If you’ve been to Shelter Island, you may have noticed the miniature covered wagon on Manwaring Road parked in the lot by White Oak Wine Garden, kitty-corner from the IGA supermarket? Or, perhaps, you’ve seen it cozied up next to Kilb’s Farm Stand on the corner of Route 114 and Congdon Road. On the days King Andrew Cheese is open, you’ll likely see one half of its duo of owners working inside: a smiling young gentleman, doling out paper bags to eager folks lined up to receive them. The scene is straight out of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House on the Prairie,” but here on the island, it’s more like the Little Wagon That Offers Dairy.
Reeve Andrew and his wife, Jessie King, are the owners of King Andrew Cheese, a cheese, charcuterie and catering business based on Shelter Island that operates out of a tricked-out 18th-century covered wagon imported from the Midwest. Furnished with an old-school Berkel slicer, state-of-the-art refrigeration and a highly curated selection of cured meats, cheeses, condiments and freshly baked bread, Andrew (or Reeve, as everyone calls him) is the island’s very first artisanal cheesemonger. But unlike the product he purveys, he’s not an import from Vermont or France or Italy; just a locally fermented kid with big dairy dreams.
Forged in Formaggio
In 2009, when Andrew was 19, he enrolled in a one-year program at The French Culinary Institute in New York City that took him to a school in Parma, Italy. His instructors were chefs who came to the birthplace of Parmesan cheese from all over that boot-shaped country with the cheese and meats of their region. For a kid who grew up on Shelter Island, where the only place to buy “parm” was the IGA, it was revelatory.
“Here was the cheese and the cured meat from its origins, already with the flavors of a well composed dish,” Andrew says. He knew that he wanted to bring that experience home but did not foresee delivering it in a canvas-covered Conestoga wagon.
A fourth-generation Shelter Islander, Andrew and King live next door to his parents, Robert and Teresa Andrew. His folks met at the Chequit in 1984 when it was a local hangout owned by the Franzoni family, adorned with a TV, a pool table, pinball and shuffleboard games and clock with hands permanently stuck at 5 p.m. His mom is a real estate agent, and his dad once drove the truck that delivers meals to elderly Shelter Islanders, demonstrating a family predilection for food on wheels.
Photos by Doug Young
After Andrew’s culinary school revelation, he headed to Bennington College in the great cheese state of Vermont, where he met King, who grew up in New York City’s Upper West Side and studied dance at the LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and the Performing Arts. Andrew had already been working in restaurant kitchens long enough to know that restaurant life was not for him, but his work as an affineur (someone who cares for the cheese as it ripens) at Murray’s Cheese on Bleecker Street in the city in 2011 definitely was, so he decided to develop his own food business.
Bennington was small enough that Andrew and King knew each other, but it took an incident involving a fire extinguisher to bring them together. A roommate in the house where Andrew lived opened a fire extinguisher one night, filling the house they lived in with fire retardant. The campus police arrived and told everybody to find another place to sleep. The mishap provided the excuse to knock on King’s door. “He showed up and asked if he could stay, because his house was condemned,” says King. They’ve been together ever since.
In 2014, they traveled to Montauban, France, where King taught English and Andrew researched French cheese and deepened his appreciation of locally produced cheeses and cured meats. When he saw the cheese and dairy carts that were common in village markets, a lightbulb went on. “I saw a life that was more manageable,” he says.
Wheying the Options
After about a year in France, the couple moved to New York City and worked at Murray’s as cheesemongers. There, they perfected the art of connecting each customer with great cheese and the story behind it, and they discovered that they loved working together.
Dreaming of those market cheese carts he saw in France, Andrew launched a catering business, while King taught school, danced with Dances by Isadora, a modern dance group that revives the work of Isadora Duncan, and helped with the burgeoning cheese and charcuterie business on weekends. In 2016, an opportunity arose to move themselves and the business to the Lenz Winery on the North Fork, where Andrew’s childhood friend, Thomas Spotteck, was a winemaker. In 2019, the cheese carriage came to Shelter Island.
“The Conestoga wagon happened by accident,” King says. “We bought it from a woman who lived outside of South Bend, Ind. She had used it as a Frito pie truck.” The food truck, which had seen many a state fair and Notre Dame football tailgate, was hauled by Andrew to Shelter Island to start a new life in charcuterie. “The wagon is like a puzzle, we take it down and it rolls,” he says, “despite what we [like to] say about it being hauled by cows, sheep and a goat.”
By East End standards, the King Andrew Cheese experience is pioneering. Andrew curates a selection of cheeses, many that he and King discover in their travels. There’s a perfectly aged gouda from the Netherlands, a raw sheep cheese from Portugal called Amanteigado, a French farmstead brie, a cheddar from the Cornell Dairy in upstate New York and cheeses from Mystic, Conn., Martha’s Vineyard and Mecox Dairy on the South Fork of Long Island.
“We offer a taste of a couple of cheeses,” Andrew says. “We temper the cheese, [bring it to the ideal temperature for flavor and texture] and serve it at peak ripeness.” They create cheese flights; menus with a theme such as Islands of Cheese, Mountains of Cheese and Empire of Cheese (from the Empire State). Their Shelter Island location also afforded them another opportunity to work with Spotteck, who is also the co-owner and winemaker of White Oak Wine Garden wines. Here, they expertly pair cheese with the wines Spotteck makes with grapes he grew and serve it with bread baked at local restaurant Léon 1909. Condiments include French preserves as well as Andrew’s favorites from Briermere Farms, quince, beach plum and apricot.
Molding a Future
Andrew and King’s wedding in June 2022 was at Shelter Island’s Camp Quinipet, where one friend was entrusted with the Berkel slicer, and another with the task of marrying them. The guests ate cheese and cured meats, the Isadora Duncan dancers performed Rose Petals, and the wedding couple waltzed.
When she’s not behind the counter at the wagon, King teaches English as a New Language and dance at Cutchogue East Elementary School, and one day noticed a child in her class was writing charming poems about milking goats. She asked the child about his goats and learned his family makes goat milk cheese at Catapano in Southold, a connection that will lead to their first aged cheese.
“I’ll start with the fresh chevre they make, smoke it and wrap the cheeses in rum-soaked white oak leaves,” says Andrew, “a nod to the history here, particularly Barbados to Shelter Island, with sweetness, and smoky.”
Andrew and King have more big plans for their business, including rolling onto the ferry to catering jobs on the North and South forks, and increasing production of their own cheeses and cured meats. Their King Andrew duck prosciutto — cured local duck breast with salt and spice — was so popular the first time it was made that another batch is curing now. They keep the carriage stocked with their own homemade mozzarella and are working on the new smoky chevre.
Like Mary in the nursery rhyme, Andrew and King like the idea of being followed around by a little lamb, but for these two cheese heads, it’s not fiction. “Sheep’s milk is great for yogurt,” King says. “Our pipe dream is to make Big Ram and Little Ram cheese from a flock of [Shelter Island] sheep.”
