Spices of Life: Best Cheese Shop Ever (Part I)

Spices of Life: Best Cheese Shop Ever (Part I) Nina Simonds: This isn’t just a cheese shop. You have oils and vinegars. Patricia Michelson: Yes, it’s sort of grew but it’s all from very small produces and what we try to highlight here is the individuality, the regionality, the seasonality, everything that you can think that’s good about food hopefully you see here. Nina Simonds: Here we are at Spices of Life in London at La Fromagerie, a superb cheese, vegetable everything, shop, café and we are very pleased to be speaking to Patricia Michelson. You started in your home, could you talk a little bit about that. Patricia Michelson: Well, it all started at JF [ph] Mountain when I was skiing and I fell in love with the cheese called Beaufort and I brought some back with me and didn’t know where to store it. So I stored in my garden shed and from there the little seed is planted. Nina Simonds: Patricia, please give us a little tour. Patricia Michelson: Okay, come in. Welcome to La Fromagerie. As you come in you’re also greeted by the color of the fruits and the vegetables. They come from a few miles out of London, from London Queen of Lake and also from France and Italy as well. We’ve got some artisan teas from Ceylon, a great coffee from Florence and there are all the wines. Wine is cool and wines or red wines our ambient images. They make ice cream too. Nina Simonds: Yummy. Patricia Michelson: Yeah, we make it. This is full fat milk. They are the house organic milk. It’s a good process to use. It’s an amazing milk in order to do an incredible ice cream. And I have all the jams are homemade and we emphasized that we own use fresh fruit. We don’t cure it, we don’t freeze. Don’t buckle. It’s all fresh and I think they come in season right here. Nina Simonds: Yeah. Patricia Michelson: When they go out we don’t have them, so that’s the way we work. We have some breads which are all home baked. We’ve got few cakes because I like having chocolate cake in this. Nina Simonds: And we should tell people too that you have a very thriving wonderful café. Patricia: Well, it was always my desire to be able to transform the food that you see on the shelves into food that you could actually eat on the premises or take a way. This is essential table and it’s all seasonal its now ready to eat and now ready to eat and what we’ve like to see it’s always sort of rolling all the time like a season, so that if you feel, you know easy about what you’re going to cook. Nina Simonds: But the whole pastries there isn’t stones of-- Patricia: What it’s all about is the cheese room. This is the reason of what we do.