Nathalie Baer Chan has been working as a cheesemonger at Murray’s flagship location just under a year, following a career transition from being an immigration law paralegal. “I felt like I was working against my personality to be good at my job,” she says, “which requires someone to be quite cold at times, as well as meticulous and really organized.” Having taken virtual cheese classes during the pandemic, she recalls being enamored with the history and the stories of particular cheeses and thinking, perhaps jealously, “this is a job?”
Cheese Makes Me Happy
Baer Chan had a lifelong love of cheese, forged by what she describes as having a “farmer’s market mother,” (Jasper Hill’s Harbison may have also played a specific role) that caused her, along with her virtual cheese experience, to Google “NYC cheese jobs” on a whim, seeking work that she felt aligned more with her personality. With a professional resume that included no food service or even retail work, she recalls Murray’s GM, Lauren Mosness, asking her why she wanted the job. According to Baer Chan: “I said, ‘I’m not very happy and I want to be happy and cheese makes me really happy.’”
The Competition
Eight months after that auspicious beginning as a budding cheesemonger, Baer Chan found herself competing on the Cheesemonger Invitational stage alongside one of her Murray’s Cheese mentors, CMI runner-up Reese Wool. It was already a meteoric trajectory for one so new to the cheese industry, but what’s more, Baer Chan became the first competitor, out of hundreds in CMI’s decade-long history, to correctly name every cheese in the blind tasting portion of the competition.
“When I heard Adam say on the stage that this hadn’t happened before, I was looking at my score sheet, and I was thinking, ‘it looks like maybe that’s me,’” says Baer Chan, “but I still didn’t really believe it.”
While the finale of the Cheesemonger Invitational includes only the top 5 competitors in various cutting, wrapping, and selling drills, the competition begins much earlier in the day, with a couple dozen hopeful cheesemongers who must complete similar drills, as well as theory and tasting exams. Those with the highest scores go on to compete in the rock and roll spectacle that is the open-to-the-public portion of CMI, which included Baer Chan, her tasting score propelling her to the top of the pack. Baer Chan reflects on her experience at CMI, and what might have prepared her to be the first competitor ever to get a perfect score on the tasting portion.
How did you approach learning to be a cheesemonger at Murray’s, which has such a tremendous range of available cheeses?
My sock drawer is still littered with the little labels that get printed out at Murray’s for each of the cheeses, so that was one way I studied at home. Whenever my colleagues would talk about cheese at work, I would just listen. I would try to learn a couple cheeses at a time; I ate a lot of cheese during those first weeks. And I just sort of latched on to it. I’d Google things I got curious about, to try to remember these little cheese facts I could use—I still to this day talk about how caciocavallo was first written about 500 BCE, and here’s why it’s called horse cheese—and after maybe a month and a half or 2 months, I sort of could look into the cheese case and feel like okay, these are friends now. And now, a year later, I have dreams about the cheese case. I close my eyes, and I can tell you what is next to what—if you ask me.
Do you feel like those organizational skills that your previous job required aided you in your life as a cheesemonger, especially in terms of learning so many cheeses in such a short period of time?
I think to some extent, the meticulous aspect is still there, in terms of being able to distill information and keep only the essential parts. That resonates as being a skill that came from previous work. But I think being a cheesemonger, at least the way that I’ve done it, is a little chaotic. There’s an element of organization to it that’s certainly not my strong suit. I think that a lot of cheese is about heart, and is about chaos, and is about being able to take chaos, and make something quite tangible out of it. Like, how many people come up to a cheese case and say, ‘I don’t even know where to start.’ And a lot of the time I go, ‘I’ve got this piece right in front of me, want some?’ And we’ll go from there.
Was there anything in your previous life before cheese that led you to think that maybe you had a really remarkable palate in terms of being able to taste things and describe those flavors?
No, honestly, I think every time that I talked about tasting notes before I was making it up. When I first started at Murray’s even, I remember being fed all these different cheeses and there was a little very unsophisticated voice in my head going, ‘That tastes like cheese. Now that one tasted like cheese.’ It definitely took a while. I feel like it’s just a muscle. I’m very fortunate to have had a lot of great, particularly fresh food thanks again to my farmer’s market mother, and I love good food. But in terms of really picking things out, that was something that came a little while later. It’s why, at CMI, I said my favorite cheese was 1924 Bleu, because it’s the first tasting note I ever really remember pulling out for myself. I remember eating it and thinking, ‘that tastes like a horse.’ And then I thought, ‘What? What do I mean by that? No, it’s not a horse. It tastes like hay, like dried hay. What do I associate with that and what comes to mind?’
During the CMI education days, I felt so out of my element. I had such impostor syndrome because I am so new to this. It just felt like I was playing at being a cheesemonger while I was with all these people who have started their own businesses and done this so long and are sort of leaders in the industry. I had this moment where we were all going around with sensory analysis and Adam was asking, ‘what are you guys getting? What are you tasting?’ And I said something like ‘prune’ or whatever, really quietly in the back. And Adam pointed at me and said, ‘You and I are on the same page.’ So that was a moment when I thought, ‘just go for it, and say it, and maybe something will stick.’ And if it doesn’t, this is a very supportive community.
Did you feel confident about the blind taste cheeses at CMI, or were you surprised that you got them all correct?
All of those cheeses were cheeses I had seen and worked with before. I was so nervous about the taste test; in preparation I’d gone to other shops to find their PDO cheeses and try to expand my knowledge a little bit. I remember the plate coming down on my table, and saying to myself, ‘these are my friends.’ In my head I said something a little less appropriate, like ‘I know these bitches.’ They were cheeses close to my heart.
So you knew them all on sight?
Mostly on sight! One of them I had never tried: Torta del Casar. But by smell and by sight, I knew that there’s nothing else that smells like that cheese I’ve ever come across. Not Stinking Bishop, not Hooligan. Torta del Casar smells a very distinct way, and it looks a particular way with the pink rind and the way that the rind is so separate from the goo of the paste. It just falls apart in a very particular way. Stilton I had on sight, because of that cheddar texture. Comté and Piave took me a second because they could have been one of a few different things. Piave I still feel a little guilty about because I knew that one from the typeface on the rind.
Did you know right after the blind taste test that you had them all correct, or did you find out later when emcee Adam Moskowitz announced it from the stage?
After the test they score your sheet with what’s correct and what’s not, but they don’t tell you what the incorrect ones are, so I looked at my score sheet and since I didn’t get any wrong I knew that those cheeses were it. After Adam made his announcement on stage, a few people were passing around my score sheet from tasting because mine became the answer key. They could have put other cheeses and I would have gotten zero out of 5.
Someone once told me you develop relationships with the food you eat, whether it’s cheese or wine or meat or produce, and so I think that’s why it was such a pleasant taste test for me. It did feel like calling back on all of those relationships. That was really lovely and it’s still something that I feel very proud of. I just like new stuff so much, and I think I grabbed onto it when I was looking for something to inspire me at that time and to add a little magic. Cheese really did that for me, and still does all the time.
For more CMI content, check out The 2022 Cheesemonger Invitational: Scenes From a Cheese Rave, and How a Reluctant Competitor Won the Cheesemonger Invitational Championship.