It’s easy for cheese lovers to get their fix in Whistler. At Il Caminetto restaurant, executive chef Mark Mcloughlin makes fresh ricotta for gnocchi and for crostini sprinkled with hazelnuts. At French’eese, Mickael Loiodice imports the fromage of his childhood, thousands of kilometres away in France. And Flute & Fromage, a cheese shop and cheese-centric dining patio owned by Tara May, carries 60 to 80 hard-to-find cheeses from Europe and Eastern Canada.
Whatever the variety — ricotta, raclette, Reblochon — these cheese aficionados are keeping Whistler well-stocked.
There’s a bounty of products in the Sea to Sky region, but cheese from local farms is not one of them (so far!). Roughly 50 percent of Canadian cheese is made in Quebec, according to Les Producteurs de lait du Québec, a dairy trade organization. In B.C., cheesemakers are concentrated in the Fraser Valley and on Vancouver Island. BC Dairy reports that 77 percent of the province’s milk production comes from Fraser Valley farms, where the terrain is most suitable to raising dairy cattle.
“People don’t have that access to fresh milk that we see in the Fraser Valley,” says Mcloughlin about the Sea to Sky Corridor. Or to fresh cheese. “But there are cheeses like ricotta that you can do at home.” He began making cheese during his nine years at Araxi Restaurant, where he rose through the kitchen ranks before moving to Il Caminetto in 2019.
Photo by Allison Kuhl
“You can buy quality Italian or Canadian ricotta,” he acknowledges. “Yet a big reason we continue to make it is that it’s our craft. It’s an important skill to pass on to the restaurant’s more junior cooks. I don’t think I’ve ever had a young cook come in here who had seen ricotta made before. It’s exciting for them to create something from scratch.”
Mcloughlin describes ricotta as “a good starter cheese” for novice cheesemakers. It’s relatively simple to produce, has only three ingredients (milk, an acid and salt) and doesn’t require long storage. And making it yourself is “a labour of love.”
Loiodice’s love of cheese began in Morzine, the ski town in the French Alps he was raised in. His family owned a restaurant at the base of the mountain where, he recalls, “I started to make pizza when I was four years old.” Their menu highlighted traditional Alpine dishes like fondue and raclette, made with cheeses that the family sourced from a neighbouring farm.
After coming to Whistler to ski, he found a job and never left. Yet he missed the culinary traditions that he had grown up with: the leisurely meals, the fondue on the mountain. He launched French’eese to bring the experiences of his family’s restaurant to his new community.
Loiodice now imports pasteurized goat’s and sheep’s milk cheeses and unpasteurized cow’s milk cheeses, primarily from France. Cow’s milk cheeses that are made with raw milk, he argues, provide both healthy bacteria and a superior taste. Although selling raw milk in Canada has been illegal since 1991, raw milk products such as cheeses are allowed — as long as the cheese has been aged at least 60 days. The Canadian government has also granted exceptions to cheeses made in France if the producers provide proof of microbiological testing, as do the farms that produce the cheeses imported by French’eese. The cheeses then age in a temperature-controlled environment during their voyage across the Atlantic.
“I receive the best cheeses three weeks after the farm sends it from France,” says Loiodice. He sells cheeses, including Brillat-Savarin, Emmental de Savoy and Mimolette, online and at the Whistler Farmers’ Market, and also assembles and delivers cheese boxes. But his real passion is hosting private cheese-focused meals. He offers both a fondue dinner and a raclette experience, using his family’s recipes and cheese sourced from the French Alps, that he’ll prepare and serve at Whistler lodgings. A common refrain at these fondue dinners is how much guests have learned, both about cheese and about the way the French typically incorporate it into a meal.
Photo by Ian Lanterman
Like Loiodice, Tara May travelled to B.C. to ski. Her Ontario family took regular holidays at their Whistler vacation property, and by age 17, May was a competitive freestyle skier. She says she knew that someday she’d put down roots in Whistler. “When I came for the first time with my mom when I was eight, I was crying on the flight home, ‘Why don’t we live here?’”
Inspired in part by a cheese store she frequented in Ontario’s Blue Mountains, she designed Flute & Fromage to offer cheeses that were hard to find in Whistler. While she notes that B.C. does produce excellent cheeses, her shop “is focused on cheeses that you can’t get unless you drive to the city.”
Her current top seller is 5 Brothers, an Alpine-style cow’s milk cheese from Ontario’s Gunn’s Hill Artisan Cheese. Another favourite is Grey Owl, from Fromagerie le Détour in Quebec. Coated in a vegetable ash rind, “it looks wrinkly and different,” May says, but it’s creamy and zingy in the mouth. Among B.C. cheeses, she’s a fan of Petite Savoie, a soft washed-rind cheese from Creekside Cheese + Creamery in the Fraser Valley.
Her patio menu ranges from cheesy snacks like crostini with Stilton, apples and honey, to wine and cheese flights, to more substantial plates like tartiflette, a traditional dish from the French Alps made with potatoes and Reblochon or a similar soft-rind cow’s cheese. She also offers cheese-filled gift boxes and brings in seasonal specialty cheeses during the holidays. This Christmas, she’ll offer a new-to-her cheese called Grizzly from Sylvan Star Cheese in Alberta.
What May, Mcloughlin and Loiodice all acknowledge is that, no matter where their cheeses come from, it’s not just about the cheese. It’s how the cheeses provide pleasure to their customers — and bring them together. As Loiodice concludes, “It’s sharing a good taste and a good time.”
Get your cheese fix at Il Caminetto (ilcaminetto.ca), Flute & Fromage (fluteandfromage.com), French’eese (frencheesewhistler.com) and raclette and fondue pop-ups throughout Whistler.
