The Cheese Board Read Online Free Page B

components play on each other—they influence and support each other. When it’s working, the sum is greater than its parts.
    —S. S.
    Marching in San Francisco, 2003.
     
    SISTER COLLECTIVES
    As with many successful businesses, the impulse to expand and capitalize on a good idea occasionally infects the Cheese Board. Unlike most businesses, the motivation for the Cheese Board is not accumulating greater wealth but advancing the notion of worker cooperatives.
    The first such endeavor was theSwallow Restaurant Collective. In 1972, the Cheese Board, after over a year of planning, opened a sister collective called the Swallow. The Swallow was an elegant buffet-style restaurant located on the bottom floor of the University of California Art Museum, next door to the campus film archive. Museum-goers could eat inside or outside, surrounded by sculpture. Initially, Cheese Board members joined with the new Swallow staff to launch the restaurant. After this transitional supportive phase was over, the Cheese Boarders returned to the original collective. The Swallow collective had a good run for almost two decades, but eventually succumbed to the combined difficulties of being a collective institution and trying to operate inside a university bureaucracy.
    I think the Swallow was probably an example of a collective not gone wrong so much as gone wild, really not kept in check. There were incredibly high moments of great cooking at the Swallow, but it always had a wild streak in it. No one was holding it down, or together even.
    —PAT DARROW
    More recently, the Cheese Board has participated in an effort to launch a network of worker cooperatives modeled on the Cheese Board and using its bread and pastry recipes. The network is called theAssociation of Arizmendi Cooperatives, in honor of the priest José María Arizmendiarrieta, the founder of the Spanish Mondragón Cooperatives. This network has opened one Arizmendi Bakery Cooperative in Oakland and another in San Francisco. These are independent cooperatives owned and operated by their workers. The Cheese Board provided some initial seed money and training, and gave the new bakeries Cheese Board recipes. At the time of this writing, the newest Arizmendi Bakery is being established in Emeryville, just south of Berkeley. The new cooperatives, which are members of the association (and own the association), will then provide financial and technical support for starting other new cooperatives based on the same model. The Cheese Board is also a nominal part of the association.
    The Cheese Board has little appetite for expanding its own enterprise beyond its borders. We want to promote worker cooperatives, but not at the risk of changing our own scale or culture. Some of our lack of ambition can be attributed to a philosophical distaste for society’s dependence on and glorification of growth and expansion, and some can be because of our natural inclination to take it easy and keep things on a smaller scale.
     
    THE CHEESE BOARD: REMEMBRANCES AND AN ACCOLADE
    My connection with the Cheese Board began in 1971, when I had the good fortune to find myself in the company of many other young enthusiasts who had a crazy notion of creating a very fine restaurant—with no previous experience. The restaurant was Chez Panisse, and I became its first chef. At the time, I was hardly a chef and Chez Panisse was hardly a restaurant. The Cheese Board, however, just around the corner, was already an established icon in what came to be a very special neighborhood in north Berkeley, California. At the time, the Cheese Board was a hole-in-the-wall with precious little interior space, so people would line up out the door to get their irresistible cheeses, always offered up with great, good vibes and free tastes by founders Elizabeth and Sahag Avedisian and their fellows. The original Peet’s Coffee, Tea, and Spices store was within a few paces, as was Lenny’s Famous Meats, Butcher to the Gods, and by