'When I arrived five years ago, everybody told me, 'forget about cheese, nobody eats cheese in Hong Kong',' says Jeremy Evrard, manager and cheese expert of the Michelin three-star restaurant Caprice in the Four Seasons Hotel.
'But I decided to push it a little bit and offer my passion for cheese. We started working with [famous cheese ager] Bernard Antony, and we did it the same way we would in France ... It worked so well we opened our cheese cellar two years ago.'
With cheese lovers - expats and locals alike - flocking to Caprice for its premium selection, and elsewhere at spots such as the Classified cheese rooms, it's apparent that Hongkongers have quite an appetite for artisan cheese.
'Asians like cheese,' says Phillipe Orrico, executive chef of Western cuisine at Hullett House in Tsim Sha Tsui. The belief that Asians don't have the stomach for the curdled milk, says Orrico, 'is because before, there wasn't much choice and not a lot of good cheese. When importers started bringing in good cheese, people here started to like it and requested more of it.'
All cheese starts out the same. Milk - generally from cow, buffalo, goat or sheep - is coagulated, separating the solid curds from the liquid whey. The curds are drained, packed into moulds and compressed. The quality of the end product depends on many factors, such as the standard of the milk (animals raised in natural environments and given good feed produce better milk); and whether or not the milk is pasteurised (the high heat required in pasteurisation removes the more subtle flavours and kills off 'good' bacteria that add taste). About half of the flavour is down to the work of the affineur (cheese ager), who matures the cheese under precise temperature and humidity levels.
A staple in most European countries, good-quality cheese - artisan cheese, in particular - is fairly new in Hong Kong, and the chance to buy cheese fresh off a wheel is still rare.
'Pasteurised cheese is dead milk, as it's cooked at a high temperature for a certain time. It kills all the flavour and everything else in the milk,' Evrard says. 'It doesn't reflect the work passionate cheesemakers do. It's not cheese. It's industrial.