Nick Bayne, Fine Cheese Co., Head Cheesemonger
Nick Bayne’s 15-year cheesemonger journey has taken him from the U.S. to the U.K. Not only did he win the 2015 Cheesemonger Invitational on his first attempt, but he also garnered third place at the 2023 Concours Mondial du Meilleur Fromager.
“I’m originally from Seattle, then moved to Mill Valley in northern California and then to San Francisco in the early 2000s, before landing in the U.K.,” he says. “I was lucky in many respects in terms of someone who unknowingly had a future in the world of artisan cheese.”
Bayne currently works as the head cheesemonger and European cheese selector at The Fine Cheese Co., after years of running its Bath cheese shop.
Cheese Connoisseur spoke to Bayne about how he began his cheese career, highlights over the years and what comes next.
CC: Tell me about your history and background.
NB: I grew up in a family that really loved food, particularly my mom who had a passion for cooking and finding wonderful ingredients. She took me and my sister to local farmers markets before they were popular and trendy.
In the Pacific Northwest, that meant great produce, like apples, bread, honey, fish and the best seafood. It also meant there was a lot of joy in cooking in our household. I spent a lot of time in the kitchen with my mom, who taught me a love for cooking.
I went to the University of Utah’s Actor Training Program, then a few years later went to Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland) for a Master of Arts degree.
At the same time, I had a parallel passion for food. My very first job was as a host at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co., and I was host at a steakhouse and oyster bar in Salt Lake City. I was a burgeoning foodie, but realized my desire was to have a day job in food, but not in a restaurant.
My love for cheese didn’t start there, but as a toddler. Even at only a few years old I could tell different brands of Monterey Jack apart and grew up with Tillamook Cheddar.
Like a lot of other kids in the Pacific Northwest, I liked cheese, but my familiarity really expanded when I moved to California. The San Francisco area is an absolute center of artisan food in America. When I moved there, it was a time when Cowgirl Creamery was at its peak, and Cypress Grove was less of a behemoth than it is now.
I started to really develop an appreciation for cheese and would seek it out.
CC: How did you get involved in the cheese industry?
NB: After graduating from the University of Utah in 2007, I moved back home to San Francisco. While looking through craigslist for a job, I saw an ad looking for “passionate foodies” to work at a company called AG Ferrari. This was a small San Francisco Bay Area chain of specialty Italian food stores. I landed that job in 2008.
I was initially more into wine and thought about being a sommelier as a day job. However, the longer I worked there, the more cheese started to connect with me. The store sold all Italian cheeses at the time, and to this day it is something I’m well versed in.
Fast forward a few years, and I moved to Chicago and didn’t work in cheese. Instead, I committed myself to theater. When I attended graduate school in the U.K. in 2011, I moved to Scotland.
I lived in Glasgow, and George Mewes was establishing a shop there similar to Neal’s Yard Dairy. It offered classic British and Irish artisan cheeses, including a lot of the revivals we now know so well.
The longer I lived out there, the more I got into it. I had a monthlong residency at The Globe Theater, and the incredible Borough Market was down the street, which is where I visited Neal’s Yard Dairy’s shop for the first time.
I fell head over heels for British cheese, in this beautiful cheese shop that was unlike anything in America. It included full wheels of cheddars and territorials along the walls, beautiful British artisan cheeses right and left sitting open in the cool air. I was googly-eyed for it!
“There is nothing more affirming than the moment when someone puts their trust in you to find something delicious and tries a cheese you think is great.”
~ Nick Bayne
In 2013, I moved to New York to act with few connections, and unsurprisingly, I ended up miserable. I loved performing, rehearsing and devising, but I didn’t love the game and hustle of the theater industry, so I scored a job at Dean & Deluca, first in the charcuterie department, and then in cheese.
In late 2013, after a frustrating audition, I had a moment of clarity. There were two things I loved — cheese and theater — and cheese was the only thing that was making me happy. The decision was easy. I took my foot off the pedal for theater, and went for it with cheese.
I was accepted to work at the Bedford Cheese Shop, then run by Charlotte Kamin. I wanted a career in cheese, and I had to learn the trade at a cheese shop that I thought was amazing. I needed someone who would train me and nurture that love — Bedford Cheese Shop absolutely did. So much of what I do today was introduced to me at their shops in Williamsburg and Gramercy.
CC: Discuss the highlights of your career.
NB: I learned by strong and rigid and comprehensive training about artisan cheeses. Bedford Cheese Shop had an overall rotation of about 600 different cheeses, and 200 in the shop at any given time. For someone like me with an encyclopedic memory, there was so much to learn and absorb.
Also, at the time at Bedford, there was cheese maturation going on, mostly late-stage affinage typical of French fromageries. I learned how to take care of washed rind cheeses, natural rinds, bloomies, and cheese on the counter, and how to talk to people about them. Using the storytelling techniques I learned as an actor and educating people is one of the things I love the most about cheese.
It’s not only our responsibility to communicate the provenance, story and hard work behind every cheese to our customers, but also to find the right cheese for them. I want to give every person a little memorable tidbit that they will take home, connect with and enjoy. It became more than a job — but something that beckoned to my very soul. And oh my goodness, there were amazing cheesemongers at Bedford, brilliant and passionate souls who taught me so much.
I started working at their Gramercy shop and moved to the store on Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. It was an incredible, small, cozy home of a place. Customers wanted to learn and were interested in food.
In 2015, I entered The Cheesemonger Invitational (CMI). Adam Moskowitz, who created the competition, was a customer of our shop. He was so passionate about cheese, and suggested that I should enter the invitational. I threw my hat in and did my best, wanting to have fun and learn a lot.
Day one of CMI is always spent on education, and I learned a lot and met people who to me were icons, like Betty Koster and Mateo Kehler. These people were like faces on Mount Rushmore to me, and they just wanted to share everything about what they do.
It was a brilliant experience. I sat in a room with 49 other people entered to compete who were just as crazily into cheese as I was. It was a community I didn’t realize I had.
I had a great time, and the actual competition was the next day. I was really just aiming to challenge myself, but out of absolutely nowhere, I won! Just a small number of cheesemongers win in their first year of competing, so none of us expect it. I had the time of my life. Suddenly, my cheese world exploded more than I was prepared for. Industry people knew who I was, invited me to things, and reached out.
In 2016, I left Bedford Cheese for my first job as a head cheesemonger at Mekelburg’s in Brooklyn. That went OK, but I had zero experience purchasing. I spent eight months there before we realized it wasn’t working.
Looking for a new job, I made a beeline for a shop I had been admiring for the past year called Foster Sundry. The owner, Aaron Foster, was looking for someone to take on a lot of the cheese work, and I leaped at the opportunity. That place shaped me in many ways. Foster is a remarkably generous spirit who not only taught me so much about how to manage a cheese section, but also how to treat the people who work for you and how to curate an absolutely amazing store.
In 2016, I also had a really bad run of mental health and a bad breakup, which impacted my work badly. In a stroke of luck, in February 2017, I met the person who was to be my wife at a musical theater piano bar in the West Village. She was a circus artist, and a few months into our relationship found an opportunity in the U.K., where I had been longing to return ever since graduate school.
After a lot of discussion, we got married in Central Park and moved to London in January 2018. In anticipation of the move, I wrote to several cheese companies in the U.K. looking for work, but none had positions available. However, the wonderful Jason Hinds, then sales director of Neal’s Yard Dairy, happened to know that his friend John Siddall, owner of The Fine Cheese Co., was looking for a cheesemonger at his London shop.
I took the tube to Belgravia to meet with Siddall, ended up enjoying a two-hour conversation, and the next day I had an offer to join the company.
About six months later, my wife was accepted to train at Circomedia in Bristol. Somehow, I had lucked into working for a company that is based in nearby Bath, and so moving to the Southwest was a natural fit.
I joined The Fine Cheese Co.’s original shop on Walcot Street in Bath in September 2018, and over the next several years occupied roles of cheesemonger, team lead, and even shop manager. I oversaw the shop through the COVID crisis, and it became my home and deep passion. It’s such a beautiful cheese shop in a Georgian city with 300-year-old buildings and stocked to the gills with delicious artisan cheeses and our iconic biscuits.
My job has changed since then. A couple of years ago, I was offered the opportunity to move to the company’s headquarters outside of Bath to become a cheese specialist. I became responsible for sourcing all the artisan cheese we imported from Europe to the U.K.
From day one of my cheese career, I have worked with an international selection of cheeses, which has armed me with the perfect background for finding wonderful European producers. Working in the same location as our cheese maturation rooms, has also afforded me the opportunity to become once again involved with some affinage.
I have also been teaching Academy of Cheese classes, writing in our brochures, and of course, getting to help our sales team learn about the delicious food we sell. This has all been in collaboration with a wonderful, passionate team of fellow Cheese Specialists, a cohort of colleagues who care deeply about the cause of artisan cheese.
Recently, I moved back to my first love: on-the-counter cheesemongering, at our shop in Bath. I will still be part of sourcing and selecting cheese, traveling to affineurs and cheesemakers in Europe to talk with and learn from them and selecting cheese. But the lion’s share of my work, will be to run the cheese shop, which is my passion.
CC: What do you like best about the industry?
NB: I just profoundly love the cheese. The aroma and flavor connect to my deepest memories.
I can be a massive nerd, openly and freely, which is not only celebrated but shared with so many other people in the industry. I love that there is such a sense of community.
Compared with the theater industry, which is dominated by egos and inaccessible people, the cheese world has a lot of pride, but a lot less exclusivity. We are proud of what we do and want to share this experience of food, creating something, telling stories; it’s amazing and a unique attribute of our industry.
CC: What’s your favorite cheese?
NB: All are my babies. Cheese is so seasonal and changes batch to batch. On the whole, I gravitate to firm cheeses from the Alps and Jura mountains (specially made from summer milk) and torta-style cheeses from Spain and Portugal.
There are so many others I fall in love with, though. I love Ossau-Iraty, Kirkham’s Lancashire, mature Gruyère and anything pungent and sticky.
CC: How has the cheese industry evolved since you’ve been in it?
NB: It has changed both in terms of economics and populations. The situation in the U.K. changed after Brexit and made the journey of cheese complex and difficult. COVID altered the British economy drastically.
For me, the most positive change I notice is in the cheesemakers and farmers. I’ve seen such a growth of interest and innovation in the U.K., particularly from younger or newer cheesemakers. They are moving from conventional to regenerative farming, from Holstein cows to mixed herds of varying breeds.
The problem with this industry has been — and remains — a lack of diversity, and the question of who takes up the mantle of the next generation.
One thing I’ve loved seeing is the newest generation of cheesemongers, with plenty of passion that needs to be nurtured. Supporting and encouraging them is something I believe in deeply, particularly when they represent diverse communities.
I’m a member of the LGBTQIA community, and fellow queer cheese professionals have been essential to my feeling of acceptance in the industry. There is a dearth of openly transgender cheesemongers who feel comfortable being open, and there is still plenty of nervousness in the industry about presenting as visibly queer because of concerns about employers and customers.
There also is a serious issue with nurturing ethnic diversity in cheese, particular in America. Cheese is a food for all people, but there’s not enough outreach and education. I believe strongly in nurturing the development of people working in cheese, and there has been positive change in that direction.
For example, I founded a group called LGBrieTQ in 2017, which at its height, helped to provide a sense of community. Far more importantly, Cheese Culture Coalition has been driving incredible outreach to increase ethnic diversity in the American cheese industry. So, efforts are being made for this support, but more needs to be done.
CC: What are your plans for the future?
NB: I’m overjoyed to be going back to the shop. I want to bring a touch of Parisian fromageries to the British scene. I don’t plan on competing in the Concours again, as third place was the most amazing and affirming experience of my career, but I want to help train the next British generation of cheesemongers, as this is not a country used to doing cheese competitions.
I also have always thought it would be amazing to have my own cheese shop. This won’t happen immediately, but maybe one day.
One thing I love doing is taking a piece of myself and sharing it with the rest of the world. It’s why I have my @thecheesemason Instagram account, why I teach classes and train, and why I like to be on the cheese counter.
There is nothing more affirming than the moment when someone puts their trust in you to find something delicious and tries a cheese you think is great. Their eyes open wide, they smile and try something they’ll love for the rest of their life.
It’s the best feeling to give that enjoyment to someone. If I can do that for the rest of my life, I’ll be very happy.
