Who are the Counter Cheesemongers?

We are Nora Granger and Eric Casella. We first laid eyes on each other in a cheese cave, had a cheese-wheel cake at our wedding, and eat cheese every night (mostly Nora).

Counter Cheesemongers is a Charleston, SC cheese shop and distributor working directly with small American cheesemakers. We ship these lovingly made American cheeses around the country kitted out with our hand-designed info cards in eco-friendly packaging. Find all of these cheeses in our Online Cheese Shop. We also provide a bevy of Charleston restaurants with cheese for their kitchens and cheese boards.

We are a true “mom & pop” business- we are a two person operation. If you reach out to us you will hear back from Nora or Eric, if you come into our cheese shop you will find Nora or Eric. Thank you for supporting us and American cheese!

Why “Counter"? 

For us, a counter, whether a kitchen counter, lunch counter or shop counter, has always been a place to connect with great food without pretension. We aim to counteract the significant amount of mass-produced, personality-less cheeses (both imported and domestic), by promoting cheese as the small, pretension free, regionally produced, table-staple that it’s been for millennia!

Do you have a brick & mortar shop? 

Yes! It is open! We are open every Friday and Saturday from 11-4. Check out this page for more info on our cheese shop.

What happened to “Counter Cheese Caves”? 

In 2023, we decided on a minor name change and miniature rebrand leading up to the opening of a storefront. After five years of pretty limited cheese aging, we decided to leave the aging to the cheesemakers who are best suited to handle it! We had a few major successes with long aging wheels from our friends at Sequatchie Cove Creamery and Twenty Paces (RIP), but frankly we couldn’t seem to hold on to most wheels for long enough for it to be worth it!

Our Story

Eric spent his childhood years moving to various cities around the world every three to four years before attending NYU Florence as a freshman year then onto NYC to earn a minimally-relevant-to-cheese economics degree. His family’s overarching focus on finding the best foods any destination had to offer combined with a lack of motivation to ride a desk post-graduation landed Eric in Houston, TX (don’t ask) at the specialty food wonderland known as Central Market. Upon being told to choose a department, and likely armed with a bit of a hangover, Eric opted for cheese over beer and wine. Six months into the rabbit hole that is cheese, Eric decided a smaller shop with more focused curation would benefit his new-found career. A job offering at Murray’s Cheese and the generous offer to stay with a college friend on the Upper West Side brought him back to familiar Manhattan. Murray’s provided Eric with a split focus of the affinage/cheese aging game and the retail pace and volume of one of the busiest cheese shops in the country. After meeting his future wife, Nora, and working too much for too little for a maniacal owner, Eric moved on to Bedford Cheese Shop to discover the joys and benefits of working directly with small producers and providing customers with a deeper understanding and appreciation for lesser known, small-scale foods.

Prior to officially entering the cheese world, Nora’s major “cheese experience” was being scolded alongside her twin sister after taking down a whole block of fancy black-waxed Cabot (or “Cab-OH” as we liked to call it) cheddar as an after-school snack. Nora’s first professional cheese experience came in the summer of 2010 when, under the advice and connections of her mother (thanks, Mom!), she began interning at Vermont Creamery in Websterville, VT. Nora spent two idyllic and informative summers living with Allison Hooper and her family and learning the ins and outs of one of America’s most legendary creameries (Vermont Creamery was one of the first to lead the American “artisanal” cheese movement of the 1980s). In the fall of 2011, Nora took a job at Murray’s Cheese on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village and proceeded to work there in various roles (sort of our version of cheese grad school) until the summer of 2013 when she moved on to Bklyn Larder on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn. During her time at these NYC institutions she made a plethora of life-long “cheese friends”– notably among them- her hubs and co-owner of Counter Cheesemongers- Eric.

While living together in Sunset Park, Brooklyn and working at separate cheese counters they started hatching plans to do their own cheesy thing. After various iterations of concept, size, and scale, they settled on starting small in a food city they knew and loved with the regional cheesemakers with whom they had built relationships over the years. The move to Charleston came in fall of 2015 as soon as the raindrops had stopped falling from Hurricane Joaquin. Counter Cheese Caves was born in April of 2016.