travel drives it up even more. Our best blue cheese at the moment is a seasonal delight from Oregon called Rogue River Blue and we sell eight-ounce pieces of it for $50. Yet we can’t keep it in the store, it sells so fast that it’s one of our bestsellers (a few weeks ago, a woman was skeptical and bought a half piece; a couple of hours later she returned, her eyes flashing in excitement to see if the other half was still available). Yet not everyone buying it is in the top tax bracket. In fact, some of them look like they make a lot less than I do. And maybe that’s part of the answer. The wine people and the craft beer people (a certain Supreme Court justice has made the inclusion of the word “craft” a necessity) have deftly overlapped into the fine dining crowd and marketers pursue them in the same manner, which enables some image building. Why hasn’t cheese done the same?

It’s complicated, and it owes a lot to scale. According to industry figures, wine sales in America in 2022 (numbers aren’t available for 2023 yet) were just over 60 billion dollars. Industry figures for 2022 craft beer sales are around 28 billion dollars. In the late 2010s, sales of artisan cheese in America were a little over four billion dollars, and it’s doubtful that the pandemic did much to bolster those numbers. Yeah, 60 vs. 4; I cite those numbers when well-intentioned people ask me if I get flown to Italy or France to try new cheese. I don’t even get on a bus to Vermont unless I buy a ticket.

Which doesn’t really bother me. I think it’s super cool that my colleagues at the wine shop that we’re affiliated with seem to be off to Europe once or twice a year. I just wish that the cheese people were viewed with enough interest by marketers to enable an image to take shape. People who are passionate about food and culinarily ambitious are a very cool crowd. It’s definitely one of the attractions of working in the business.

Blinded by the Light 10: An Old Dull Ache

The Pitchfork logo points up but most media is down.

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free of deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

Blinded by the Light Episode 10: An Old Dull Ache

Every time it happens, it hurts. Sometimes it’s like a gut punch, sometimes it’s more like an old injury reminding me that part of my body might be 99% healthy instead of 100. The problem is that it happens more and more these days.

The it in the previous paragraph is news about a media outlet viciously downsizing and leaving many of my colleagues out of work. In recent days, it’s happened at Pitchfork, Sports Illustrated and the Los Angeles Times. Each time I search out the social media posts to offer encouragement to writers I know who have just been laid off. And each time I read of such news, I’m reminded in a way that I don’t write anymore as a pursuit of a dream of a being a full time professional writer; that dream is dead. I write because I can publish some of my best stuff in high profile places, and the money I earn from it makes paying the rent much easier.

Each of the recent closures affects me indirectly though. The biggest gut punch was the news that Pitchfork was being folded into GQ and that most of the staff was being let go. I never wrote for the site, though it wasn’t for lack of trying, every few months I’d pitch a review and never got a response, but the writing at the site was an inspiration. I felt a kinship with many of the writers there; they took admirably deep dives into music. It was often about music I neither listened to nor cared much about; I read because the enthusiasm and passion in the prose made me want to listen to the music I love with that much more depth and verve. It hurt that such writing was deemed insignificant by the cultural gatekeepers at Conde Nast who evidently regard a thorough analysis of oh say Mitski of the same level as Drake’s favorite sneakers. The SI layoffs were a reminder that what I regarded as the biggest mistake of my career, not pursuing sportswriting, which I did from 2003 to 2015, more aggressively may not be such a big mistake after all. Many of the writers I admired most, notably Kevin Arnovitz, have left the field. The pain in the LA Times layoffs were more abstract. One of the highlights of my career was writing for the New York City edition of Newsday, which was a Times-Mirror endeavor. Even though I was a freelancer, I enjoyed the validation of feeling like I was part of the team. It’s a reminder that just as cheese might not fit into concierge economy newspapers don’t fit into the demands of 21^st Century capitalism. In other words, perhaps all roads to a cheese counter, and rather than torment myself for what I didn’t accomplish in journalism I should thank my lucky stars that I can articulate the difference between and Alpine cheese and a Basque sheep cheese and explain which one pairs best with a Cabernet Sauvignon and which is better with a Pinot Noir.

Often when I tell my cheese customers about my other professional life, they remark about the big difference between writing about music and selling cheese. I gently disagree. I tell the customer that the two endeavors are really quite similar. It’s about demystifying the often exotic pleasures of a familiar subject. In addition, it’s a bit of secular evangelical work too. Just as I’m eager to persuade people that their cultural lives are crucially uninformed if they haven’t heard the recent Mary Halvorson or Kris Davis recordings, I want people to believe that their culinary life is incomplete if they haven’t tasted Hoch Ybrig or Tommette Brulee.

Cheese and music both offer transformative possibilities if you let them. Both are about combating the numbing aspects of contemporary life, and those numbing effects are mounting every day. Thus, more and more I feel like I’m on a mission, even though it’s the not mission I dreamed of.

Blinded by the Light 09: Previously on Columbus Avenue Pt. 2

Blinded by the Light 09: Previously on Columbus Avenue Part 2

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free of deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

The store I was working at in 2012, which is less than a mile north of where I work now, was struggling, and I desperately needed the job, so I reached out to a New York Times food section feature writer, and to my enormous surprise, he reached back straight away. A week later he was in the café section of the shop patiently listening to me pitch a story on the shop. It was a valid story idea, but a very poor fit for the New York Times (I think I knew this is the back of my mind, but I was desperate, even if the store’s owner seemed nonchalant about our plight; she even argued with me that I wouldn’t need additional staffing on New Year’s Eve because it would be slow, and if it wasn’t, well “New Yorkers don’t mind waiting”).

The staff I was once so proud of had all left. I was pinning lots of hope on this meeting with Times writer, and it wasn’t going well. Rather than beat a dead horse, I decided to give him a tour of our cheese case. While offering him samplings of cheeses, he noticed that our signage, which compared the cheeses to cultural works: Stones albums, Scorsese movies, PJ Harvey songs etc. He asked about them, and I began to prattle on about how every cheese shop had a signage style; and as a music journalist (I’d resumed writing), I built my style around syn-aestheticization. I looked at him, and saw an exclamation point in a thought bubble over his head. I knew the look from when I had sold an editor on a story. That was a Friday afternoon. Monday morning, I was posing for a Times photographer in front of my cheese case.

The story ran in late January, and the impact was immense. Sales tripled. The cheese counter became an attraction of its own. Cheesemongers as far away as San Francisco grumbled in jealousy. But within a week or two things began to sour. The owner who was initially delighted approached me with her face in a Guernica like contortion and said, “I hope you don’t do anything like that again.” That explained why she’d refused to put a poster of the story in the window.

I shrugged off the remark; the store was finally looking like a success. Unfortunately, the success was taking a toll on my health. I was on my feet far too much for a middle-aged man with bad arches and no budget to get orthotics (we were offered a health plan with an absurdly high premium, so I was waiting for ACA to kick in. Suddenly, a cane became a regular part of my wardrobe and Alleve became a staple of my diet.

I struggled on, even working eight- and nine-hour shifts holding myself up on the counter since it was so painful to walk. Ultimately the Times bounce wore off, and our numbers stabilized at a nominally profitable level. Then one Saturday afternoon in early 2014, the Robs, Robin Raisfeld and Rob Patronite, the lead food writers for New York magazine showed up at the counter. 75 minutes of convivial dialogue punctuated by numerous tastes of our inventory ensued. About a month later, an eight-page section ran in the magazine, and we were listed as one of the best places in the city to buy cheese.

The ensuing bounce was smaller but noticeable. Again, the owner refused to put the story in the window, and she called me into a meeting. She told me that she was cutting my pay by 40% and that I had never been worth what she was paying me. I chose not to give her the satisfaction of storming out the store, and instead simply cut my schedule by 40%, and began looking for work.

Work was surprisingly hard to find. Managers of cheese shops had no interest in a cheese monger who had been featured in the Times and New York magazine in the past 18 months. When I brought up my struggles in a Facebook cheese group, I was scolded for mistaking cheese work as a professional job. “It’s just something to do until you go to grad school,” said one especially unsympathetic member. And as mentioned in a previous episode, one store refused to consider me for a job telling me “you’re so not the type.” I figured that if 30 years of experience plus extraordinary media notoriety wasn’t the type in cheese, then it was time to switch specialties. Craft beer sales were booming; they’d gone from 8.7 billion in 2011 to 14.3 billion in 2013. I highlighted my beer experience on my resume, and within weeks landed a consultancy for a small local chain of fancy grocers.

After a month of double duty, I gave notice on Columbus Avenue, and the owner seemed surprised. I had thought about it and realized that I’d done as much for my brand as could be done in that setting. One Sunday afternoon in October, I bought a beer there, poured it into a disposable coffee cup and walked out, vowing to never work on Columbus Avenue again. I was physically riding into the sunset, but psychologically, I was escaping a burning building. The store closed a few years later.

But never say never, right?

Blinded by the Light 08: Previously on Columbus Avenue

Blinded by the Light 08: Previously on Columbus Avenue…

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free of deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

One of my favorite movies is Chinatown for many reasons, Jack and Faye, the cinematography, the direction, certain scenes, thus the expression that closes the movie “forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown” is never far from my memory. I remembered it often as we were setting up the store. A few friends even asked, “it’s on Columbus Avenue, right.” They knew that the street had ghosts for me. Not good ghosts either, they were surprised that I’d return to the scene of the crime.

In 2011, a store on Columbus Avenue appeared to be my savoir, at least I treated it as such. I was pretty down financially, and I mean down relative to a pretty down decade. In 2011 when I interviewed for the job, I had only a smattering of writing income, and retail split into two jobs working three days a week. No, not each, total. The reality was that I was falling backwards into an abyss of financial ruin, and I didn’t know what to do about it.

Then came an email from a headhunter. He knew of me because of a mutual pal. His client was setting up a specialty food shop on Columbus Avenue; she needed a cheesemonger, was I interested? I was eager even before I heard that she was paying a professional wage. I was 51 at the time, and it seemed as if the workforce no longer wanted me. Since I all but worshipped at the altar of work—I’m the son of two workaholics and the kid brother of three others (my rebel streak is in how I dress, I’m proud to maintain the family work ethic)—this was an especially traumatic circumstance.

I interviewed with the headhunter in October, then the line went dead for a few weeks. Then suddenly the owner of the store wanted to interview me on a Saturday afternoon in late November. I enthusiastically met her at a café three doors down from the store. The Upper West Side is known for retailers like Fairway and Zabar’s that catalyzed the specialty food movement in the city many years ago. I laid out plans that would enable this little place to be competitive against the much bigger, and better-known competition. She talked about getting open before Christmas, which seemed optimistic. This was my third startup and usually it takes a few months longer than you anticipate to open. But I was eager (did I say that already?), I was already imagining my first orders. We walked over to the store.

The sight inside the store was my first warning sign. It was a mess. There were no cases, the floor was unfinished. The contractor’s voice in my head said late January at the earliest. But whatever, I got the job and went on payroll almost immediately. That’s another warning sign, there was a little too much money to burn here, but I was broke. Far be it from me to turn down real paychecks for showing up at a weekly staff meeting. Yet, these staff meetings were a warning sign too. I was the only one with any retail experience, and during the staff up phase, she tried to bring in someone to supervise me (it was someone I knew and he declined sensing the messiness ahead).

The owner had zero retail specialty food experience, but my worries there were initially allayed by the infrastructure committee that she’d assembled. Then my worries arose again when I met them. The consulting marketing director told me not only to give up journalism but to stop blogging as it might suggest a connection to the store, and the store had to remain a secret. This flustered me, but the paychecks were rolling in, so I went along to get along. Then the social media consultant told me that she couldn’t tweet more than once or twice a week because any more than that would overwhelm Twitter.

At that point, I began to worry about the potential of this place. But the build out had gone well. The physical plant was beautiful. I resolved that if I had to put the place on my back and drag it to profitability I would. For one, I had been waiting for an opportunity like this for years, for another, my staff consisted of a recent NYU Food Studies grad, a recent Barnard grad who wrote her thesis on the rise of food trucks in NYC, a former chef, and an up-and-coming cheesemonger from Murray’s, the city’s leading cheese shop. I was so proud of my crew that I imagined visiting other cheese shops and challenging their mongers to a battle. On Friends and Family Day, Max McCalman, founder of the great cheese haven Artisanal and author of three cornerstone books on cheese, came by to give us his endorsement. The rest of the store was dicey; for instance, the owner didn’t believe in filling the shelves, which led to some well-meaning questions of whether we were just opening or on the verge going out of business, but the cheese department was ready to rock.

I had designed an inventory that bested what the big stores nearby offered; the cheese was higher quality and featured exciting new imports and distinctive American fromage. In addition, I took over the beer program and turned that section into a showcase of leading imports and emerging local and regional craft brews. Yet we were in the back of the store and nothing on the front promised a great cheese section. People who found us loved us. Our first customers on opening morning bought a Winnimere and a large piece of the great aged gouda, L’Amuse. Another customer who had spent several minutes telling me to look at Zabar’s for instruction on how to run a cheese counter (nobody ever thinks an African American can know anything about cheese); then he tasted the L’Amuse and did the fastest 180-degree pivot in culinary history and began asking if he could bring Eli Zabar by to see the future of cheese.

This was great, but the overall problem was that we didn’t have enough customers, and ownership seemed to not care that the store was making a middling first impression on its neighbors. I noticed that a New York Times food section feature writer had followed me on Facebook. Then I noticed that he’d written a very intelligent article on cheese. So, I wrote him a note.

To be continued.

Blinded by the Light 07: Cheese Needs Better Intellectual Architecture

No matter how you pronounce it, it’s really good.

Blinded by the Light 07: Cheese Needs Better Intellectual Architecture

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free of deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

Several times a day, even hourly on weekends, my customers eagerly tell me about their new favorite cheese, something they call “compth.” I smile as tenderly as possible and tell them that it’s pronounced com-TAY, noting that the accent aigu equates to an “ay” sound (it’s truly pronounced con-tay, but, you know, baby steps). I try to soften the correction by telling them that it took me five semesters to complete my four semester French language requirement in college. And if I still have their rapt attention, I try to explain that Comte is an Alpine cheese, similar to Gruyere and several other cheeses that they might enjoy.

I aim to turn a minor mispronunciation into a teachable moment because cheese needs better intellectual architecture. Wine is basically color coded; red wines taste different than white ones, and then geography and grape varietal create other distinctive differences. In beer, lager versus ale is meaningful, then several stylistic differences determine flavor that most drinkers grasp (for instance the whole IPA boom of the late 2010s owed to a substyle, the Hazy IPA, that made the flavor of the hops appealingly accessible and amid the emergence of a wide variety of new hops). Cheese is hopeless in these Roman numerals, letters and cardinal numbers. Often, people look to divide cheese by animal of origin, which is useful, but nowhere near as definitive as separating Pinot Grigio from Malbec by color and region. There are fundamental differences between cheeses made from different animals of origin, but not so much that I can’t create a cheese plate full of variety in texture and flavor exclusively from cow’s milk, goat’s milk or sheep’s milk cheeses.

Geography isn’t much help either due to a rush to stereotype. Several times a week, we explain that Pleasant Ridge Reserve, the great Alpine style cheese from Wisconsin, is not a cheddar (people think a firm cheese from Wisconsin or Vermont must be a cheddar). I’m a little less sympathetic there since the tendency to stereotype cheesemongers has slowed my career progress considerably even if I know that the folks who think any firm cheese from Wisconsin is cheddar don’t mean any harm; they are just eager to categorize this new bit of deliciousness.

I think the lack of effective roman numerals, letters, et al, has led to a situation where people are better at articulating what they *don’t* like instead of what they do like (compth lovers notwithstanding). It forces us cheesemongers to roll up our sleeves because a lot of times people think they don’t like a particular category of cheese (oh say, “goat cheese” a category much larger than many people imagine) only because they had a poorly made type of that style. And it leads to situations where people arrive at the counter and announce that they don’t want anything smelly or blue. I calmly tell them that they have eliminated ten percent of the inventory, but when I ask what they do like, I frequently get blank stares in response and that’s a problem. Visiting a cheese counter shouldn’t remind people of the helpless feeling of being stuck on a test in school.

People develop an appreciation for something by discovering an item that they like and building on that affinity. For me with wine, it was Cotes du Rhone. Once I discovered that I liked that style of wine, I then investigated the wines of the Rhone Valley and discovered Vacqueras, Gigondas, and of course Chateauneuf du Pape and Hermitage. After that I found numerous other red wines that appealed to me, and so on. The challenge at the cheese counter is leading people down a parallel path if they are unable to properly identify what they like.

That’s why I’m not really scolding about pronunciation. I’ll leave that to the French; they are much better at it than I am. My obsession is to get people to understand that Comte and Pleasant Ridge Reserve are Alpine cheeses. If they grasp that, then I can introduce them to Challerhocker, Hoch Ybrig, Vacherin Fribourgeois and many others, and they’ll get it that they like that flavor profile, sort of how I found that I like the dark fruit and smokiness of Cotes du Rhone wine. Ditto getting people beyond the notion that cheddar flavor can be organized by state. I try and tell people that the more precisely they know the origin of a cheese, the better it will be. Knowing that Willi Lehner made the cheddar is much more important than that it came from Wisconsin, since Lehner makes many excellent cheeses.

There’s an extraordinary range of deliciousness in the cheese case, and my task is to make those goodies accessible, no matter how the clientele pronounce them.

Blinded by the Light 06: Modern Love

It seemed like a nice setting for a casual get together.

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free of deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

“What are you looking for?” asked the woman across the table from me. It was a Friday night, and I thought we were visiting a nice Union Square area wine bar for a casual get together. When she arrived in a tight white top, a black pleather knee length skirt and strappy high heels, I began to change my expectations. I knew her from the store where she was an occasional customer. But until she strode smiling into the bar, I hadn’t considered this a date. I was weary from a long day in retail (and a couple of hours of journalism before I left for the store), but motivated by the gorgeousness across the table, I was quickly locating extra reserves of energy. But this question threw me.

“A woman just like you,” felt like the right answer even if it was a tad performative and well, cheesy. However, the truth was that I wasn’t really looking for anyone. I was still clearing the debris in my psyche from years (two decades really) of regarding myself as a failure. I had an elite college education and substantial professional skills, but most of the last 20 years keeping a roof over my head had been a fervent struggle. I was searching for a concise way to phrase all of that when she grew impatient and began rattling off gay stereotypes and repeated her question.

My previous train of thought went off the rails and tumbled down a mountainside. When you’re 63 and still single, you get used to being misunderstood, but this was a doozy. I smiled and told her I was straight and hoped to explain that my glasses had all but fogged up upon the sight of her that evening, but before I could charm my way out of an awkward situation, she bellowed, “you’re straight?!” loud enough for our table neighbors to hear.

Her plan had been to meet me for wine and snacks then take me to all of her favorite gay bars to hook me up with the idea that I’d reciprocate. I ordered a bottle of Sancerre and another plate of oysters and crab cakes to nosh on; this was going to take some time to untangle.

The woman across the table is in her late 30s, and her biological clock has her in near panic phase about meeting Mr. Right. For instance, I went to the restroom and returned to find her pestering the bartender for advice on meeting guys in the area. That’ s not ridicule; I admired her intensity, and I wondered if I ever felt that passionately about being in a relationship and if not, why not. I spent the next few minutes explaining that I wasn’t really in the market (though I would have happily made an exception for my present company). I needed to get my self esteem back in order first. I thought this was prudent. She thought I was lying.

I wasn’t. If anyone was ever fated to be single at 63, it might be me. I spent my high school years in Dallas Texas living in a neighborhood where we were one of the few Black families. During those four years, I had two girlfriends, a white woman whose parents forbid us to date only two weeks into the relationship. It’s a shame, one of our first dates was to repertory cinema for the first of two nights of the Fassbinder classic The Marriage of Maria Braun. On the second night I bumped into her coming out of a screening as I was I going in to the next one. After staying up until the wee hours talking about the movie’s epic scope and wonderful cinematography, we both had to see it again before if left town. That relationship crashed but it was better than the one I had with a Black classmate, whose father forbade her to date me because he didn’t want her seeing an “Uncle Tom,” a designation I earned because of my lack of a pronounced “Black” accent. These days I think people would say I sound like the 44^th President. Back then, I was called Uncle Tom early and often; it fueled my desire to get out of town as quickly as possible.

Then I went to an all-male school in New York, and after college, failing to land a professional job, I have worked six and often seven days a week for 41 years to make ends meet. The economic pressures have forced me to numb so thoroughly not to be enveloped by the pain and agony of my struggles. It’s hard to be responsive when you’re numb. About six years ago, when I was working as the craft beer buyer at the fancy grocery store in the East Village, I was sampling our new Other Half IPA and a gorgeous middle-aged woman tried some, looked me in the eye, and said “oh, I LOVE Other Half.” Rather than ask her if she’d been to the brewery’s new facility in Domino Park (a great site for a beer date), I retreated, fearing that the stench of my failures would soon drive her away anyway (it had done so with several other women), and explained that we were now carrying several varieties of beer from Other Half and thanked her for taking a sample. Some people can date when they’re broke; I can’t, and broke has been a way of life for so long, that now that it isn’t, I need some time to parse the new reality. Thus, my relationship history is my much of the rest of my life, a complicated failure. At least so far it is I don’t think I’m done. I’ve had some glorious infatuations, and some lovely short-term affairs, and I use that for evidence in the belief that I can still be meaningful to someone.

My Friday night companion wasn’t buying the abbreviated version of the above, but she did grasp that after a 11-hour workday, I wasn’t interested in a night on the town, so we traded war stories about our dating failures, visited a friend of hers who had just opened a wine shop then Ubered to our respective homes.

Over coffee the following morning, I reconsidered her question. I think the right answer is that I’m looking for a woman who is tired of “potential.” I am too, but in a different way. I’m tired of potential job security, potential steady income, and potential solvency. It took 20 years of middle age searching, but I think I’m achieving real versions of those things. I wonder if that answer would have led to a better evening.

Blinded by the Light 05: Eviction Can be Fun

Blinded by the Light 05: Eviction Can Be Fun

Hi, I’m 63 years old and unlike many of my friends, I’m not thinking about retirement, not even close. Instead, I work two jobs, and for the first time in nearly two decades, I awaken every morning free of deep, haunting existential economic fears. I think this means that after 20 years of intense struggle and depression, I’ve returned to the bottom rungs of the Middle Class. This blog is an exercise in figuring out what that means.

Housing court in lower Manhattan played a big role in my life during the first two decades of the new century. In the mid-2000s, my appearance was seasonal; the guards and some of the lawyers got to know me, and we’d chat. At the time, a big chunk of my income came from writing analytics forward articles about the NBA for the short-lived broadsheet, New York Sun. Every summer, there would come a time, typically late July where my editor would point out that I’d just turned in 800 words on the fourth guard quandary facing some team that was nowhere near championship contention, and if that was news, then it might be best to give the basketball beat a rest until training camp opened in mid-September. My journalistic sensibilities understood even if the hiatus removed $500 a week from my paltry revenues. By mid-October, I’d be in housing court responding to an eviction notice, armed with a game plan to clear up my arrears since I’d resumed my basketball columns. This ritual was repeated two or three times, probably 2005-07 and was so casual, that I don’t think I ever particularly feared homelessness. Instead, I looked forward to chatting with the security people and lawyers about what could be done about the Knicks, a team going through an especially traumatic phase back then.

In late 2011, times were different. The New York Sun had folded. Initially I replaced the income by writing similar columns for an African American news and cultural affairs site called The Root. I was delighted. My passion for statistics had been fueled by my father who back in the ‘50s and ‘60s felt that the mainstream press wasn’t giving Black athletes their due. And my work was resonating! The Mexican fast casual place down the street from my apartment was a hangout for African American MBA candidates at NYU, and I was often treated to a margarita in exchange for a short discussion about my methodology and forecasts. Yet a new editor deemed my work too academic for the African-American audience and discontinued my column. In addition, my manager at Bedford Cheese Shop cut my schedule. So, I went into housing court penniless and reliant on a couple of shifts at a neighborhood wine shop for sustenance.

As if that wasn’t dire enough, the judge was a ballbuster. She was telling people with far better situations than mine to go home and start packing, the marshals would be there in a few weeks. I sat there in total panic, fearing that my colleagues who abandoned journalism after 9/11 and the dotcom crash were right. My thoughts focused on paring my stuff down, putting some of it in storage and leaving New York, when my landlord’s attorney arrived. He was delighted to learn that I was a writer. That was his ambition too before his parents insisted that he go to law school (I resisted the urge to tell him that his parents were probably right). He told me that I was entitled to a continuation and that by the time I returned to court perhaps things might improve. I did, and ten weeks later, things had taken a sharp upturn. I had been hired by one store to write their website copy, and another store hired me to build their cheese program and manage it. Both gigs paid professional wages (as cool and fashionable as food work sounds, much of it is minimum wage toil). I marched into court with a financial plan to satisfy the arrears, and marched out feeling as if the world was on my side again.

Six years later I was in a familiar hole. The new store had failed; writing income was still hard to come by, and due to an obscure clause in my lease, my landlord had bumped my rent to a market rate. What was once $795 a month in 1992 was now close to $2500. By this time, I’d lived in my East Village apartment for 26 years. I’d spent months turning out the lights and hiding when I heard footsteps in the hallway fearing it was a Process Server (this isn’t rational, but as any Republican strategist can tell you, fear often isn’t). I decided enough was enough. Preserving the apartment wasn’t worth the toll, and maybe I should adapt to the new culinary economy. In 2014, one of my presumed allies had told me to take a minimum wage job in the cheese biz, well, by 2018, I was working a minimum wage job in the craft beer biz and struggling to advance. I decided to give up the apartment. When I arrived in court and told my landlord’s lawyer(a different guy than before) that I would vacate, he vehemently objected. He eagerly encouraged me to fight the notice (I figured that he just wanted to bill my landlord for several court appearance fees). Even the judge encouraged me to fight the eviction notice. I wasn’t having it. As a high school student living in Dallas and spending hours listening to records in my bedroom, my dream had been to live in downtown Manhattan and write about music. I had done that. It was time to try new vistas. I took 75 days to vacate and moved to Brooklyn.

It turns out that my landlord’s lawyer and the judge may have known something. Less than a month after I moved to Brooklyn, the state legislature outlawed the clause that my landlord used to jack my rent. A few former neighbors came to see me at the store to see if I was going to sue to get my apartment back. I didn’t consider it. I wanted to move on. I liked Brooklyn.

In Brooklyn, I didn’t feel out of place. The church that used to be across the street from my East Village apartment was razed and turned into luxury condos. On the beer aisle of the grocery store one autumn afternoon, I met one of my new neighbors. He was enthused about his new place, a studio that was only 1.2 million. Said it was such a great deal! That was a potent reminder that the East Village of my dreams had entered the same dustbin of New York City history as SoHo as an artist’s colony, DUMBO as bastion of scrappy bohemianism and hipster Williamsburg. It was time to adapt and move on. I was now paying just over $1000, and though that was sometimes a challenge, it seemed feasible by comparison.

My place in Brooklyn didn’t work out, though. When my predecessor, a roommate “with benefits” returned to New York City, I was on the street looking again. A New School Professor who occasionally assigned episodes of a previous blog to her Urban Memoir students connected me to a friend who lived uptown in a spacious three-bedroom place and was looking to fill one of them. Her uptown colleague was a PhD candidate at Columbia and she and I had obviously been on opposite sides of the same room before as we had dozens of social media commons. Five minutes into the interview, she asked if I wanted to be on the lease. I moved in a few weeks later; my rent was less than it was in 1992. I rarely feel like a winner, but somehow, I won the New York City rent championship.