Rind & Rafter has been cutting cheese on Bridgeland Street since 2011. Nia Trevaskis buys and ages it; Davy Pollard cuts, wraps and drives. Between them that is the whole company, which is why the handwriting on your parcel is somebody's actual handwriting.
A Saturday board, built that morning and photographed on the bench
The cellar is Victorian stone, forty feet long, and it holds eleven degrees and ninety per cent humidity without any help from us. Four hundred wheels sit on spruce boards down there. We turn them, brush them with brine, and take one apart every few weeks to see where it has got to.
Nothing here is clever. It is mostly driving, turning and waiting.
Out to Hartland, Clovelly and Welcombe. We pay the price the dairy asks and we take whatever is ready, which some weeks is not very much.
Young wheels go onto spruce boards and get a number chalked on the shelf edge. Turned every fourth day, brushed with brine, never sealed in wax.
Two wheels are broken open every Thursday morning. If they are not right they stay down there; if they are, they go on the slate with a number and a price.
Your piece comes off the wheel the morning it leaves, goes onto the scale, into waxed paper, and gets its weight and date in pencil on the outside.
All of them are the same two people, which is why the hours are what they are.
Behind the shop on Bridgeland Street. Marble bench, two wires, a beam scale from 1952 that still passes its check. Thursday to Saturday, 9 to 5.
Pannier Market, Wednesday and Saturday, 8 to 2. Six lines on the board, everything cut in front of you, and the same prices as the shop.
The shop itself, which holds about eight people and usually has four. Taste anything that is open. Nobody will mind if you buy a hundred grams.
“We were told to pick a lane — wholesale or retail. We picked neither and kept the cellar small enough that two people can turn everything in it by hand. That is the only decision in fourteen years we have never argued about.”
Thursday to Saturday at the shop, Wednesday and Saturday on the market. Or send a note and we will write back with a board.
