Review: Oh, Look, A $350 Box To Hold Your Cheese
WIRED—June 9, 2017
WALK UP TO the cheese counter at DeLaurenti Food & Wine in Seattle and you’ll find offerings from the worldwide luminaries of cheese: l’Amuse from Holland, Guffanti from Italy, Neal’s Yard Dairy from the United Kingdom, and Hervé Mons from France, all there in cold cases, like jewels in a museum. It’s awe-inspiring. Leave the store with a few of those beauties, which average more than $30 a pound, and you’ll want to cosset them until it’s time for the cheese course, then display them like works of art.
I arrived at the store with a glass and bamboo box designed to extend the life of these fine cheeses by creating the perfect storage conditions. Riding the train, I could feel people glancing at it, perhaps wondering if I was carrying a hamster. In DeLaurenti’s, however, the box was received like the cheese world’s equivalent of an unreleased iPhone.
This box, called Cheese Grotto is the brainchild of Brooklyn cheesemonger Jessica Sennett, who calls it a “humidor for cheese.†Barely bigger than a breadbox, it features two shelves to store and display cheese, a terra cotta brick you can soak with water to maintain the humidity for up to a week, a tiny vaulted ceiling to keep condensation from dripping onto the cheese, and a sliding back wall to control airflow. With a $350 price tag, think of it as a luxury apartment for dairy.
At that price, is it worth the rent? Read the complete WIRED review here.
