The Cheese Shop of Portland is a boon to the city’s nascent specialty shop inventory compared to the nonstop lineup of new restaurants recently opened or in the works. What the city lacks is a substantial roster of fine-food purveyors. Other than Micucci’s, and to a lesser extent, Rosemont or the various Asian markets, it’s still slim pickings to find ingredients called for in sophisticated recipes of world cuisines.
Otherwise Micucci’s remains a standout Italian specialty market for olive oils, authentic canned San Marzano tomatoes and double-rich tomato paste; their selection of dried pastas is terrific, too.
The focus of the Cheese Shop is, of course, cheese curated from top European and local creameries as well as a fine selection of vinegars, olive oils, charcuterie, coffees, pastas and preserves.
Owners Will and Mary Sissle hail from the extraordinary food purveyor Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge and Boston’s South End, where Will was the international cheese buyer and Mary directed the vast online shopping business.
When the ingenious black box shipping containers were created along Washington Avenue to house retails shops no more than 400 square feet, the Sissles snapped one up immediately from the developer Jed Harris. (He has since sold all his holdings, including the massive Nisson Bakery building at 75 Washington and everything else around it to entrepreneur Jake Edwards.)
The black box stores on Washington Avenue
In such a tiny space it’s amazing how much stock is on the shelves and in the cases. The standouts that I’ve tried are Vivid Coffee from a Vermont coffee roaster (makes Tandem Coffee seem tame) and beautifully curated cheeses from Europe and America. One was Rush Creek Reserve made by Uplands Cheese, a Wisconsin creamery. It’s a soft cow’s-milk cheese that’s only made in the autumn when the farm’s cows transition from pasture to hay displaying the richer texture of hay-fed milk and the delicate ripeness of a soft, young cheese.
Cheese, domestic and imported, olive oils, pasta, charcuterie
But they also have items like Benton’s bacon and hams from the famed smokehouses in Tennessee (try one of the daily sandwiches of Benton ham with a cultured-butter spread on Standard Bakery baguette), olives in brine, various dips and emulsions such as whipped feta with Greek herbs and saffron.
Will and Mary are very particular about the cheeses they bring into the shop. They won’t stock Gruyere, for example, until they can get it from a farmhouse cheese producer in Switzerland.
“ The rest,” says Will, “come from cooperatives where the quality isn’t as good.”
Benton’s bacon and one of their arttisanal cheese
As for cheesemakers from New England, try the Spruce, by Sage Farm, Vermont, a goat/cow’s milk blend that is washed in a salt brine and wrapped in spruce from the farm. It’s a great soft cheese to serve on crostini or crackers.
While we have other stores like Whole Food’s cheese department, which is pretty good, The Portland Cheese Shop takes it to the next level under the scrutiny of just two people, husband and wife, Will and Mary Sissle.
