I knew when I went to the launch of High Cheese at The Westin that Jeremy Spradbery from Supercheese would be a great person to talk to, and visiting his Richmond shop proved it. We stood together beside his impressive hero fridge: a glorious line-up of cheeses that each show off their style, while he told me how he became a self‑professed curd nerd, weaving in stories from kitchens, farms, and festivals around the world. His enthusiasm was irresistible, and I walked out not only with a deeper appreciation for cheese, but with a beautifully curated selection for my dinner party this weekend.
Conversation with a cheese: Hi Jeremy, it’s so great to be at Super Cheese. I met you at the High Cheese Launch event at the Westin, and I really love the way that you talked so fondly about cheese. I knew you’d have some great stories to tell. I’ve come into this shop, and, for such a small space, it’s got a lot of really big personality. Tell me about super cheese.
Jeremy Spradbery: Yes, Supercheese was born out of an idea I had in about 2019. I’d been in and out of the food world for a long time. I had a long career in the world of cheese, working for the likes of Will Studd, and was lucky enough to travel the world and visit lots of beautiful cheesemakers and go to cheese festivals. I had a bit of a break from that and did something quite different, which involved, of all things, IT consulting, which allowed me to travel a lot. Then, of course, when COVID struck, and all travel stopped, I was stuck behind a desk in front of a camera, doing everything online, which was doable, but it just didn’t interest me. I decided to get back into the world of cheese, because I had a little bit of money from my father’s estate. He died in 2019. I thought I would open up a cheese shop in the suburb that I live in. We’re here in Richmond. This is my local area. I know lots of the locals here who come in, and I just wanted to create a fun, but high-quality cheese shop showcasing beautiful, local, and international cheeses.
It sounds like it’s your village, like in Europe, there’s always the village cheese shop, and the village bakery, and all those kinds of things.
That’s exactly what I wanted to do. We are on the high street on Swan Street. It does have a bit of a village feel. People who live in Richmond say they live on the island, and it does have a village feel.
We were looking at your hero fridge, which is an incredible, I was going to say, beast of a fridge, but that doesn’t sound quite right, but it’s huge. It has all your hero cheeses in it. What does it take for a cheese to be a hero?
Well, the cheeses in here are exceptional examples of the style. What I like to do is showcase the cheeses by unwrapping them as much as possible, so people can see the colours and textures, and even get to smell some of the aromas when we open up the fridge, and there’s all sorts of beautiful things in there, from soft goat cheeses from France, to locally produced ones. Along the top shelf, we’ve got a whole range of alpine cheeses, most of which are raw milk, which I’m a really big fan of. Raw milk cheeses are super exciting, and we are lucky enough to have a few Australian producers making raw milk cheeses which is really great. And then a big section of blue cheeses, and then all sorts of different cheddars on the bottom shelf, and some Dutch goudas. What does it take for cheese to get in here? It’s just an excellent example of the style, and something that we really like to champion, and anyone who comes in, we will often give people a taste of the cheeses that are in there, and that begins the conversation. Right now, we’re standing around the marble bench, which I got deliberately to create a sort of kitchen island bench feel so people can stand around in the shop, taste cheese, and hear the stories about what we’ve got.
It’s beautiful. What is this cheese? It looks like it’s running away.
Yes, that’s it. Gorgonzola Cremosa. It’s fun. We scoop that with an ice cream scoop. What I have done in the past for events, which is really cool, is do a little scoop of that into a waffle cone with honey and almond praline on top. A little play on an ice cream cone.
So delicious. I’m a French teacher, and I spent a year in the south of France, and so when I see the little crottins de chèvre, that just makes me feel, like I’m in my other home. Well, I love having French cheeses in the cabinet, because the French, and not just the French, but particularly the French, absolutely know their cheeses, and what makes me really happy is when a French customer comes in, and they recognise things from home, and the cheeses, the aromas, and flavours, take them back to their homeland, which is really cool. I lived in France for a while and was able to pick up French reasonably well back then, so it’s really nice to converse with my French customers in a little bit of broken French.
Cheesemaking is a very simple process. You’ve got milk, salt, rennet, cultures, and then time to mature the cheese. But it all starts with the farm and the pasture and the soil to get the right kind of milk, the breed of cattle is also really important, and those factors highly influence what sort of cheese can be made or is best to be made from that milk. Often us cheese people will talk about those things: the farm, what sort of pasture they like to focus on. Then the making techniques: how they treat the milk, whether it be a very traditional quick set of the curds and whey, or some producers like to have an overnight fermentation of the milk, and so there’s lots of technical stuff that us curd nerds, like to get into.
Jeremy Spradbery, Supercheese
How many cheeses do you have in the shop?
It fluctuates between 90 and 110 different cheeses. Of course, through the summer months, in the lead up to Christmas, we really pile up the shop, so we’ve probably got maybe even 120 different cheeses, which is a lot. For a good cheese shop to sort of stand on its reputation, you need to have a lot of different cheeses so that you cover all the styles and flavour profiles for customers.
Is it mainly people coming in to get cheese to have at a dinner party and do on? I know you’re getting ready for a catering job. Do you do a bit of catering as well?
Yes, I do quite a bit of catering. That’s a growing part of the business. People will order cheese platters, and they leave the selection up to us, and depending on how big a platter they want, we usually have five or six, or maybe even seven different cheeses on there, and I’ll portion it all up, and make it look really pretty, and garnish it with all the nice things on there, and then they come and pick it up. I also do cheese and wine tastings, both here in the shop, but also at offices. So, we do corporate events, large companies, they might have a social club that want to do a cheese and wine night, and they’ll book me in for that, and they’re always good fun.
How do you find out about different cheeses?
Having worked for a cheese importer and distributor for a long time, you hear about them on the grapevine, you’re always chasing them. You hear about new dairies popping up. Throughout the year, there are a number of festivals in Australia, as well as overseas. I’ve been to a few of those, which are really exciting. There are yearly events, such as salons de fromage, where all the great cheesemakers descend on Paris and have little stalls, and you spend a few days wandering around, chatting to all the people, and discovering new cheeses, and then hopefully try and secure an arrangement, to get them into Australia. And then with Australian producers, it’s a small market, so you find out fairly quickly who’s doing something, and people come into the shop with some new cheeses that they’re doing, and they’ll offer me some samples, which is great. Then we discuss how we progress, and if they’re great cheeses, they find a spot in the shop.
When cheese people get together, what do they talk about? They are probably quite a different conversation to the one that I, as a novice, is having with you. What do you talk about?
Often, it’s a combination of the farm where the milk is sourced from. Cheesemaking is a very simple process. You’ve got milk, salt, rennet, cultures, and then time to mature the cheese. But it all starts with the farm and the pasture and the soil to get the right kind of milk, the breed of cattle is also really important, and those factors highly influence what sort of cheese can be made or is best to be made from that milk. Often us cheese people will talk about those things: the farm, what sort of pasture they like to focus on. Then the making techniques: how they treat the milk, whether it be a very traditional quick set of the curds and whey, or some producers like to have an overnight fermentation of the milk, and so there’s lots of technical stuff that us curd nerds, like to get into.
Are there rules around cheese? Do you really have to drink the right wine with the right cheese?
Oh, all rules are meant to be broken, but there are guidelines. For example, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend drinking a big Shiraz with a soft goat’s cheese, because you won’t get the flavour profile of the cheese. All you’ll taste is wine with the textural elements going on the palate. But not necessarily the flavours of the cheese. Whereas if you pair the goat’s cheese with a Sancerre or a beautifully made Sauvignon Blanc, both will start to shine, and you can taste both, and they, in fact, will elevate each other. Pairing strong blue cheeses with something sweet is a really nice combination. You’ve got those contrasting flavours that you can work on. So, the classic would be Stilton, and a glass of port, or Roquefort and Sauternes. Now, if you like drinking red wine with blue cheese, sure, go for it. If that’s your thing, do it. But when we do cheese and wine tastings, we like to match things together, so they are in balance and in harmony, and ideally, lift each other up.
I think being a chef, being in hospo, there’s this desire to please people, make people happy. That’s what we ultimately are trying to do: give pleasure to people. When you see someone walk out of the shop with a really beautiful piece of cheese and they’ve heard the story, that makes me really happy. That’s what gets me up every day to do what I do. The hospitality side of me is very ingrained.
Jeremy Spradbery, Supercheese
Let’s have a chat about High Cheese, because I really love the way you worked and with the chef at The Westin to create that. How did that all come about?
In the past, the Westin has worked with other cheese identities, other cheese mongers, and they decided to take a different tack this year, and they went on the lookout for another cheesemonger, and through one of their suppliers. They put me in contact with the exec chef there, Apoorva, and we had an initial discussion, which was really great. Apoorva and some of his team came into the shop one day to show me a few of the initial ideas, and then I threw a couple of curveballs at him to see what he thought about it. One of those was the Emile goat cheese that we have here, I love to serve with honeycomb and a little bit of fresh thyme. And he took that away, and decided to add it in a little bit of lavender to it, so he took our initial ideas, played with that. Then we have a really cool fruity hot sauce from the Tasty Stuff, which, when I first was approached about stocking that line, I really didn’t know if they would go with cheese, but they go great with cheese. I wanted Apoorva to try something a bit different. I gave him some of the apricot and habanero hot sauce, which he then took away to make a Basque cheesecake. And then they have these little pipettes to infuse that hot sauce into the Basque cheesecake, which is really cool and clever. We bounced off each other with some ideas, and, of course, I do have a chef background, going back a long time ago. So, I was sort of able to get my head around some of the things that he was trying to create and give him some extra inspiration for the menu.
I actually didn’t realise it goes for so long. It’s already on, and it’s been on for a few weeks now, and it runs until October, but you were saying that there’s going to be a menu change.
There is. In August, there will be a menu change. So right now, it’s heavily focussed on warmer style dishes. A little bit of a theme is Earth, so there’s a lot of earthy elements to it. Then in August, as we lead into the change of season into spring, Apoorva introduced a few more, sort of lighter, brighter, cooler things for the new menu of high cheese.
It’s interesting, isn’t it? Like, yes, there are different seasonal cheeses as well, or is it more that our palate is different at different times of the year?
Seasonality is critical in cheese. The structure of the milk changes through the year. In autumn, you’ve got a different structure of the milk, so certain cheeses don’t make so well at that time of the year. A very good example would be goat’s milk. Goats typically don’t lactate year round, and they are at their peak in spring, and then at about this time of the year, so we’re now in July, a lot of the goat herds get dried up, so we no longer see any of the Australian soft goat’s cheeses, and there’s one in particular, I’ve only got a few left until the new season begins. Seasonality is really, really critical. Spring milk always makes the best cheese, and then in autumn, you might have a higher protein content in the milk, so you make a different style of cheese there, and there are some classic French equivalents.
You were mentioning that you started out as a chef? Was that your first career?
Yes, indirectly. I always wanted to be a chef when I was at high school. I really wanted to leave at 16 or 17 to start an early apprenticeship. A wise man talked me out of doing that, suggesting that if I could prove to someone I can learn, then I can go and do just about anything I want. I stuck it out to finish up high school, and I took a year off, and I spent about six months working on a farm in France. It was a Ferme Auberge. There was a kitchen, and it had bed and breakfast style accommodation. On the weekends, we would host big weddings with100, 150 people, and so the kitchen was a really focal part of my time in France. During the day, I was a farmer, and at night, I was in the kitchen helping out. That really influenced my interest and passion for food. When I came back to Australia, I thought, oh, maybe I should be a chef, and then I decided to follow my father’s footsteps and start a science degree, but I just knew all along that I really wanted to be a chef. Ultimately, I left all that behind, and worked in some restaurants in Hobart as a kitchen hand, and I thought, Well, if I’m going to do this, I should do it properly. I moved to Sydney to work for what I thought at the time, was one of the best restaurants around. That was Bilson’s, with Guillaume Brahimi. I had three and a half years working with Guillaume, which was an amazing experience. Intense, really intense, but his technique and passion for high quality food is still with me. I then ended up working for Tony Bilson. That was in about 1999 at his restaurant then called Ampersand. I came to Melbourne in 2000 and did a short stint with Jacques Reymond. Then I had a nice, long stint working for Philippe Mouchel at Langton’s, and Philippe was a fantastic mentor and leader of a great brigade, and it was a lot of fun. Then my last chef job was head chef of Bistro d’Orsay on Collins Street. That was back in the day when it went from Café d’Orsay and they extended the restaurant space and it became Bistro d’Orsay, and I jumped on board to head the kitchen there. Which I loved. I sometimes miss the thrill and excitement of service, but I still get to cook a lot. And in the cheese shop, I still use a lot of the skills that I learn as a chef in what I do here. Food is never terribly far away from what I do in my career.
That’s really fascinating that you mention Philippe Mouchel. The chef that I just spoke to in Queenscliff worked for him, and he just speaks so highly of him as a mentor, and still has a really great friendship with him now. He really shaped the way that Mike went on his journey when he left Australia to go and work in London. He told him where he should go and all that kind of thing. I haven’t spoken to Philippe. I must.
He’s a fabulous man. He’s a very gentle, kindhearted man, and he earns the respect of his brigade through this calmness. We always worked so hard to, not to please him, but he was just such a nice guy to work for, and you always wanted to get the thing right just for him, and sometimes he would look at a dish or look at a garnish, and you would know that it wasn’t right. He never raised his voice. He never got fiery in the kitchen, and he set this incredible standard through that calmness, and he was such a gentleman.
I think it must be such an asset to have someone that has your background working here, and then when you do work in with chefs like Apoorva and others, just having that background knowledge would be great.
It really does help. I suppose another thing that really helps is, there’s a mentality in hospitality. There’s a way of working. There’s an urgency, there’s a speed, there’s a hustle that is instilled in you, having spent so much time in kitchens, and I use that now when I’m doing events and catering. I really draw on that experience to get things done at a very, very high level, but always remaining calm and executing. Prior to you coming into the shop today, Jo, I was thinking, oh, what is it that really makes me tick, and do what I do? I think being a chef, being in hospo, there’s this desire to please people, make people happy. That’s what we ultimately are trying to do: give pleasure to people. When you see someone walk out of the shop with a really beautiful piece of cheese and they’ve heard the story, that makes me really happy. That’s what gets me up every day to do what I do. The hospitality side of me is very ingrained.
What are you most looking forward to over the next few months to a year for Supercheese?
Well, the shop has been open for three and a half years now. It has been a particularly tough year with all of the weird things going on in the world. So what I’m really looking forward to and hoping for is that as things settle and ease, people will start to branch out a little bit more, come out of their shells a bit more, and come and experience the beautiful things that we do here. I’m really looking forward to the new menu change at High Cheese at the Westin, and then, of course, we start moving into spring, it starts getting a bit warmer. People are out and about a bit more, and so there are some fun times coming up. Christmas is always a really exciting time for anyone in the world of food retail, because it gets hectic.
I’m having people over for dinner on Saturday night. I’m cooking for eight. I am going to buy some cheese from you. What’s, the perfect cheese for a cheese course. What should I get?
So many options that we have to consider here. I’m assuming you’re going to do the traditional thing and have cheese after the main course and before the dessert, which is how the French like to do it. I am a fan of having cheese before a meal, but I do like a little cheese plate after the main course. I think it’s always fun to have something like a proper Normandy Camembert. I do like that style of cheese, so we’ve got some really good examples of that. A big favourite, at the moment, is I’ve got a goat’s cheese from Little Cedar, who are based in Winton near Benalla. This is the end of their season, and they’ve got some really beautiful cheeses. They are eating really, really nicely now. I do like a washed rind. So, something like, Epoissé, the burgundian washed rind is really cool. For a hard cheese, I’m constantly tossing up between an Alpine style cheese or something like a really great Tasmanian cheddar. I’m a big fan of Pyengana cheddar, which is Australia’s oldest continually produced cheese. They’ve been making it for 130 years in the same factory. So I’d probably lean towards the Pyengana, and no cheeseboard is complete without a blue. So, the blue that’s making us excited at the moment is a blue cheese from Prom Country who are based in Gippsland, and they make a really fine blue that they wash in some Pouilly-Fumé, the wine, and then they wrap the cheese in the vine leaves from the Pouilly-Fumé grapes that have also been steeped in some Pouilly-Fumé. Really cool, slightly crumbly, a little bit creamy on the outside. Great flavour. So, that’s what I would probably suggest.
Sold. I’ve got two French people amongst the party as well, so they’ll be happy.
I like to mix it up between some local stuff and imported. It’s really important to celebrate the Australian cheesemakers that we have. And we’ve got some really great ones in Victoria, Tasmania, and actually, also in Queensland, there’s some really good cheeses coming out of there.
I’m often asked, what is your favourite cheese, or what should I go with? I scratch my head sometimes and I think, oh, there are so many good cheeses to pick from. So, more often than not, it comes down to a mood or a feeling or a vibe. I like to ask people, what they are drinking with their cheeses, and that might guide me in a certain direction. Then we’ll come up with something delicious.
Supercheese, 121 Swan Street, Richmond