New London’s premier cheese market Brie & Bleu

Dining

Say Cheese

Eat brie and blue and more at Brie and Bleu.

Thursday, August 28, 2008
By Betsy Yagla

Betsy Yagla Photo

Tapenade, with crisp veggies.

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Brie and Bleu

84 Bank St., New London. (860) 437-2474, brieandbleu.com. Tue.–Thu. 10 a.m.–8:30 p.m., Fri.–Sat., 10 a.m.–9 p.m. $, all major CC

All through lunch my mother kept exclaiming "This is so perfect!" We were dining al fresco at New London's Brie and Bleu, overlooking the Thames River.

Brie and Bleu is a small bistro and fromagerie — hence the name — in the heart of New London's downtown. The menu is a concise, seasonal, one-page selection of cheese-heavy appetizers, cheese-focused salads and a few bruschettas (we spent so much time ooh-ing and aah-ing over the salads we never made it to the bruschetta).

We considered the baked brie-in-a-box ($12) appetizer, the most expensive item on the recession-friendly menu. The creamy baked brie is glazed with onion and garlic jam and served with apples. Tempting, but we chose the crudité appetizer ($8), which comes with a choice of house-made blue cheese spread, hummus or a tapenade. We chose the tapenade to avoid overdoing it on the cheeses. The purple-ish spread was salty and thick, like it should be, and came with crisp slivers of veggies: summer squash, zucchini, radishes and whole sautéed spears of asparagus.

Before we could make a dent in it, our waitress brought our three salads and our two-person table quickly got crowded. Despite a heavy focus on fromage, the food is light.

We planned on ordering just two salads — one for each — but the menu got the better of us. The Vermont star ($8) came as a mound of mesclun dotted with bright orange cubes of cantaloupe, sweet house-candied pecans, shredded Grafton (a white cheddar) and a dusting of the house lemon rosemary vinaigrette.

The Stilton salad ($8) was a surprisingly harmonious combination of fleshy bing cherries, a slab of salty and creamy Stilton blue and roasted pistachio nuggets topped with sherry shallot vinaigrette, over mesclun.

We made sure to pair every cantaloupe chunk with at least one candied pecan—the fruit's silky texture played well with the rough pecans. Similarly, every fork-speared cherry was accompanied by a few pistachios and a chunk of Stilton, which made for a very pleasant mouthfeel and an elegantly earthy taste.

The goat cheese salad ($8) was more mainstream: The same perky mesclun came with cherry tomatoes, an assortment of olives and three crostini topped with baked goat cheese exploding with herbs. This third salad we slightly ignored, only because the other two were so innovative. The dressing was barely there on all three salads, but we didn't miss it. It was almost unnecessary with such flavorful combinations. Most ingredients in the salads are locally sourced, so come fall you can expect pears, apples and nuts.

Although everyone was eating on the minimalist patio (white chairs, white tables, white awning) the day we visited, the bistro's interior is low-key and welcoming. Wide wood boards plank the floor and one wall is exposed brick. The brass-topped tables are simple and accompanied by red wooden chairs. There's a small display counter full of semi-exotic cheeses (mahon from Spain, orange Shropshire blue from England) with a few available for samples.

Brie and Bleu was an afterthought for owner Charlotte Hennegan. She really wanted to open a wine shop, and when she realized her retail space was larger than necessary, she added cheese into the mix. "It wasn't difficult to put wine and cheese together, having loved wine and cheese for the better part of my life," she says.

The wine shop — Thames River Winery — is next door and after lunch we explored the basement where Brie and Bleu gets its selective French-heavy wine list. Down a steep flight of stairs is a wine-lover's dream. The temperature drops at least 15 degrees in the high-ceilinged cave-like vault stocked with an impressive array of wines. We spent at least as much time browsing the basement as we did devouring our salads.

byagla@newhavenadvocate.com

Great Couples
Matching Wines And Cheeses Takes Some Know-how

A Pecorino di Sardo cheese and Serego Alighieri Vaio Armaron wine are a match made in heaven, according to Ryan Connolly, manager of Brie & Bleu in New London.
TODAY'S TOP STORIES
By ELISSA BASS
Day Staff Columnist, Feature Editor
Published on 6/29/2005

Bogie and Bacall. John and Yoko. Hepburn and Tracy. Fred and Wilma.

Something special happens when a great match is made. The same is true of wine and cheese. But while Lauren and Humphrey may have known it was love at first sight, how is the average consumer to know if a Pinot Grigio will get along with a Camembert?

We sought help from Ryan Connolly, manager of Brie & Bleu, a gourmet cheese shop on downtown New London's Bank Street that opened last October. Brie & Bleu is — not coincidentally — next door to Thames River Wine & Spirits, an upscale wine store. Both are owned by Charlotte Hennegan and Fred Argilagos, proprietors of Thames River Greenery, which is around the corner on State Street.

One way to successfully pair cheeses with wines is geographically, Connolly says.

picture credit
Sean D. Elliot

“Geography plays into it a lot,” he says. “The grasses, the flavors that are specific to that region. ... Within a certain micro-climate exists something unique to that place” and it translates into the wine and the cheese that comes from that place.

We asked Connolly to suggest some wine-and-cheese couplings. The cheeses are all available at Brie & Bleu and the wines are for sale at Thames River Wine & Spirits.

1. Cobb Hill Caerphilly and Sharpe Hill Cabernet Franc

Cobb Hill is a small farm in Vermont that has been making cheese for about five years. Caerphilly is an English-style cow's milk cheese, comparable in texture to a soft cheddar. But Cobb Hill's Caerphilly is unique, Connolly says, because it comes from Vermont.

“The taste is really its own, because it comes from this small farm, so it is not like anything else,” he explains. “It's the American expression of an English cheese. It is very different in flavor than English Caerphilly, which is bland. This is a lot richer flavor.”

Cost:$21 per pound.

Sharpe Hill is a small vineyard in Pomfret, “about as close as a winery gets to Vermont,” Connolly says. He describes it as a “light-bodied red.”

Cost:$17 a bottle.

2. Porbica and Dão Particular

“This is one of my favorite cheeses,” Connolly says of Porbica, a Portuguese cheese made of a blend of cow, goat and sheep milk. “It is rubbed with paprika, which imparts a nice flavor.” It is a mild cheese, but the combination of the three milks makes it “complex,” Connolly says. “It is more of a textural exercise. It's soft; it coats your mouth.”

Cost:$19 per pound.

The Dão is a single-vineyard Portuguese wine: its grapes come from only one vineyard. The winery is quite small, manufacturing only a few thousand cases a year. “It is very reflective of the place it comes from,” Connolly says of the wine's flavor. “And the great thing is, it is only 12 dollars (a bottle). Because they aren't known yet, they price themselves so people will be willing to experiment. This is one of the best 12-dollar bottles of wine you'll have in your life.”

3. Beltane Farm goat cheese and Chamard Estate Chardonnay

Beltane Farm is in Lebanon, and Chamard Vineyard is in Clinton, making them practically next door neighbors in the world of wines and cheeses. “These both show what Connecticut is capable of,” Connolly says.

“These pair together really well,” he says of the goat cheese, which is rolled in dill, and the Chardonnay. Because Beltane is just up the highway, the cheese “is about as fresh as you can get. This was milked three weeks ago.”

Cost:$7 per 4 ounces.

The Chardonnay is Chamard's Estate Reserve, which means all the grapes that went into it were grown at the vineyard in Clinton. “It is an amazing Chardonnay,” Connolly says. “It has a gorgeous golden color. It has oak (flavor) but is not over-oaked.”

Cost:$13 a bottle.

4. Pecorino di Sardo and Serego Alighieri Vaio Armaron

This sheep's milk cheese is hard and sharp. It can be served on its own, with crusty bread or crackers, or in an antipasto.

Cost:$12 per pound.

This wine goes for $60 a bottle, but it's worth it, Connolly says. The grapes at the Italian vineyard are hand-picked and then laid on hay mats to partially dry in the sun in order to concentrate the juice.

“It is the most intense, rich, deep wine,” Connolly says. “It is inky purple. It has a gorgeous flavor.” It goes well with the Pecorino, he says, because “it has enough to it to stand up to the strong flavor of the cheese.”