The best cheesemonger in the country came out of Philly — again

The winner of this year’s Cheesemonger Invitational — a 15-round, 40-contestant national competition sometimes referred to as the Olympics of cheese — is not a Philly-area native. But before you lob accusations of a clickbait headline, talk to Max Lazary and you’ll quickly learn: He wouldn’t have won without stints at two of the city’s premiere cheese shops, making him the second Philly-molded monger to win the competition in as many as years.

Lazary, 32, moved to Philly from upstate New York in 2023. He had been working in hospitality and food distribution in Rochester for 10 years and knew he wanted to narrow his professional focus to cheese. When he asked around, a Finger Lakes cheesemaker told him Philly’s a good city for cheese — specifically Di Bruno Bros.’ legendary Ninth Street shop, a shrine to amazing cheeses domestic and international. (Di Bruno Bros. was acquired in 2024 by national grocery cooperative Wakefern Food Corp.)

Lazary landed a job at the shop, and on his first day, a veteran monger tasked the newbie with cutting an 85-pound wheel of Gruyere into eighths. “I struggled for like 30 minutes and I was doing a terrible job,” Lazary said.

Little did he know that two years later he’d be onstage at the Cheesemonger Invitational, charged with speed-wrapping an eighth of Gruyere in 45 seconds. “Lo and behold, I did a good job when it counted,” he said.

That was one portion of the event where Lazary put up big points. He also scored 24 out of 25 in blind tasting, doing a near-perfect job of identifying the milk type, country of origin, cheesemaking style, pasteurization process, and name of five different cheeses by looks, smell, and taste alone. “The cheeses didn’t have a rind on them, which makes it very hard,” he said.

This time around, Lazary’s other stop on Philly’s cheese circuit came in handy. For much of the last year, he was mongering at longtime Reading Terminal stand Downtown Cheese. That’s where he first tried Saint-Nectaire, a pungent, semi-soft French cheese from France’s Auvergne region. He encountered a square of that same stinky cheese again at CMI. “It happened to be right next to Taleggio, which has a very similar texture. They’re both cow’s milk cheeses that are washed rinds, and they’re kind of pudgy,” Lazary said. “I was going through my mental Rolodex and I was like, ‘Wow, I think that’s Saint-Nectaire.’”

The week-in, week-out work of selling cheese at both shops gave Lazary confidence in the salesmanship round, in which the competitors staff a mock cheese counter while a previous CMI winner or a well-known cheese-shop owner pretends to be a customer. “And they’re not like, ‘I’ll take a cheddar,’” Lazary said. “They say something like, ‘I’m going camping with another couple for three days, and I want a cheese that will travel well, that I can enjoy with a gin and tonic or something. What do you recommend?’”

That was the question Lazary fielded at last year’s CMI (in which he placed fourth). This year, he was asked to recommend a selection for visiting cheese snobs from Europe, eventually steering the faux customer toward a Gouda. Lazary said that the judges are using the round as an opportunity to test a cheesemonger’s bedside manner as well as their acumen. “They’ll try to lead you to an easy answer or a basic question, like, ‘What are those little crystallized-looking things in that Gouda?’” Lazary said. (They’re crunchy little bursts of amino acids called tyrosine, and they’re delicious.)

Much of CMI unfolds privately between contestants and judges, but the public rolls in when each of the competitors’ “perfect bites” go out: a snack-sized portion that pairs a pre-assigned cheese with other ingredients. Though the mongers have about six weeks to plan, prep, and practice for their perfect bite, they only have 90 minutes to assemble 120 pieces to serve to the judges and the audience.

For this round, Lazary was assigned L’Amuse Gouda, from the Netherlands. “It has a lot of almost burnt-caramel, roasted-nut flavor to it,” Lazary said. To highlight the Gouda’s sweet-salty properties, he spread hazelnut praline on a whole-wheat Ritz cracker, added a sliver of Amarena cocktail cherry, and grated cheese over top. “Something you always have to consider is that you have to taste the cheese. That’s feedback everyone gets every year, like, ‘This was delicious, but I was tasting X, Y, and Z and not the cheese,’” he said of the perfect-bite criteria. “It’s fun to do the high-low, so the Ritz cracker was a nice, mild, easy choice.”

Lazary takes the champion cheesemonger mantle from last year’s winner, Main Line native and former Downtown Cheese monger Jake Heller, currently a cheesemaker at Perrystead Dairy in Kensington (of 24/7 cheese vending machine fame). He carries on a legacy of Philly-based CMI winners, including Tommy Amorim, who won in 2020, and Emilia D’Albero, who placed second in 2021 and won the CMI Masters competition in March.

Working for the summer at Hudson, New York’s Talbott & Arding cheese shop, Lazary predicts another Philadelphian stands a good chance to take the title next year: Di Bruno’s monger Kat Filipkowski, who’s participating this year in the same cheese apprenticeship program as Lazary.

“I think she could be hot on my heels, for sure,” Lazary said. “Philadelphia has a lot of cheese history, so it wouldn’t surprise me.”