OAK CLIFF SAYS CHEESE
New Oak Cliff boutique spices up cheese shop with exotic extras
A truth-in-advertising award should go to Cheese and Chutney, a food boutique opening in Oak Cliff that will specialize in two food groups: cheese and chutney.
The shop will sell domestic and imported cheeses, meats, and wines, plus chutneys, nuts, relishes, and chocolates. It’ll open in late spring at 1318 W. Davis St., in the former Zola’s Everyday Vintage space, which closed in 2015 after 12 years.
Cheese and Chutney is a husband-and-wife venture, with the “cheese” overseen by husband Jeff Foster, and the chutney headed up by his wife Chitra, whose Indian heritage gives her some authority on the topic.
Foster says that they were inspired by a favorite shop in Claremont, California, where they lived, called the Cheese Cave.
“When we moved back to Texas, we noticed that this area on Davis didn’t have anything like it,” he says. “We liked the idea of working for ourselves and getting out of the rat race.”
For cheese, they’ll have a lot of local cheeses, plus some personal favorites and rotating selections. The chutneys will center around nouveau selections that no one else has.
“It’ll be a cheese market, a meat market, we’ll have cutting boards and accessories and artisanal goods,” he says. That’ll include bread and wine, for impromptu sandwich-making, although they won’t be a restaurant, since they do not have a commercial kitchen.
Zola’s moved out after the building suffered a roof leak. The Fosters have started construction, but it’s an old building, and there are a number of things that need to be done to bring it up to code.
“We’re going to be purely a market, at least at first,” Jeff says. “Customers can come in and find stuff, and we’ll make trays and things to go, but we won’t be a sit-down. Some of that is driven by the fact that the space wasn’t big enough to do all that. We could grow into that. But the idea right now is a market.”
To read more, go to CultureMap Dallas, click here.
This article originally appeared on CultureMap Dallas and was written by Teresa Gubbins.
Reproduced by written permission. © 2016 CultureMap LLC. All Rights Reserved.