Mori was not alone in noticing the scarcity of cheese spots in the District. According to Rachel Juhl, head of education at artisan cheese importer and wholesaler Essex St. Cheese, D.C. is known to some in the industry as the “black hole of cheese.” That’s not to say there haven’t been good cheese shops: Bowers Fancy Dairy Products in Eastern Market has been operating in the area since 1964, for instance, and the whimsical Cheesetique has been a Northern Virginia fixture since 2004. But industry veterans like Juhl found the cheese market here tough to crack.
“It’s a chicken-and-egg thing,” Juhl said, referring to the self-perpetuating problem of a lack of distributors transporting goods to D.C., meaning a lack of cheese shops opening. “The logistics have always been really, really difficult, which is always bizarre,” Juhl explained, because in D.C. “you have major distributors leaving New York to go to Atlanta and they have to pass by.”
In the past few years, however, the D.C. cheese scene has undergone a sort of renaissance. These four businesses offer cheese in different ways, but at the core of each is a belief that good cheese should be not scary or pretentious, but approachable and accessible.
The neighborhood market: Each Peach
The inspiration for Jeanlouise Conaway to start a neighborhood market came from halfway around the world, when she worked as a U.S. Agency for International Development contractor in Ethiopia on food security and livelihood issues.
“I was really, really lucky to get that project in Ethiopia because I was interacting with people growing their own food, people selling their food, and seeing how the linkages and how that all ties together and what it means to people,” she said.
Once she saw how food could bring communities together, she couldn’t get it out of her head. She quit her job in development aid, moved to Paris to study pastry, and eventually came back to D.C. to open Each Peach, a quirky grocery with a farmers market vibe in Mount Pleasant with her co-founder (and former colleague in development aid) Emily Friedberg.
Cheese has been central to Conaway’s vision since the market opened in 2013. “Every cheese has a story, and a deep, deep cultural tradition,” she said, casually referencing her favorite anthropological scholarship on cheese. Conaway sees Each Peach’s cheese counter as a way to share these stories.
Together with head cheesemonger and buyer Beth Pershing, Conaway works to curate the cheese counter with funky and diverse cheeses from around the world. There are some mainstays: You can almost always find a good-quality brie, pecorino, chevre or Emmentaler Swiss cheese, for instance. But you can also find some less conventional offerings, sourced directly from farms in the region. One recent favorite of Conaway’s is Hummingbird, a soft-ripened cow’s milk oval from the Farm at Doe Run in Pennsylvania.
Conaway works hard to bring the stories of how these cheeses were produced directly to the eater. Each Peach is self-service, but the staff is trained to offer suggestions and more information about each cheese. Conaway and others host cheese education classes for “deep dives” into particular kinds of cheese — she has held classes and delivered cheese subscription boxes centered on themes including “All About Goats,” “A Trip to Spain” and “Virginia Is for Cheese Lovers.”
And she goes annually to the American Cheese Society Conference, both to meet new cheese makers…
Read More: These four women are helping to reinvigorate D.C.’s cheese scene
