By Ann Volkwein
Photographs by Linda Campos

In another life, Matt Rubiner would stroll into fine dining establishments in Boston sporting a Barbour coat with cheese in all the interior pockets. He’d sit at the bar and, near the end of his meal, pull out the cheeses and suggest to the bartender that he send a spontaneous “cheese board” back to the chef. For context, this was the mid ’90s and cheese was not the elevated thing it is now in this country. Restaurants did not have cheese programs. But what Matt was serving up was a truly mind-blowing selection, often (sometimes illegally) imported from Europe. He got their attention, and this is part of how he became known as Cheese Boy in Beantown, working for Formaggio Kitchen in Cambridge. His drive and ingenuity eventually led to chefs such as French Laundry’s Thomas Keller calling him up for FedExes of his cheese selections. Matt Rubiner’s mother says that, as a child, he proclaimed he would one day open a cheese shop, which is not verifiable by the man himself. But he did enter this world with a legacy. “My grandfather was in the food business in a big sort of way,” he said. “It was one of those immigrant businesses where they sold peas, I think in a stall in South Philly. It developed into shops and eventually a chain of supermarkets.”

In addition to fashioning himself a bit of a food connoisseur when he was little, Matt was a passionate student of foreign policy and military history, which led him to Asia in college and then a position at the Japanese Foreign Ministry. After returning to the U.S., he ended up working at MIT in Boston analyzing Japanese military technology capabilities.

As a solo diner and frequenter of fine dining establishments in Boston, Matt slowly got to know some people in the wine business. “I was with a friend at a café in the North End, a classic Italian soccer bar, day drinking wine on a Saturday. And my friend said, ‘Hey, we should go to Italy. I’m due for a wine boondoggle.’”

This is where the pivot happened. At the end of a dirt road in a magical shack in the hills above Lake Como, he was regaled with an unmarked bottle of local wine and rabbit stew over polenta. And then the next day, at a 2-star Michelin restaurant, “the food started coming out—things like a salad made with kidneys from a rabbit that the chef had shot or trapped, and some kind of brook trouty sort of fish from the local streams. Everything was done in that old manner, where they whisk off the domes all at the same time and it was all so perfect.”

These experiences made their mark on him. “I need to do a job in my life that brings me to these places,” he thought, “where I can eat this sort of food, whether it be the simple rabbit stew or this meal at the Michelin 2-star restaurant. I need to work with people like this chef, I want to meet this wine maker. So, I declared boldly then that I would go into the food business.”

He eventually settled on cheese. “Like wine, cheese seemed to be something that you could look at from any possible angle. From a cultural point of view, from a culinary point of view, a scientific point of view, or even from a military historical point of view. You know, the conquest of peoples.”

Matt met Julie in 1998 through a mutual friend. “I had this idea of what a Cheese Boy would look like,” said Julie. So when she met him the first time, she thought, “You’re the Cheese Boy? You’re kind of cute!” By 2001 they were engaged and Matt was ready to open his own store, which they did in Richmond, Massachusetts. “We were so young and naïve, we just did it,” remembered Julie. Since then she has figured out how to balance her own New York-based career in the fashion business—she is currently the VP of Design Innovation at Eileen Fisher—with life in the Berkshires.

When they acquired their current spot in Great Barrington, the café building—now Rubi’s, where they offer a menu of coffees and grilled cheese—was part of the deal. “I thought for a second that maybe I would leave my career and run the café and he could run the cheese shop, and we’d be this great mom-and-pop place. We still are, I just gave up after about six months,” she laughed. “From the very beginning of our relationship, I thought that him being a cheesemonger was the coolest thing ever,” Julie said. “I am a big fan of him doing this and doing it in an environment that is lovely to be in. We have set our roots here.”

A Purist’s Cheese Board

In contrast to the kaleidoscopic, Instagrammable boards that shove and mingle all of the ingredients—and flavors and aromas—together, Rubiner’s style of board is simple, to the point of minimalism. This allows for better appreciation of the individual cheeses, not to mention easier slicing and eating. He advises leaving “some characteristic of the cheese, so that you can envision it when it is whole—typically that means cutting a wedge.” (And leaving the rind; eating the rind, by the way, is just a matter of preference.) Whatever you do, please don’t cube cheese up, as the more surface area is exposed, the faster your cheese will dry up and lose its texture and aroma. Matt will serve dried fruit and nuts as a palate reset, and bread as opposed to crackers, as the texture of crackers can detract from the sensation of eating the cheese.

Matt carries cheese from around the world—here are five standouts that are made close to home.

St. Stephen
Four Fat Fowl, Stephentown, NY
Bloomy-rinded cow’s milk cheese. Bright, milky sweet, distant dried mushroomy character. This is a triple cream which means they have reinforced the cheese with cream, which sort of stiffens the cheese, and pushed that cardiological red line of 75% butterfat, so it’s voluptuous and luxurious.
Paired with: Dried tart Montmorency cherries from Northern Michigan

Hooligan
Cato Corner Farm, Colchester, CT
Raw cow’s milk cheese made in a Trappist, monastic style. You can see the orange rind, which is always a harbinger of a smelly, funky cheese in that dirty-sock kind of way.
Paired with: Wood-roasted Marcona almond

Wendell
Churchtown Dairy, Hudson, NY
A wonderfully simple raw cow’s milk cheese. An everyday cheese, but really elegant, restrained, and lovely. If you see the whole cheese, you’ll see a spiral graph pattern on the outside.
Paired with: Dried mulberries

Siegfried’s Pride
High Lawn Farm, Lee, MA
Cow’s milk cheese made in the heart of Berkshire County. Similar profile to the Wendell, maybe a little bit more pungent and intense in flavor.
Paired with: Figs from Afghanistan

Great Hill Blue
Great Hill Dairy, Marion, MA
From the opposite side of the state, on Buzzard’s Bay. When American artisan cheese was just getting going, Tim Stone decided to make a raw milk blue—it was unheard of at the time, but they succeeded and are still hyperspecialized in making this cheese.
Paired with: Quince paste from Portugal

Rubiner’s Cheesemongers
264 Main Street, Great Barrington
rubiners.com