Posted by Jeff Jurmain in cheese and dairy, cheesemongers, ingredients, shops on February 4, 2008 at 8:07 am

La Fromagerie
868 College Street
416-516-4278

Robert Burns' shop is tailored toward a nice hike in the mountains of France where he was once married. Not the correct footwear and walking stick one may need, but rather the food. Take several types of cheese, a couple of baguettes and several French saucission. He doesn’t sell the other integral ingredient, red wine, but that can be purchased on the way to the hillside.

Yet La Fromagerie is in fact near no French mountains, or mountains at all for that matter. This is College Street and the red streetcar going by clearly indicates this is Toronto. The hike required is only the one back home. And it’s probably only a block or two away, as this cozy cheese shop has a neighbourhood feel to it. Instead of laying out a picnic gazing across lush valleys, the reality is more like gazing across the living room floor at the television.

For those living in the vicinity of Ossington and College, here’s the place for cheese. Burns' focus is on a variety of chevres that inhabit the top row of the glass display, and of all unpasteurized varieties made with raw milk and on small farms in Europe and Quebec. Or, as his business card puts simply, “specialty cheese.” Myself a cheese connoisseur (more ravenous than well-researched), I asked him what separates raw milk from the crowd.

“Well, with raw milk the taste isn’t boiled out of the cheese,” I think he said. This is one fast-talking fellow from Cape Breton whose words blend seamlessly into one another. “You can taste the original flavour. You can taste the grass that the cows fed on.”

La Fromagerie offers its beauforts, triple-creams, goudas, mimolettes and cheddars, most of which sound lovingly foreign, yet it’s always nice to know the proprietor’s personal favourites. These include: Lingot raw milk chevre, Selles Sur Cher goat’s milk cheese, Ossauiraty raw sheep’s milk (produced in a small operation in the Pyrenees Mountains), cheddar fused with 10-year-old scotch (ask him about it) and “excellent” applewood smoked cheddar straight from a kiln in Scotland where it’s smoked naturally.

Match them with baguette and bread from Pain Perdu, sold here most days except Tuesday when Burns stalks goods from Bakery Thuet. Match them with original saucission from France ($12 each) or chorizo from Spain ($13). Match them with an impressive array of olives at the back. Match them with crackers ($7.50) that he's selected for their variance of flavours: chive, caraway, walnut, charcoal, mustard and black pepper, to name a few. The short shelves house a bunch of items you could probably guess but maybe not these: figs in syrup, anchovy paste and chestnut spread.

I struggled to think of what, exactly, separates one good cheese shop from the next. Burns, who veers away from mentions of competition, could come up only with “location.” How about I dig deeper for La Fromagerie’s one superior attribute: tastings.

Most shops will let you sample cheese (unless they are averse to profits), but here Burns goes a step further. He won’t let customers walk out with something they didn’t precisely want. He told me of one exchange where a customer scanned his wares and found what she was looking for, ready to buy it. Burns, knowing there were both big and subtle differences in two types of the same cheese, asked if she had ever tried it. She said no. After she tried his offering, she realized it wasn’t quite the flavour she wanted. After a few minutes later trying several other varieties, she found it.

Burns wants to sell his customers the right cheese, the best cheese. If asked he will pontificate about many and give several suggestions (that is, for those can follow his accent and train of thought), but in the end strives to give people the precise cheese they’re after. He even encourages people to phone him first and ask if certain cheeses are available.

The doors of La Fromagerie have been open for the past three years and in that time a steady neighbourhood clientele has built. It represents the latest in Burns' ambitions that, among “a little bit of everything,” have included music and artwork. (His paintings hang on the wall.)

Here’s an inside tip: Call him up later this month and ask if new shipments are in yet from Europe. If so, head over to find a bounty of new chevre, and pretty much everything else as well.