Welcome back to If You Can Make It Here, a newsletter about New York and new beginnings.
And hello from my friend’s cheese popup, at the rooftop of Cherry On Top, a wine bar about fifteen minutes walk from my home. Fifteen minutes walk from home has become a talismanic concept for me, because it means a thirty minute round trip, and while my L4/5 disc continues to revel in its Herniation Era with no sign of complete recovery, I know this much: walking helps. When my friends stayed with me for a week, we walked 20,000 steps every day. The more I walked, the better it got. Hydration helps. Inflammation hurts; it’s all mechanics.
Wait, you say. Inflammation, as famously caused by wine? And dairy? Yes, but I’m here on a social mission. I am an early groupie of Tommy Cheese.
New York, Gotham, Metropolis, the Big Apple, the Five Boroughs: this is a city of layered identities. Perhaps people come here to put a new one on, or take off an old one that doesn’t serve them any more. (Who, me? Never.) And so last summer, after my morning gym slots and weight requirements synced up with a guy wearing a different Democratic representative’s campaign t-shirt every time, he issued an invitation. “My name’s Tom. I’m running a cheese popup at Sundown Bar tonight, you should drop by. I’ll hook you up.”
To be hooked up with fine cheeses of the world; I am, as they say, here for that. And so I went along. The sun was indeed going down when I reached Sundown, and Tom sat in front of the bar, his stall in the long shadows. He jumped up when I arrived — I think he may have been surprised I actually came. I was there for me, for something interesting to do, but I was also kind of there for him. Turned out it was only his third popup event, and it showed: the cheeses sweated under the heat, on a chopping board he’d brought from home. A jar of honey, paper plates; a home-printed QR code, linked to his own Venmo account. All on a trestle table he’d borrowed from the bar, gently listing.
The night was hot and business was slow; people had not yet learned to expect an absolutely fire Brie with their Old Fashioneds. So I was treated to a little of every cheese on the board, plus apricots, plus patter. Remember that I had only met this man in a single context, regarded by many as one of the most awkward contexts possible: a gym class. Now, even with nobody else there, I saw him in flow, slicing and chatting: he had in fact trained as a monger, years ago in a cheese shop, but now he worked in software sales. Here the trained sales patter mixed with the thing he actually wanted to sell, in dangerously potent combination: this goat is mad stinky, it’ll blow your head off, bro. Look at the crazy veining on this Blue, you ever seen anything like that? I admitted that I had not, and I needed to try it. Maybe it comes from being a salesman-for-hire in my working life, but I love being sold to by people who actually care about what they’re selling. I want to buy, as an act of love to them. To validate that their mission has meaning.
And it was a mission. At closing time, a fair bit of cheese remained, so we packed in all into his sports bag and took it to Gottscheer Hall, a German beer hall in north Ridgewood which deserves its own post. There we sat at one end of the bar, getting to know each other a bit better, as Tom carved off slices and handed them to regulars, and the husband and wife who owned the place.
It was those patrons who eventually gifted Tom his trade-name, his Usul. And so when I caught up with him at the roof of Cherry of Top, Tom was Tommy Cheese. There’s something Welsh about it, and something gangsterish. Now, I look around this up-and-coming Bushwick spot, everyone enjoying their tasteful marbled chopping boards of dairy and carefully paid white wines, lounging in shades in the Spring breeze, and I think of a trestle table outside Sundown. I think of Tommy. He’s my cheese guy. He’ll hook me up.
Last course
☞ @tommycheesenyc does not - yet! - offer international deliveries. In a way, his business works in the other direction, bringing the best of the world to New York. But by Christmas, who knows? Maybe I’ll be hooking you up, in some kind of gift guide.
☞ It occurs to me that you could tell this whole thing from Tom’s point of view, too. It’s now been almost a year he’s been doing this, and as we talked on the roof he told me of all the adventures he’s had. There’s a whole world/subculture/hierarchy of cheeses and fine foods, there’s competitions and contacts and new players coming through. He’s got a connection with C.Hesse Cheese, a distributor who thanks to a CNBC segment a couple of weeks ago is seeing her ascend to the throne as the Cheese Queen of Bushwick. It’s all very exciting. Probably a good mystery novel in it.
☞ Newsletter-wise. I wonder what stuff you prefer - past or present? Now that we’re in May, all sorts of “one year anniversary” type stuff is coming up. Like, it’ll be a year I’ve been in Ridgewood... do you want a post about that? In a funny sort of way, I guess this one was.
Okay, cheese break over. Issue #11: Monday 20th of May. Maaaybe the morning after: something’s happening that night that could make the front page.
Until then: eat something mad fire.
James
Is it too greedy to ask for past AND present? Love it when a newsletter loops between the two, as this one does.
You always make me feel like I'm there in New York, rather than here hanging out with the babies in Visalia. We miss you, my friend.