Hospitality is Alive and Well at The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills

Now in a new location with Dominick DiBartolomeo at the helm, the 56-year-old shop is firing on all cylinders.

Photographs by David Gurzhiev

Dominick DiBartolomeo and his pumpkin tortellini.

It’s noon on a Tuesday, and The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills is bustling. Dominick DiBartolomeo, the owner of the 56-year-old gourmet shop, shuffles swiftly around the space, grabbing items for chefs and taking sandwich orders from regulars. He’s on a first-name basis with almost every customer, and when he asks how they’re doing, a smile spreads across his face, seeping into a set of warm brown eyes. “What are we doing today?” He says, ready to cut cheese, slice charcuterie, and make recommendations amongst the array of vinegars, oils, tinned fish, condiments, crackers, caviar, wines, and spirits he’s carefully selected for the shop.

“Here, try this,” says Norbert Wabnig from behind the counter, holding it down as DiBartolomeo (known by most as Dom) runs around. He has a salt-and-pepper beard, circular black-framed glasses, and a grey scarf tucked into his apron. He’s called Norb by his colleagues, and he’s giving out generous samples of The Cheese Store’s vast cheese collection. His signature move is to dip a piece of bread into a bowl of olive oil, then cut a square of cheese, say a French goat or a semi-firm sheep’s milk from Paso Robles (which he shaves thin), and place it on top, like a miniature open-faced sandwich. 

Norbert Wabnig.

Wabnig is DiBartolomeo’s predecessor. He bought The Cheese Store in 1978 from its founder, Colonel Sigmund Roth, and ran it for 45 years before handing the baton to DiBartolomeo last year. But he didn’t throw in the towel. “Norbert’s still here, giving away free shit,” jokes DiBartolomeo. “We’re very familial here.” 

Once DiBartolomeo took the helm, his first order of business was to move the shop from its original location on Beverly Drive and Brighton Way to a 5,000-square-foot storefront on Santa Monica Boulevard and Roxbury Drive, just a ten-minute walk away with three times the size. Last July, they opened the doors to The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills 2.0, with many details from the past shop intact. Old photographs of DiBartolomeo and Wabnig with family and customers, many of them chefs, line the walls. The green awning from Beverly Drive hangs framed on the ground floor. Tens, if not hundreds, of worn-in cheese and wine posters from Italy and France are plastered across the store’s three stories. And a massive cylinder of Auricchio Provolone from 1972—the oldest cheese from the former shop—suspends from the ceiling amongst legs of prosciutto and pear-shaped scamorza.

Behind the counter.

At the new store, there’s ample kitchen space to make sandwiches and salads, which have already generated buzz, and to cater all types of events, both on- and off-site. They’re also making pasta, sauces, and spreads in-house under DiBartolomeo’s sister company, Domenico’s Foods, which he launched in 2003 at the farmers’ market while working as an employee at The Cheese Store. 

DiBartolomeo founded Domenico’s Foods 20 years ago.

DiBartolomeo was born and raised in Staten Island, New York before moving to Los Angeles as a teenager to attend the University of Southern California. Soon after graduating, he found his way to The Cheese Store. “I was interested in food, but I didn’t quite know how to make a career out of it,” he remembers. “When I went into The Cheese Store, I was like, ‘Oh my God.’ In New York, you have your butcher and your neighborhood shops, but I never saw something so specialized in L.A. I loved it, and so I started working there.” Fast forward 20 years, and DiBartolomeo’s dedication to his two passions—pasta and cheese, plus everything that comes with them—is under one roof, at last. 

Before the renovation, Domenico’s Foods’ handmade and extruded pastas, pestos, stuffed peppers, and more were made in a commissary kitchen in Lincoln Heights and then sold to restaurants and other specialty stores across L.A. But on this Tuesday at The Cheese Store, one pasta maker is putting the finishing touches on a pile of sweet potato gnocchi while another is pulling thick strips of pappardelle from a machine, and a third is fixing the radiatore die onto an extruder for a special guest. The Fire Chief of the Beverly Hills Fire Department is here for lunch, and DiBartolomeo heard he was partial to the short pasta shape with ruffled edges. 

Sweet potato gnocchi.

The Cheese Store’s influence in Los Angeles extends far beyond the walls of the new-and-improved customer-facing shop. Much of DiBartolomeo’s work, formerly Wabnig’s, consists of importing top-notch cheese and other European ingredients for a distinguished clientele. Today, in one of his several walk-ins, he has Parmigiano Reggiano Vacche Bianche, a rare cheese made from the milk of Modenese white cows, for Nancy Silverton at Mozza and Massimo Bottura of Gucci Osteria. “There are only two caseificios in all of Italy that have the white cows that make the milk. The first one, when I asked if I could buy some, told me to go f*** myself. The second one was like, ‘yeah, sure!’” DiBartolomeo says, laughing. A few doors down, in a private dining room, a shop employee named Jay Seals oversees a cheese tasting for a group of local chefs, some of whom are preparing to open a new restaurant. (Apparently, NFM stands for “not for me,” meaning “above my funk zone.”)

DiBartolomeo shows off a hunk of Parmigiano Reggiano Vacche Bianche, a cheese tasting in the private room.

For both the store and a host of restaurants, including Funke and La Dolce Vita, DiBartolomeo has burrata coming in from Puglia every other week. He has mortadella, prosciutto cotto, prosciutto crudo, lardo, ‘nduja, and salamis, most of which are featured in The Cheese Store’s superb La Macellaia sandwich. Currently, he has a limited supply (due to the lack of rain in Italy last year) of dried sweet Calabrian peppers, known as cruschis, and they are fruity, slightly bitter, and fantastic when flash-fried and served with a cold Peroni. 

In another walk-in, cooked-down corn is drying out in a hotel pan to be rehydrated, mixed with mascarpone, and piped inside agnolotti. Freshly made ricotta is dripping out, so it’s not too wet to be folded into ravioli. And a tub of confit Nueske's bacon is being cooled for The Cheese Store’s club sandwich, which also features house-roasted organic turkey breast, avocado, red onion, butter lettuce, and herbed mayonnaise on pan cristal, a high-hydration ciabatta-like bread imported from Spain. (Writer’s note: my personal favorite sandwich here is La Zucca, a vegetarian number starring fried zucchini with whipped buffalo ricotta, basil pesto, and lemon-artichoke tapenade.)

The Cheese Store is so much more than cheese. In fact, right now, there are white truffles from the Piedmont region of Italy in the shop. (The season for the intoxicatingly musky funghi started in October and will stretch just past New Year’s.) Still, cheese is king at The Cheese Store, and the range of unique varieties from France and Italy especially is unparalleled in Los Angeles. One standout is Langres, a semi-soft washed rind cow’s milk cheese made in Champagne, with a creamy interior and a richly savory, slightly funky taste profile. “If you go to Paris and have a cheese course, they’ll pour Champagne onto [the cheese’s concave top], let it sit in the cart, and after your meal, when they bring it back, the Champagne will have seeped right into the cheese, so you’ll get this nice, winey flavor,” DiBartolomeo explains. Also in the shop is a 20-year-aged cheddar produced by Hook's Cheese in Wisconsin, which, at $485 per pound, is one of the priciest cheeses they carry. It’s dense, creamy, and crumbly, with an intense tanginess that hits the back of your throat. 

Prized white truffles from northern Italy.

DiBartolomeo has a particular fondness for Buhaiolo, a Tuscan sheep's milk pecorino that’s infused with wild fennel pollen and wild fennel flower. The flavor is distinctly sharp, sweet, and salty, and each slice showcases an aromatic, olive-toned ripple. It reminds DiBartolomeo of a dinner he once had at a hunter’s home in Tuscany on a property lined with olive trees. “He went out and killed pheasant, duck, and quail and slow roasted them over a wood rotisserie that he had made. When we sat down for antipasti, they served fennel and carrots in ice water, and I thought, ‘If that’s all you’re serving, what’s so special about it?’ It was wild fennel and carrots. The carrots were so sweet, and so was the fennel, it wasn’t licorice-y or anise-y at all,” he recalls. At Spago, they use a microplane to grate Buhaiolo imported by DiBartolomeo on top of a fennel salad.

Buhaiolo is a Tuscan sheep's milk pecorino infused with wild fennel pollen and flower.

A fourth cheese worth trying is a sweet blue cheese from Montepulciano that’s aged in the must of dessert wine and swathed in raisins. Briacacio a Vino is the name, and it’s caramelly and pungent. “When you talk about trying to end a meal on a great cheese, this is it. I wouldn’t give you another taste of anything else after this,” DiBartolomeo says.