Stinky Cheese Week begins today at the Tour de France restaurant group, whose many francophile eateries include casual bistros to more upscale brasseries. The annual festival turns nine this week with dedicated menus of fragrant fromage unique to each of their eateries. If you can't smell it from across the room, it ain't stinky enough.
Of course, to describe a cheese as "stinky" is to lose some of the audience—exactly why Murray's Cheese Program Manager Rachel Freier prefers "beefy and porky"—but to the well-initiated, a cheese that smells like a sock is exactly what we love the most. Still, at a recent press preview at Marseille in Midtown West to herald SCW, dishes like a bisque made with raclette and an excellent halibut crusted with taleggio didn't have the knock-your-knickers off punch one might expect. The dishes were balanced, with just a touch of funk to remind diners of the cheese of the hour.
Each restaurant has its own specials [pdf], but most are doing some kind of soup—the Saint Andre Cheese Soup at L'Express on Park Avenue sounds particularly appealing—and many are offering a traditional raclette service, which you'll recall involves using a heater to melt an alpine-style cheese over potatoes, cornichons and some type of cured meat. It goes without saying it's a simple and delicious way to truly experience the flavor of the cheese.
Desserts aren't exempt from the versatile cheese treatment, with milder offerings like a Ricotta Tart fortified with Fourme d'Ambert—an ancient French blue cheese—at Pigalle and a fluffy-and-buttery Blue Cheese Mille Feuille with date jam and pecan praline at Nice Matin on the Upper West Side.
Stinky Cheese Week runs through February 28th at all eight Tour de France restaurants.
