I'm often asked how I got into cheese. The short answer is that I needed a job and NY Times wasn't hiring. The long winded answer is what the Counterintelligence series is all about. The second installment follows.

 

 

Proud to the point of arrogance,
and opulent to the point of pretension, Bloomingdale’s and the ‘80s were made
for one another. When I arrived in 1984, people at the store were still beaming
with pride from the Queen’s visit in the late ‘70s when traffic on Lexington
Avenue was reversed so that her highness could
exit her limousine from the right side and walk directly into the store.The
store’s garish theatricality in merchandising felt unique and enjoyably over
the top.It was the perfect setting for
my introduction to the food world.

 

 

Blooomingdale’s Fresh Food section
was begun in the early ‘80s after Macy’s food segment, The Cellar, became a big
hit, and after Joel Dean and Giorgio DeLuca attracted shoppers in droves to the
<place>Soho</place> boutique that bore their name. For their executive
staff, Bloomies raided Balducci’s (“they may as well have stood on the corner
of Ninth Street and Sixth Avenue with a bullhorn telling every middle
manager not named Balducci or Doria to come with them,” said a friend of mine
who worked at the renowned <place>Greenwich Village</place> retailer in
the late ‘70s).But Bloomingdales wasn’t
out to copy what other great specialty food markets were doing; they were going
to do it the B way.

 

Everywhere you turned there was
someone handing out samples of great food.And in contrast to the model wannabes who try to spritz you with perfume
or cologne as you walk through the store, many of the barkers in the food area
were experts in their field.

 

One afternoon, there was a guy
hawking a coffee roasted in <country-region><place>Switzerland</place></country-region>.I told him with some pride that I’d just
bought some Irish Cream coffee beans from Porto Rico, a respected coffee
roaster in <place>Greenwich Village</place>.

 

“That’s not coffee” he
scoffed.“Try this!” he said handing me
a sample cup of his brew, Café La Semeuse.

 

He was right; I’d never tasted such
deep rich java.He went on to explain
the roasting method, the style of bean used, and the difference borne of
roasting coffee beans at high altitudes.His method—don’t hesitate to be a contrarian then provide proof to back
up your claims--became my style.

 

My coworkers and I weren’t
especially interested in becoming cheese experts out of a love of cheese but we
needed to know enough to fend off the sense of privilege and presumption of
knowledge felt by many of our clientele.We knew enough to sound authoritative even if there was much that we
didn’t know.

In the world according to the
Bloomingdale’s counterpeople, cheeses were classified by strength, strong, mild
or medium, not by region, animal of origin or by method of production. We knew
that chevre went with white wine, cheddar and hard Italian cheeses went with
red.Oh yeah, that’s how we knew wines,
color code.If someone asked about
matching a particular type, oh say, Riesling, (which would have been an
excellent match for the some of the soft aromatic cheeses in stock which back
then meant things like Tavallion Savoyard or Saint Albray), we would bandy the
name amongst ourselves until someone would feign knowledge and made a
recommendation.

“The city” was a lot smaller then
and New Yorkers feared one another a lot more.A cab ride above 96th Street<street /> usually required a negotiation.Directions usually involved what blocks to walk on and which to
avoid.The outer boroughs were a place
only for urban adventurers and natives of those far away lands.But the concentration of urban sophistication
only enhanced the sense of entitlement amongst our clientele and our very own
sense of authority as salespeople.

 

Late summer 1984 was also a strange time in <state><place>New
York</place></state> as many reasonable thought that Walter Mondale
would be the next president of the <country-region><place>United States</place></country-region>.While the nation’s political capital had
shifted elsewhere, <city><place>Manhattan</place></city> was
still very much the cultural capital of the world and that plus the B way gave
our customers a solid notion that they knew more about our cheeses and
charcuterie than we did.And any dispute
would be settled by our District Supervisors who spent far too much time
arguing over whether Madonna was a flash in the pan.

My new coworkers were mostly
ambitious twentysomethings including some from far flung places like <state><place>Oregon</place></state>,
<state><place>Arizona</place></state>, and <city><place>Houston</place></city>.We might have been put out as sacrificial
lambs for our clientele but we had no intention of staying that way, marching
meekly to verbal slaughter; and we weren’t going home with our tail between our
legs.One of these new colleagues found
the Simon and Schuster Pocket Guide to Cheese and within days everyone on the
crew had a copy and we were enthusiastically citing chapter and verse.Blue cheeses were injected with penicillin
and they go with white wine, we’d proudly tell our customers by means of
reminding them that we knew things they didn’t.

Thanks to S&S we now not only
knew the backstories of all of our cheeses but we could tell anyone who had the
time that cheese was made from farm fresh milk, which is something far
different than what you buy from a supermarket.The milk is heated slightly and rennet is added to separate the milk
into curds, the soft pudding like nuggets and whey, the liquid-ey remainder.Then the curds are salted, culture is added
and from there a myriad of cheeses are made.Most customers didn’t have time for that explanation; they wanted their
goodies and fast.

Our counter, a rectangle of display
cases, was divided into three sections, cured meats, prepared foods, and mostly,
cheese.The Bloomingdales cheese case
circa 1984 would look quaintly middlebrow by today’s standards.Our top cheddar was Canadian Black Diamond,
which had lean flavor and a piercing sharpness; our best washed rind was <city><place>Beaumont</place></city>,
which wasn’t that stinky but had an earthy finish, and in our little world, all
goat cheese was soft and spreadable.These
weren’t the greatest cheeses on the planet, but it didn’t matter. We were doing
the grunt work of the culinary revolution.

The struggle then wasn’t to introduce—if
not addict—Americans to the finest cheese in the world, but rather to liberate
them from supermarket habits.We wanted
to illustrate that Vermont Cheddar didn’t mean just one thing, that fresh made
mozzarella was miles beyond the Polly-O stuff in supermarket dairy cases, and
that a world of creaminess beyond brie awaited those interested in tasting St.
Andre, L’Explorateur or Gratte Paille.

Yet Simon and Schuster
notwithstanding, if a customer asked any of us for <state><place>Munster</place></state>,
we would have happily reached for a brick of American slicing sandwich cheese
rather than a wheel of the classic, deeply aromatic washed rind cheese from <state><place>Alsace</place></state>.
If someone did that to me today when I’m
a customer at a cheese counter, I might channel a certain Trinidadian from years
ago.