Does the Triangle like cheese enough to have a cut-to-order cheese shop? That’s the question Michelle and Stevie Webb asked themselves when they moved to the Triangle in the fall of 2020.
While several local businesses made and sold cheese—Boxcarr Handmade Cheese, Chapel Hill Creamery, and Hillsborough Cheese Company, among others—there wasn’t a stand-alone shop where people could choose from a wide array of cut-to-order cheese products.
The Webbs decided to try to answer that question and fill the gap themselves, opening their own cheese business in 2022.
In just three years, the Cheese Shop has gone from selling six to eight cheese varieties at pop-ups and farmers’ markets to selling roughly 30 options inside a small counter at Carrboro restaurant and wine bar Glasshalfull and now opening what will soon be their own location with a new moniker to boot.
“When we first had the idea, I really wanted to try and re-create the feeling of going into a [cheese] shop when I was a little kid,” Stevie, who grew up in Great Britain, says. “It’s not going shopping, it’s an experience, and I think we’ve re-created that.”
Restaurant and shop Wedgewood Cheese Bar is slated to open in early May in the old Carolina Car Wash building in Carrboro, where Stevie estimates the shop will keep 75–100 cheeses available inside of its 18-foot cheese case.
Wedgewood also has 15 seats around a U-shaped bar for people to hang out at and have small plates, cured meats, or a glass of wine from a selection curated by sommelier Paula de Pano of Rocks + Acid Wine Shop. The shop’s interior, with its cerulean-blue bar, vintage food prints, and orderly rows of tinned fish, looks lifted from a Wes Anderson movie.
The Webbs have experienced their fair share of hurdles getting Wedgewood open. The shop’s original opening date was planned for the fall of 2024, then shifted to spring. In March, the couple experienced another setback: due to a major equipment malfunction, they lost 200 pounds of cheese.
Although they say it was hard to ask for help, the Webbs turned to social media and their community of customers to help recoup the loss. The goal was to raise $10,000 to cover the costs of the lost cheese, but Michelle says they ended up with $30,000 in gift card sales and donations.
“The outpouring of support that we got from our customers and people that come to see us every week was just so heartwarming, so validating that we do know that we’ve built this great following because we are super passionate,” she says. “We want to acknowledge that it’s been a huge community effort to help us get here.”
While Stevie originally started out “in kitchens”— even receiving training from The Great British Bakeoff’s Prue Leith and knowing just enough about cheese to be dangerous—his true love for cheese blossomed when he was a paramedic in New York City.
Stevie, who worked in emergency medicine for a decade, says he decided that one day a week, he needed to do something completely different to keep his sanity. He found a job at a “fancy little grocery store” in Brooklyn as the cheesemonger.
“It was the best day of the week because all I did was give people pieces of cheese and tell stories about them and see smiles on their faces. Nobody died, and nobody crashed into the cheese case, and nobody started a fight with me.”
“It was the best day of the week because all I did was give people pieces of cheese and tell stories about them and see smiles on their faces,” he says. “Nobody died, and nobody crashed into the cheese case, and nobody started a fight with me.”
And now, after taking what the two call lots of incremental steps over the past few years with the business, the Webbs are now on the precipice of opening Wedgewood.
Stevie says they initially started with a focus on local cheeses. While they still try to stock local varieties, he says, over time, customers have become more and more adventurous with what they want to see in the store.
“[People] want to try something new, they want to try something weird, they want to have something they’ve never had before,” he says. “They want to be challenged with their cheeses, which makes it difficult for us, because we have to keep upping the ante on the stuff that we find.”
The hardest question Stevie gets is what his favorite cheese is. And while he says it’s near impossible to answer, one of the ones he loves that he wishes people would try more of is the British cheese Appleby’s Cheshire, which he describes as a “really nice crumbly cheddar that’s not a cheddar, that’s light and refreshing as well.”
For Michelle, the answer is easy. “I like to say that my favorite cheese is butter,” she says, specifically the Isigny Ste Mere Beurre de Baratte kind, with its golden hue and crunchy, salty flakes.
Wedgewood will host its first of many cheese classes on Wednesday, May 14, so the Webbs are determined to have the shop doors open by then.
“It’s very real this time,” Michelle laughs.
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