Meet the French Chef Behind LA’s Underground Cheese Cart

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Food

Meet the French Chef Behind LA’s Underground Cheese Cart

For chef Laurent Quenioux of the underground supper club Bistro LQ, raw cheeses are a way of life. His cheese cart is exclusively filled with raw cheeses from around the world that he smuggles in himself.

Raw cheese is not a crime.

For people like Laurent Quenioux of the underground supper club Bistro LQ in Los Angeles, it is a way of life. His cheese cart is exclusively filled with raw cheeses from around the world that he smuggles in himself. It's become something of an urban legend within LA's food community—to say that he has a cult following would be an understatement.

Dining table at the pop-up

He hosts two dinner pop-ups a month at his house and occasionally helms raw seafood and cheese bar residences at nearby restaurants. "I don't want to own restaurants anymore, I really don't," Quenioux says. "Everyone always leave so happy from here, nobody breaks my balls. It is wonderful." He has four employees who work with him during each session.

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At a little over 50 years young, the chef has owned five restaurants, but he decided to leave brick-and-mortars behind in 2009 in favor of cooking for guests in the comfort his own home. "Doing this in an underground setting allows me to do much more for customers, and it is also quite the thrill for them," Quenioux tells me. He swears that as soon as he made the switch to this DIY form of hospitality, he fell in love with cooking all over again.

Guests and the sous chef

On a Saturday night, I join a group of a dozen strangers at Quenioux's home in the hills of Highland Park. They've each purchased a $125 ticket online and have come just to get a taste of this cheese cart, which only appears at the end of a nine-course prix-fixe dinner with wine pairings.

The group of people at this particular dinner and cheese service—which Quenioux named "MaMaison's Last Winter Series 3.0"—is made up of mostly elderly couples. The tidbits of conversation I overhear during the Champagne cocktail hour are exactly what I had imagined.

Octopus, watercress tapioca pudding, epazote, achiote

"The best meal I ever had was at The Fat Duck," says one man who has attended this pop-up two times previously. Another elderly couple who drove 20 miles from Santa Monica complains about the time they got charged $50 for a burrata salad during a stay in New York City during Fashion Week.

As the maître d' instructs everyone to take a seat at a big, makeshift dinner table in the living room, everyone starts shaking hands and socializing with one another, all the while exchanging restaurant recommendations. Soon, the first course comes out: wagyu with Santa Barbara uni, caviar de Sologne, Coromandel oyster tartare, grated fresh wasabi, and thick chickpea socca. The room turns silent as Quenioux's sous chef introduces the dish and go over every detail.

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We've gotten caught at the airport three out of the last four times, and it still breaks my heart every single time they confiscate my cheeses.

This process is repeated every 20 minutes as new dishes make their way out the kitchen: seafood cassoulet with British Colombia honey mussels; foie gras parfait with a genmai tea crumb; housemade boudin noir with aligot-style mashed potatoes; octopus with watercress-epazote tapioca pudding; and a venison rib chop with chocolate and chicory velouté. At the end of the eighth course, the cheese cart—along with Quenioux—finally makes an appearance.

"Label Rouge Poularde" hen, black Perigord truffles, bottarga crumbs "

"Anyone that could be pregnant should probably stay away from these cheeses," the chef warns. He begins to name all of the cheeses, which includes a neon orange mimolette and an oozy Époisses de Bourgogne. "For anyone who is interested, I have a raw cheese from Chihuahua and Valle de Guadalupe, too." Everyone lines up to fill their plates with thickly cut wedges of each cheese, each drizzled with a black truffle honey that Quenioux infused himself.

For the next 30 minutes, the dinner guests are welcome to come back for seconds, thirds, and fourths if they'd like. Most are content with just one plate of assorted cheeses, since each type is pungent as fuck. Some hard cheeses taste like chocolate bars; other runny ones feel like taking a spoonful of penicillin to the dome.

After the dinner, Quenioux talks about some of the issues that come up when you have cheeses that are against the law on your menu. "We've gotten caught at the airport three out of the last four times, and it still breaks my heart every single time they confiscate my cheeses. Not for me personally, but for my guests, since some come for the cheese cart alone."

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Even if he claims that the cheeses are not raw on his declaration forms, customs officers will often take the cheeses to run tests on them. "They suspend the shipment and wait until you get the results. This takes around 48 hours, but since they don't refrigerate the cheese during this process, everything dies."

The art adornining the dining room.

Quenioux is the type of chef who will make you love the art of food as soon as you hear him begin to talk about it. He grew up eating raw cheeses in the Loire Valley of France, and it concerns him that some young chefs aren't into cheese anymore. That's why he risks losing hundreds of dollars each month to teach anyone who will listen about good French cheeses.

Chef Quenioux and his cheese cart

When I ask him if he's scared of getting busted by the cops or the health department, he simply responds, "You know what? Sometimes you have to live dangerously. We live in such a sterile world right now. My life has always been a little bit edgy. I wouldn't have it any other way."