A
delicatessen like no other, the Big Cheese is located in St. Andrew's Lane in the city center of
Dublin,
Ireland.
The Cheese's mission in life seems to be to provide students and expats with familiar comfort foods - which means that alongside truly excellent cheeses from all over Europe, first grade olive oil and their own freshly baked bread (yum, yum and double yum) they also stock things like Aunt Gemima's pancake mix, marshmallow fluff, Hershey's, Reece's etc. for the benefit American students.
There are many more items specifically targeting people from various parts of the world (Vegemite, for example, and the distinctly odd choice of supermarket-grade buffalo mozzarella), but the most rapidly expanding sub-culture represented at the Cheese recently has been the kosher/Jewish culinary niche. What's disconcerting is that, obviously not being Israeli, the owners of the shop are not too conversant with Israeli brands and products, and consistently purvey the lowest of low quality stuff - from truly horrible coffee to shelves upon shelves of completely unnecessary matza bread which no one is ever going to buy.
I, of course, am highly displeased at this development, seeing as if I wanted to eat bad kosher food I wouldn't have left Israel in the first place. Regardless of my quibbling, however, The Big Cheese Company is still an excellent place to visit and pick up imported foodstuffs which are exotic in their ordinariness.