Cheese Cave Brings Cheese to Light in Claremont
By Lorrie Baumann
Cheese Cave in Claremont, California, may not have been born in Finland, but it was certainly conceived there. Co-Owner Marnie Clarke and her sister and fellow co-Owner, Lydia Clarke, were in Finland visiting their brother Noah Clarke, a professional hockey player, when the two started discussing Marnie’s reservations about her job as a cheesemaker for Winchester Cheese Company.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like making the cheese – Marnie grew up in a dairy family, representing the dairy started by her grandfather Harold Stueve at natural food shows and helping out with the chores around the farm. When she’d landed the job as a cheesemaker, she’d thought she’d found her own career within that world. “I totally thought that was the route I was going to go down,” she said. But then she’d found that she didn’t like the early mornings, and she didn’t like the loneliness. She wanted more connections with people, she started telling her older sister in 2007 or so. “My sister and I have always been very close,” Marnie said. “We knew that at some point in our lives, we were going to do something together.”
While the two were in Finland visiting their brother, who was there after he’d been traded from his Swiss team, Marnie confided her uncertainties about the direction of her career, and they talked about how Marnie was living in southern California, while her sister was way up in Napa. “I wanted her to come back down to southern California,” Marnie said. By the end of the trip, Marnie and Lydia had figured out a solution that made them both happy – a cheese shop that they’d run together. “Our original business plan was that we were going to be two sisters running the shop by ourselves, and we’d become little old ladies doing the same thing,” Marnie said.
In 2010, they opened Cheese Cave in Claremont, a clean little 13 square-mile community between San Bernardino and Los Angeles, California, with a population of 36,000 people living in half-million dollar houses under enough trees to make the city a perennial winner of the National Arbor Day Association’s Tree City USA award and 21 city-owned parks, of which 2,378 acres are wilderness. “It’s a very cute community, we knew we wanted to be in Claremont from the start,” Marnie said.
The plan to be two sisters running their 1,100 square-foot cheese shop forever and ever lasted a matter of weeks. The community embraced them and their shop, and Marnie and Lydia needed another employee within the first couple of months after opening their doors. Then they needed a few more. The customers started asking them about accouterments for their cheese plates and then for the tinned fish, the pasta, the olive oil that they needed to round out their meal plans. “People really came to us when they needed or wanted something,” Marnie said. “We’ve become the go-to purveyors for people who are interested in food.”
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As their business grew, the sisters roped in Lydia’s boyfriend, Chef Reed Herrick, who joined Cheese Cave in 2012, and Marnie’s husband, Milan Dragojlovich, who came into the picture in 2013 as they were planning an expansion into a second shop, DTLA Cheese + Kitchen, in Los Angeles’ Grand Central Market.
Today, Herrick and Lydia Clarke manage DTLA Cheese + Kitchen. He runs the tiny kitchen turning out sandwich orders, while Lydia manages the retail business. Dragojlovich gave up his career in information technology and project management to become a Cheesemonger and administrator at Cheese Cave. “We really rope everybody in. Our mom picks up bread and makes sandwiches every day,” Marnie said. “The whole family makes baskets for Christmas. We’re very intertwined.”
The DTLA store inside Grand Central Market, a food hall that brings together the cultures and cuisines of southern California under the roof of the longest continuously running public market in Los Angeles, is about 420 square feet with a tall cheese case, a small retail shelf with crackers and a few special chocolates, a countertop with five seats and a pass-through window to the minuscule kitchen where Herrick makes grilled cheese sandwiches and salads to order. “Reed really loves seasonal produce,” Marnie said. “He also loves to pickle things, so there’s always some sort of fun project that’s happening on the menu.”
At Cheese Cave in Claremont, there’s also a classroom space where the community comes in to learn about cheese or just to drop in to taste some of the Cheese Cave’s selection of organic and biodynamic wines along with some cheeses that they might not ordinarily be adventurous enough to try. On the first Saturday of each month, Cheese Cave hosts an afternoon in which they pour natural wine and offer cheese plates for anyone who wants to drop in. “We have a really quirky wine lineup so it’s a great way for people to try new wines without having to take a leap of faith on whether they’ll like it,” Marnie said. “People find new things that they didn’t know they’d love.”
The cheese case with its 120 or so cheeses cut to order is the star of the show with its balanced mix of imported and domestic cheeses and a particular emphasis on local products. “We try to support them [California’s artisan cheesemakers] as much as possible and have a lot of California cheeses,” Marnie said. “We try to work with smaller producers and have a different selection that we really love…. Throughout the week, we keep getting things in. All of our awesome staff of cheesemongers love to tell the stories of the cheeses and have that interaction with the customers, which they really love too.”
She gets asked all the time about her favorite cheese, and like most devoted cheesemongers, she’s hard-pressed to answer it. She’s very fond of Monte Enebro, a soft goat cheese from Avila, Spain, that’s made by a father-daughter team, she said. That’s officially a blue cheese, but it’s inoculated on its exterior for an insistent flavor near the rind that has overtones of black walnut and a salty, lactic core. “But right now, the Kenne [from Tomales Farmstead Creamery] is at its perfect ripeness,” she said with a sigh. Comte is always a favorite, and she loves it so much that she frequently has more than one in the case. Jacobs & Brichford‘s Ameribella is so interesting. And then, there’s Grafton Village Cheese Bear Hill…. “All of our cheesemongers feel the same way,” she said. “We really have an incredible team at both shops. When we’re working together, we’re always talking about what we’re going to take home. We feel passionate about the condition of all of the cheeses in our case. It’s easy to sell because we’re so excited about so many of them.”