Formaggio Kitchen on Huron Avenue. Photograph via Formaggio Kitchen.
When Julia Hallman first walked into Formaggio Kitchen as a student at Tufts, she had ten dollars to spend on cheese. Robert, the employee helping her behind the counter, introduced her to unfamiliar cheeses and the methods used to produce them. He offered her things to taste. They talked about what she liked, what she didn't, and why. By the time she left, Julia had spent her ten dollars on something she enjoyed and begun developing her own taste. It was her first introduction to the store she would eventually own.
By then, Formaggio Kitchen was already an established Cambridge institution. Norma Wasserman founded the shop in 1978. Ihsan Gurdal joined in 1982 and Valerie Gurdal in 1984; the two began as employees and eventually acquired the business. They developed close relationships with producers, traveled to find products difficult to obtain in the United States, and brought their discoveries home to Cambridge.
In 1996, Ihsan installed a cheese-aging cave beneath the Cambridge store at 244 Huron Avenue. Valerie opened another location in Boston's South End in 2000. By the time Hallman visited, the shop’s selection, its cave, and the expertise of its employees had given it a reputation extending well beyond its neighborhood.
What stayed with Hallman, though, was the conversation with Robert. His expertise went beyond understanding how cheese was made, washed, or aged. He knew how to help someone else discover what they liked, including someone with only ten dollars to spend.
In 2007, Julia joined Formaggio Kitchen for what was supposed to be a three-month seasonal job. Robert helped train her. She stayed, became a buyer responsible for sourcing honey, learned the importing business, and eventually took responsibility for the Cambridge flagship as general manager in 2017.
By the time the Gurdals prepared to retire, Hallman had spent more than fifteen years learning the business from the inside.
The Handoff
In 2019, another Cambridge grocery was facing the end of an era. Brothers Marc and Crosby Najarian were retiring from Fresh Pond Market, the neighborhood grocery their family had operated on Huron Avenue since 1922. They wanted to sell, but they didn't want to see the building become a CVS or another national chain. They wanted someone who would keep it a grocery, and they were willing to negotiate the price to make that happen.
The Gurdals bought the property, initially planning to continue operating Fresh Pond Market alongside Formaggio Kitchen. Renovation expenses and the pandemic changed those plans, and in March 2021, Formaggio Kitchen moved from its smaller location up the street into the former market, adding room for more produce, a butcher counter, coffee and espresso, pantry staples, and a larger selection of specialty foods.
Soon afterward, the Gurdals were ready for their own succession.
For years, they had discussed the possibility of selling Formaggio Kitchen to an employee. Hallman made sense. She had learned the business from the inside out through buying, importing, operating, and managing its flagship store, and she could explain what made the business worth preserving. She also knew how to grow the business while investing in what made it special. But according to Hallman, there was significant interest from private equity in purchasing the business. She knew she couldn't match the money an outside financial buyer could offer.
The Gurdals, like the Najarians, considered what would happen to the business after the sale. They chose to sell to Hallman.
In February 2023, Cambridge Savings Bank announced a $5.3 million lending package supporting the management buyout and providing working capital. Hallman purchased Formaggio Kitchen with her husband, Aaron Rubin, making the transition from employee to owner.
Julia had managed to secure the business. Now she could decide what it should do next.
The Cheese Case
Hallman wants buyers to find products they genuinely love, learn about the people and traditions behind them, and bring what they discover into Formaggio Kitchen. The store employs multiple buyers, each with their own interests and preferences. Hallman doesn't expect them to share her taste or one another's. She wants them to develop enough knowledge about a category and what they sell to explain what they love and introduce customers to it.
Company-wide, Formaggio Kitchen has more than 30 buyers. Each shop has buyers who manage stock and source directly for that location, while international importing is handled through Huron Avenue. The Huron Avenue shop carries approximately 300 cheeses and 5,000 unique products.
Hallman remembers when individual grocery stores had local buyers who could follow their curiosity and introduce products to their neighborhoods. Centralized purchasing brings efficiencies and economies of scale, but it can sacrifice something even more important, twice over: the buyer's delight in discovering a product they love and the customer's delight in being introduced to something they might never have known.
Julia remembers what it feels like to get excited about the food she's eating.
She loves finding products before they have an established American audience. She wants the shop to introduce things it believes deserve attention, and she sees becoming the first retailer in the country to carry them as a source of pride. But she doesn't see exclusivity as the reward for that work, or as the point of her early interest.
If Formaggio Kitchen introduces a product and the producer subsequently finds customers through other stores, Hallman considers that a good outcome. The producer can grow, more people can enjoy what they make, and the shop gets to continue carrying the product and looking for the next discovery.
Many of those producers are small artisans and family-run businesses. Formaggio Kitchen describes its approach as producer-first: the goal is not only to find products worth carrying, but to support the livelihoods of the people making them and help preserve the traditions they are upholding. The shop imports from approximately 150 international vendors across approximately 20 countries.
She recalled visiting a producer making sweet cookies with olive oil rather than butter. Being there allowed her to understand the ingredients, where they came from, and why the producer had chosen to make the cookie that way.
Back in Cambridge, that experience became part of what she could share. Someone at the shop has to introduce the product, explain what they found interesting about it, and give customers a chance and reason to taste it for themselves.
That pleasure in finding something and sharing it is especially clear in the work of Marc Hernandez, Formaggio Kitchen's Head Cheese Buyer and a cheesemonger.
Hernandez thinks about grocery shopping through four considerations: quality, convenience, location, and price. The shop isn't going to be the cheapest grocery or necessarily the nearest one. Some customers live in the neighborhood and certainly sustain the store, while others travel specifically to visit. Hernandez knows that people willing to make that trip need something worth coming for.
His approach to building a cheese case is to represent the range of possibilities within cheesemaking. His selections bring together different producers, techniques, regions, textures, and flavors. Hernandez's work is curatorial. He's assembling products that represent the knowledge, techniques, and imagination of an industry. As he learns more, his understanding of what the case can offer expands, and so does the selection.
When I asked him what he thought he was ultimately producing through that work, his answer was knowledge. For employees, the store, its customers, the neighborhood, and the broader hospitality industry.
Developing that knowledge starts with surprisingly ordinary language. Taste a cheese. Is it wet, chalky, chewy, squishy, firm? Do you like it? If not, why not?
Hernandez doesn't expect someone beginning to develop their taste to describe a cheese as reminiscent of a forest floor. They can begin with the words they already possess and keep tasting, noticing differences and learning to describe them more precisely.
The approach works for customers and new employees alike. Taste something, develop a preference, ask questions, try something else. Hernandez and the other buyers continue that practice through their relationships with producers, travel, and the products they continue to explore.
The Workhorse
Like Hallman, Hernandez sees how much of Formaggio Kitchen's work contradicts the industrial-scale sourcing, stocking, and merchandising systems of commercial grocery chains. But the economics of grocery retail haven't disappeared from his work. He still has to sell cheese.
Hernandez described a brie that does necessary economic work for the department. It's well made, better produced than many comparable cheeses, and priced at a level customers don't balk at. Someone can recognize it, buy it, and take it home without asking a cheesemonger for help.
It isn't, however, a cheese Hernandez gets excited about.
But the brie sells, and Hernandez needs it to keep selling.
He has to merchandise it somewhere customers will see it, rather than relying on a cheesemonger's enthusiasm to move it. It serves a familiar role, satisfies the shop’s quality standards, and gives customers an approachable option.
Its dependable sales also help support the cheeses Hernandez wants to explore and curate.
He doesn't work from a fixed formula for how much of the case should be practical and how much exploratory. The balance changes with demand, the needs of the business, and the products he and the other buyers want to bring in. Sometimes the shop needs to carry a cheese that doesn't particularly excite its staff. It still has to be good enough to belong.
The workhorse brie finances the discoveries, and the discoveries give people reasons to come back.
A favorite seasonal peach, figs from Greece, or an incomparable French honey can draw customers into the store. Those products give the shop a particular gravity. They create an association with quality and delight, and anticipation for the next product someone might find there that gives them the same sense of joy.
Someone comes back for a particular fruit, cheese, or honey, and while they're there, they discover something else. Other purchases make the store useful throughout the week, and the special products give people reasons to make a trip even when another grocery might be closer or less expensive.
Formaggio Kitchen's buyers keep finding things worth introducing, customers keep developing new interests, and the selection changes with them.
The People Who Make It
Hallman wants the people working at Formaggio Kitchen to enjoy sharing their excitement about the products. She hires for "people people": individuals who are passionate about food but equally interested in sharing that passion with shoppers. It's not enough just to be an expert.
Early in her career, Hallman, who is five-foot-one, learned that coming out from behind the counter, removing the barrier between her and the customer, made conversations easier. Standing beside someone relaxed the interaction and made it easier to engage around products.
Customers tell Hallman about products they've encountered while traveling, suggest things the store might carry, and introduce staff to foods they haven't yet tried. Julia continues spending time on the floor partly because those conversations give her ideas about what to look for next.
Formaggio Kitchen is also designed to encourage different ways of engaging with the store, creating new reasons to visit. The sidewalk barbecue, tastings, classes, dinners, and cave tours create opportunities to encounter products through an experience. Hallman has made an effort to keep certain everyday offerings, including coffee, deliberately inexpensive because they provide a low-risk entry point into the store.
Someone might first come for coffee, return for a tasting, and eventually develop a particular interest in the cheeses or products the staff introduce them to.
On any given day, a team of six to ten chefs and cooks prepare meals for the neighborhood. Menus are planned each weekend for the following week around seasonal local produce, fish, and proteins. Hallman describes the shelves as a playground for the chefs. They use products sold in the shop, including Parmigiano Reggiano from the whole wheels cracked at the cheese counter, olive oil from the shelves, and meat often butchered in-house. In that way, the store is as much a pantry for the kitchen as it is for the neighborhood.
Making More Possible
Hallman regularly asks managers two questions: What do you like most about your work right now, and what do you like least?
She considers whether changing the kitchen layout could increase productivity, whether moving one operation might give another room to grow, or whether a different workflow would free an employee to spend more time developing the work they enjoy.
She's particularly interested in changes that solve more than one problem.
There is an economy of movement and attention in her approach. A better arrangement of space means employees spend less time working around obstacles. A manager freed from a persistent operational problem can focus on developing something new. Improvements in one department can create opportunities elsewhere.
The point isn't simply to make Formaggio Kitchen more efficient. It's to reduce the friction and constraints that take attention away from expanding the store's ability to deliver the experience of engaging with a Formaggio Kitchen product or employee.
Hallman can imagine additional Formaggio Kitchen stores. In her fourth year of ownership, she's beginning to think about those possibilities over a longer period.
She describes her first years as a progression from the excitement of buying Formaggio Kitchen to the administrative realities of financing, vendors, insurance, staffing, payroll, and the systems that determine what a store can do. By the third year, she began to feel those systems working more reliably. In the fourth, her attention has shifted from addressing immediate problems toward building the business she wants the shop to become.
One of her goals is to pay down the acquisition debt within roughly a decade. That would give Formaggio Kitchen more financial flexibility, but Hallman has another ambition connected to that goal.
She wants someone else who has developed within Formaggio Kitchen to have the opportunity to own it someday, just as she did.