Cheese Boutique
45 Ripley Avenue
416-762-6292

“Quality is our bottom line,” says Fatos Pristine while he displays the effects of aging on cheese. Fatos, as the owner of the Cheese Boutique, is largely responsible for how people in Toronto view not only cheese, but also gourmet food in general. With wire-rimmed glasses, a high hairline, and expressive hand gestures, Pristine could easily pass for an eccentric professor instead of a local cultural icon.

When I asked about what contributed to this success he responds, “We needed to diversify ourselves from the larger chains or face obliteration.” Fatos and his son Agim have done so by having a thorough understanding of what quality means to them and bringing this understanding to their customers. Each has a personal obsession. For Fatos, it is cheese and for Agim it is dry-aged meats. However, as Agim is quick to point out, the focus is the day-to-day operations of the store and meeting the customer’s culinary needs.

Quality and customer satisfaction are mainstays of the retail food industry but are often nothing but empty words. The Cheese Boutique follows these words with action. For instance, their beef is rail aged for forty days without exception. This is done, despite the fact that they lose a third of their product, because it allows the meat’s juices to cultivate and concentrate the flavour. Because it requires a retailer to waste both energy in keeping the meat cool and the space for them to be stored as they are cooled, this process is rarely done by other producers. Yet, for people who love food, individuals and chefs included, the difference is very dramatic from the moment they first smell the beef at the counter to the final taste off the grill. Seven of Toronto’s best restaurants use this meat for the above mentioned reasons and this number could easily be doubled if not for the limited supply and Agim’s dedication to his retail customers.

The dry aged meats are but one example of the attention to detail you find throughout the entire store. The cheese, for instance, is aged to perfection as father and son eagerly showed me the difference in both taste and view between aged cheeses and the same cheeses that have recently arrived. To age does not mean to simply place a cheese in a cooler and wait; instead, there are details to attend to while the cheese is aging. To provide an illustration, I was escorted to the cheese cellar where wheels of cheeses are stored, and told about the nightly ritual of flooding the cellar floor to provide humidity or washing the wheels with wine to enhance flavour.

Details, details, and more details, but the details work and their qualities are apparent. The store shelves are a collection of food goods from around the world picked up at trade shows, through customer recommendations, from personal contacts in the food industry, or on a hunch. In each of these instances both Fatos and Agim recognized that there were trends they missed, such as freshly made pasta, but if they missed anything I didn’t notice. There are rare olive oils from Turkey, Ginger Snaps from England, even shark fin soup from China on their shelves.

Prices at the shop can seem daunting but according to Fatos “You are our best customer if you come here four times a year to celebrate a special occasion” this is not to say they do not want regular business but to have standards this high some things need to be sacrificed and the price is it.

The results of their definitions for quality have been to make their store a Toronto cultural icon amongst a city dedicated to good food. This has included a fan base that was willing to move with them from Bloor Street West to the obscure new location at 45 Ripley Avenue. Chefs constantly make appearances at the store and The Cheese Boutique hosts a local chef fair in May. The store is an experience that should be had more than four times a year but if four times a year is as many times as you can get there, they will still consider you their best customer.