Murray’s Cheese came to debut a European Union of rare cheeses and nurture a generation of American upstarts. Within a decade, the affordable neighborhood joint transformed into an upscale destination shop. He bought the store in 1991, invested in it and hired a consultant, Steven Jenkins, who was the cheesemonger of the highly-regarded specialty market Dean & Deluca. The origin myth of Murray’s Cheese started with Robert Kaufelt, the heir to the New Jersey supermarket chain that would become Mayfair-Foodtown. It is the story of the upscaling of the Village, the rise of gourmet food, and most of all, the gentrification of a man. But how the son of a pushcart peddler became the face of a multimillion dollar cheese empire is not a Jewish Horatio Alger tale. Murray would go on to have a large impact on New York cheese. Marks Appetizing and own a couple of tenements under the Second Avenue El. Within 20 years, the family managed to open St. Murray’s father peddled goods from a pushcart, and his teenage siblings worked in sweatshops. Immigration and census records show his family arrived on the Lower East Side a little over a year later, squeezing into a tenement. Murray Greenberg, the youngest of nine children, was born in a shtetl in what is now Ukraine in 1909. Then I stumbled on the store’s About page and was shocked to read, “Murray Greenberg was a Jewish veteran of the Spanish Civil War.” A counter man once told me that the store was founded in 1940 by a certain Murray Greenberg. Like most New Yorkers, I knew it was a classic Village shop, but not much else. I’d gone to the Bleecker Street shop for years without realizing that Murray’s Cheese had gotten bigger than Chuck E. The name Murray has become to specialty cheese what Nathan is to hotdogs - a New York Jew turned name brand. Now fully owned by Kroger, the nation’s largest supermarket chain, Murray’s Cheese has over 750 locations across more than 30 states. Since 2008, Murray’s influence has spread across the country. From a small Greenwich Village store, cheesemongers enlighten New Yorkers on terroirs and washed rinds and supply upscale restaurants with camembert and French triple crèmes. For the past two decades, Murray’s Cheese has been Manhattan’s cheese tastemaker.
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