The Formaggio Kitchen family of stores began in 1978 with a vision of creating a European shopping experience in Cambridge. Today, owners Ihsan and Valerie Gurdal operate three stores: Formaggio Kitchen Cambridge, Formaggio Kitchen South End, and Formaggio Kitchen New York.

They are best known for their cheese. They travel throughout the US and Europe visiting dairies, cheesemakers and agers of artisan cheese whose products they bring to their stores so that their customers can experience the wonders of these artisan producers. Beyond cheese, they sell wine, beer, charcuterie, produce, olive oil, jams, honeys, coffee, tea, spices, chocolate, confections and a variety of other specialty food items.

Each store has its own distinct personality and while the product selections will vary, the root of it all is a passion for tasty and authentic food. In their Cambridge and South End stores, they operate full kitchens producing sandwiches, salads and dinner for take out. Cambridge and South End also produce a selection of baked goods each day. Both shops offer catering where they take their ingredients from the shop and turn them into amazing cheese, charcuterie, sandwich or salad platters for customers throughout Boston and the surrounding area.

Their New York store is located in the Essex Street Market on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. This tiny gem of a shop offers a compact and carefully curated selection of products. While New York highlights the unique imports they bring in through our Cambridge store, they also discover new and unique local products from the city and beyond.

It is their goal to offer customers the finest products they can find and to be the medium through which they can come to know the producers themselves. They try their best to source products that reflect the traditional methods and ingredients of a region with a keen eye toward sustainability of the environment that makes those ingredients so good.