The Cheese Board (3 page)
Authors: Cheese Board Collective Staff
FORMER MEMBER
Daily work at the Cheese Board consisted of waiting on customers, cleaning, cutting cheeses, sweeping the floors, and paying the bills. The introduction of bread for sale, like so many changes at the Cheese Board, wasn’t planned. One day friends of the store brought by a loaf of whole-wheat rye as a gift. With its hearty crust and dark crumb, it couldn’t have been more different from sliced white bread. Inspired, the members invited the friends to bake loaves to sell alongside the cheeses. The loaves were baked in a single oven in the cramped kitchen space. Bread making was seductive—it was a hands-on, tactile experience that was deeply satisfying. On a political level, it was an honest handmade product. Customers loved the bread, and the new product added variety to the store, inspiring members to develop recipes for other breads.
The collective was expanding in a new direction, slowly evolving into more than just a cheese shop. But not all the members were excited by this new direction.
With a steadily growing business in cheese and the development of new breads, the Vine Street store was bursting at the seams.
There were discussions about moving to a larger space and what that would mean to the group. It wasn’t simply a matter of getting a new space; there were serious concerns about how growth would change the intimacy of the group. The lament, “Let’s stay small and keep the family feeling,” would be heard from then on. But when a larger storefront became available around the corner on Shattuck Avenue, the opportunity was too good to pass up.
In typical Cheese Board style, the members embraced the store’s new home.
It wasn’t long before the Cheese Board was one of many food establishments in the area. There was Peet’s; Pig-by-the-Tail, a charcuterie; Lenny’s meat market; North Berkeley Wine; the restaurant Chez Panisse; Cocolat, a decadent chocolate shop; the Fish Market, right next door to the Cheese Board; and the Juice Bar, another collective, which took over the original Cheese Board location. The neighborhood exchanged ideas over food, and there was a shared belief that good food was essential, honest, and important. Alice Kahn, a local writer and humorist, labeled the neighborhood the Gourmet Ghetto, a title that has stuck to this day. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were in the middle of a food revolution, one that could never have happened without the support of the whole community.
The conflict between personal vision and the “collective good” has always been a challenge to the group. The collective fosters personal freedom and at the same time suppresses it. While everyone is an owner, everyone is also a worker.
The new store, Shattuck Avenue, 1975.
Despite initial hesitations, the collective members eventually embraced the idea of offering warm, house-made baguettes to eat with cheese. The customers loved them, and the members began to delve deeper into the art and challenges of baking.
did
make money.
Though innovation is a source of struggle and tension at the Cheese Board, it is crucial to our creative dynamic. Each product undergoes scrutiny and experimentation until it is impossible to recall the prototype after all its incarnations. The reward of the process is universal pride of ownership as the new product makes its daily appearance on our shelves. Each of the many bakers has brought their own contributions to the recipes; our store’s master recipe book, tattered and scribbled with notations and corrections, is a testament to this.
Our master recipe book.
Shattuck Avenue, 1982.
When the recession of the eighties hit us in California, the business suffered and we were worried about our economic stability. We brainstormed about ways to stay viable. There was talk of taking a pay cut. As business was slow, there was time to play around.
Pizza became a regular staff lunch. Someone grabbed cheese from the case, someone else would run next door to the Produce Center for vegetables. A half an hour later, pizza was served. Customers noticed and wanted a piece, too. Before we knew it, we were selling slices for lunch.
P.M.
—for fun, you know, just for fun. And that’s how it happened. That first Friday night, everyone stayed after work to check it out. It was a good thing because we needed their help.
What started out as a whim ended up reinvigorating our sales. It was so successful that we needed to open an entirely separate storefront and add new members to handle the volume.
pizzeria as a separate division, the pizzeria was able to expand. I was one of the first people hired for the pizza collective, just as it was in the process of splitting off from the Cheese Board. Cheese Board members were beginning to have babies and didn’t have the time to put into a new product.
The pizzeria quickly developed its own distinct character. Nowadays, friends and families listen to live jazz while sitting at café tables inside and out on the sidewalk in front. The tiny space fills up quickly and spills out into the neighborhood. In good weather, picnickers spread out on the median strip, and the sidewalk is full of people eating a slice as they walk along. The line out the door is echoed down the block by the coffee line at the French Hotel.
The Pizzeria, 2003.
The opportunity to expand presented itself again when the Fish Market next door closed in 1989. The membership voted to take a pay cut to fund the remodel of the space. With no particular plans for how we would use the space, we closed our eyes and jumped in, employing our in-house talent to do the remodeling.