Zele Community Table
December 5, 2006
5:30-6:30 PM
Michelle Kiley with Matt Malone, Philip Popson, Pat Newkam, Michael Conniff, Zele director of marketing Lisa Zimet.
Michelle Kiley: I’m the youngest of four. I say I’m an inbred, 100 percent, manic depressive alcoholic, Sheehy on one side, Kiley on the other.
Michael Conniff: And you run the Cheese Shop.
MK: My business partner is Marco Chingolani. It’s called Specialty Foods of Aspen, commonly referred to as “The Cheese Shop.” And we’re opening Wine Cellar. This is a scoop. Actually in mid-December. We held our hearing. We almost lost it at the same time we got it, so it’s pushed back to the 14th. I told this wine rep he could host this tasting. I forgot all about it until the day we had that hearing. I’d totally forgotten. Somebody came from the city. Sure enough somebody reported us. Somebody ratted me out. They had an employee who was served.
MC: What kind of wine will you have?
MK: Small-production boutique wines. Hopefully we’ll avoid conflicts with other retailers with small hard-to-find boutique wines. They will be an amazing value, but you have to take the time to find them. Most people don’t know Marco has unbelievable palate.
Lisa Zimet: Why do wine now?
MK: Just a timing issue.
Philip Popson: How long have you been open?
MK: We celebrate our third anniversary Christmas Eve. The whole thing happened in four weeks. A complete Hail Mary. We signed our lease mid-November. We met mid-October. We were business partners with no business plan, no blueprint. We should have named the store “Serendipity.”
LZ: But you were at the Cooking School of Aspen.
MK: I’d been selling cheese at the cooking school for nine months, so I had a core base of customers, and a bit of a length of time selling cheese.
Pat Newkam: She’s got great hair.
MC: I thought about it, but I decided I wasn’t going to ask about the hair.
MK: I’ve had it this way [dreadlocks] for eight years. I’ve never had to deal with it. My sister and my Mom still want to know “when you’re going to cut your hair.” Sincerely, the funniest thing about my hair is it doesn’t speak to who I am at all—I am the farthest thing from some pot-smoking hippie child. It’s no fuss no bother. Haven’t fussed with my hair for ten years.
LZ: What was Marco doing when you started the store?
MK: He had just returned from California and had a stand on the Cooper Street mall. He went to California. He had a panini operation some years ago.
PN: Where’s your store?
MK: It’s next to the Autograph place.
PK: Your window displays make me hungry.
LZ: Where are you from?
MK: Originally from Washington, D.C., the youngest of four. Bethesda. Two girls and two boys. I lived in D.C. for ten years. I went to AU [American University] and got a degree in economics and international relations. I went to work for Whole Foods.
MC: Are they coming here:
MK: No it’s not coming to the Valley with a 65,000 to 85,000 square foot store. They don’t have the right feel. Whole Foods does better out of a smaller store. I worked at the Bethesda Whole Foods.
PP: We’ve been to one in Mill Valley [California].
LZ: Aren’t they opening in Vail. I think they are. Originally it was a place called Wild Oats, but went out of business.
MK: I was the cashier and I bagged groceries. I was very unbalanced at the time so my thing is to work all the time. I became manager of the cheese department. I knew there was cheddar and there was Swiss. My mother says to me: “Michelle I remember the night before you started were petrified.” I didn’t know anything about cheese. I reached the point in Whole Foods where I transferred to nutrition. Boy, was that a new perspective. I had lost perspective on genuinely how much I loved my career [in cheese].
MC: What do you like about it?
MK: There’s the endless variation. You have your goat, your sheep, your cow. For a cheese maker there’s a myriad ways you produce cheese.
PN: Do you hear all the jokes?
MK: There’s a limited number of cheese jokes. I’m still cutting the cheese for the living.
MC: What do your siblings do?
MK: Lawyer. Business Man. Housewife. I have to admit I have no culinary aspect. I can’t even cook an egg.
LZ: What’s different about the cheese you sell?
MK: Without an ounce of hyperbole, you get a better cheese from me now than when I was selling $70,000 worth of cheese a week. I protect integrity of cheese. I sell it at the peak of its life. Lots of retailers will sell you a second-rate piece of cheese, but I manage my inventory very carefully. I take a lot of pride in it. There’s only a handful of retailers who do a fabulous job with cheese. The American audience is still pretty naïve about their cheese. Most of what you find is a commodity like Havarti where you can’t go wrong. We have hand-made artisan cheeses. In that you can go really wrong. Invariably customers will say they won’t eat blue cheese. Or you had a bad cheese experience. Brie. What happens to brie in America is a travesty. You should be able to eat the rind. That’s the first place any kind of abuse will show up. If there’s any abuse. Then there’s the scale of the production. Lots of the big producers will cut corners. If they have a big lot of milk and it’s sat around that’s bad. Or they pasteurize it to death. We can do a trial at the store. Then there’s the timeliness. They design it to sit on the shelf. It’s one thing with the commodity cheddar. You stick a piece of mine next to a piece in the grocery store, and there’s no comparison. It’s about complexity and the nuances. It’s got layers, it should keep revealing itself. I call bread, wine, and cheese the Holy Trinity. The Catherine Store [in Carbondale] has had a master baker for only six weeks. We carry their bread in our store.
MC: I’m a bread person more than a cheese person.
MK: Breads are better than they’ve ever been. I’m really, really encouraging people to get out there and support the bread.
PN: They should do all the little special events. For your cheese, do the Food and Wine.
MK: We do the Taste of Aspen. He was nobody. That’s where he started.
LZ: There was a juice bar.
MK: We had that for a while but it closed.
MC: What about fondue?
MK: Get it out of a box. No one in your group is going to notice. But you can make fondue from scratch. There’s a number of different recipes.
Bernard: How about raclette?
MC: What’s that?
LZ: Pieces of cheese with potatoes and pickles.
Bernard: I don’t know if anybody in town who serves it.
PP: Do restaurants buy cheese from you?
MK: Adrian, the chef of the new Lu Lu Wilson was just in my store finding cheeses for his menu. In seasons past we sold cheese to Cache Cache, Restaurant Mogador, L’Hosteria on occasion, Syzygy. We love to work with local restaurateurs. Our cheese is very very reasonable in smaller quantities. They can run over to the store and shop.
LZ: What percentage of your business is the cheese.
MK: Depends on the year. Holiday season the cheese will go nuts. We do a fair chunk of our business in the six-week season. We go from zero to 160. No business to answer to and then more than enough. We have some challenges which is okay. This town makes me look like I don’t know what I’m doing.
Bernard: Is staffing hard?
MK: It’s tricky, it takes a long time to come up to speed.
LZ: How did you land in Aspen?
MK I came here with a guy. He’s not in the picture any more. I was working for a cheese importer, and this was part of my territory. I literally said to my boss: “They had a huge snowstorm, Main Street was covered. Oh my God I want to live here. Careful what you ask for.
MC: You’d be amazed at how many people have that exact same story.
MK: Aspen has been such a delightful place to be. I spent the first year working in dispatch. 911.
PP: I thought I recognized your voice.
MK: It literally took me a year to complete the training for that job. It breaks you down. The you get your first choking baby call. There are very strict protocols.
MC: What do you do in a case like that?
MK: Repetitive persistence is a great technique with my customers. That’s the whole idea. “Ma’am I need you to calm down” with the same inflection over and over. “Ma’am I need you to calm down .” It works with irate customers. It’s very challenging, multi-agency, multi-jurisdictional, so you have to learn all those protocols. Is it a law response or a medical response. Then the call taker has nothing to do with the dispatch. In this county you do it all. Aspen, Snowmass, Basalt, Eagle.
Bernard: You seem to know where the person’s calling from.
LZ: What’s your worst case dealing with a customer?
MK: Everyone has their bad day. You have no idea where anyone is coming from. You try not to react to people who are miserable.
LZ: Is there a change in people’s attitudes here in Aspen?
MK: There are retail challenging no matter where you live. So blessed because I know my customers. I’ve worked on it. It’s the people having a bad day I’m trying to help the most. This has nothing on the Red Sage in Washington, D.C. Those people were heinous. I’ve had one or two really bad customers in three years. I take that one home. I think about how I could have handled it differently.
MC: Is cheese a metaphor?
MK: I say I don’t just sell cheese at that counter, but I don’t know what that means.
LZ: What’s the hardest part?
MK: The holiday period. I’m in training all year for the weeks that are coming. When you think about it I am at everybody’s holiday table. I really find with the American audience I’m so frantic all the time, so I say: “Slow down, take a step back.” It’s very challenging. Sometimes I don’t know how to sit still and don’t know how to be present.
LZ: There’s a smile on Matt’s face.
Matt Malone: I work next door at the Autograph Source. Sometimes I say: “Give me a hug. Can’t you take five seconds for a hug.”
MK: In order to elaborate on that expression, it’s through food that we slow down.
MC: Slow Food.
MK: It’s through food, the whole notion of slow food. Really it’s a heart-felt lesson. Slow Food came along in The Sixties or the Seventies maybe as a response to processed food. My parent’s generation thought processed food was better nutrition and that arrested America’s relation to food. We’re in the process of rediscovering the legacy of what really good food look like. It’s not just the domain of the privileged and the titled. I’m fully conscious we are operating in the most affluent market in America. Hopefully, my goal is to bring a grocery store to Aspen. I’m looking at smaller stores like Salida with a dine-in take-out place where food and pricing is available to the everyday Joe. I’d like to see Slow Food in the schools. I’m interested in what we’re feeding our kids. The fact of the matter is it’s not rocket science. It’s just getting back to basics. Basic food done consistently.
PP: Your average customer is pretty well to do.
MK: It’s something I really really struggle with, but it’s comparable with Whole Foods in Boulder. Their rent is 5 percent of their revenues and they have so much purchasing agency because they’re so big. Our rent is an Aspen rent. We’re treated very fairly. We have three more years. We really really like our landlords, Howard Bass and Harris Cahn.
PP: Is educating the customer the key to your success?
MK: Marco and I have complementary skill sets. He does daily lunch business. The fact is consistently you get a great product.
LZ: Not just the cheese.
MK: Our lunch-time business is out of hand. Wine put us in a position to make a profit. Wine is inexpensive.
MC: Let’s talk about your motorcycle racing.
MK: First off, it’s not motorcross. It’s road racing. I had a long-held wish to ride motorcycles. I did until the bottom end fell out at 118 MPH on Route 133. It was all very dramatic and it was actually exceedingly lucky.
MC: What happened?
MK: I was just out for a casual Sunday ride. However, what happened was I got a really fast bike two summers ago and a friend of mine said it was worth it to go to a professional school to get me safer. I so fell in love with racing on a track. The track was a poor excuse outside Denver called Second Creek, since closed. The track was in a fair state of disrepair. Now we have the $80 million race track outside Salt Lake City, 4.7 miles. They vary the terrain, it turns to the left, right, the elevation changes. Cars and bikes share the track. I’m entering at the club level which is mainly 21 and male. There are a few women but there aren’t very many. Like to do for road racing what Danica has done car racing, but I’m a little long in the tooth.
MC: How old are you?
MK: I’m 38.
MC: Have you seen that movie “The Fastest Indian,” with Anthony Hopkins.
MK: Oh yeah. The bottom line is if you love something, should age be a deterrent? But I’m also fully conscious the next accident will be my last one. I’ve already ripped the clavicle off my sternum.
MC: You’re going to compete.
MK: Starting in the 250 ccs. Hopefully I won’t manage to kill myself out of the gate. The 600 series you could get in a lot of trouble. The tracks I go to people are out there making mistakes. You just hope they won’t when you’re around.
MC: How do you feel about this, Matt?
MM: I’ve been talking to her for three weeks. I’m learning a lot tonight.
LZ: When was the first time you got on a bike?
MK: Last summer. I’ve done these two clinics at Miller Motorsports Park in Salt Lake. A couple of things happened. They had never seen anybody come in at my level finish where I finished. I really am a natural, but at this point in time, it’s probably going to be a very short career, a question of when, not it I’m going to have an accident.
MC: Why do it?
MK: Why? I’ve referred to that period of my life as unbalanced. I know what it’s like to put my passions on hold, and I’m not willing to do that any more. That’s a life half-lived. I don’t mean to take it to the opposite extreme, either. The vicissitudes of life are going to happen anyway. The more you try to protect yourself… When I did my clavicle I thought I had broken my neck. I said to myself: “That’s the last time I do this.” Then I started to heal, and I couldn’t wait to do it again. It’s a sobering thing.
Bernard: You could be in a wheelchair the rest of your life.
MK: There’s a beautiful man in Salt Lake who is in a wheelchair. He’s racing again with a clutch lever and a gear shifter. He’s back to racing and he’s beating guys. It all comes down to a personal thing. Not everyone’s going to get their head around it.