Les Frères Marchand cheese, two ways
![Les Frères Marchand cheese plate at [CUISINE] Bangkok, with toasted baguette, chutney and a spoon of honey on a pink floral plate](/assets/journal/cheese-plate.jpg)
Two new dishes at [CUISINE] start in the same place: the cellars of Les Frères Marchand in Nancy, France. One comes to the table much as it left the cellar. The other meets Sichuan chilli at the hot station.
The house
Les Frères Marchand have been fromagers-affineurs in Nancy, in Lorraine, since 1880. The house is run today by the brothers Patrice, Philippe and Eric, the sixth generation of the family. They choose cheeses from small farms and dairies across France and mature them in their own cellars.
The cheese plate
The Les Frères Marchand plate is on the cold station menu now, 550 baht: 30 grams each of two cheeses, brought up to temperature before they go out.
Hercule Vieux is a pressed wheel of about 4 kilos, half sheep's milk and half goat's milk, matured in the Marchand cellars. "Vieux" means it is the long-aged version. The sheep's milk gives hazelnut notes and a rich, dense, buttery paste. The goat's milk brings a clean, slightly sharp finish. We serve it rind on.
Le Claousou is a soft sheep's milk cheese from Le Fédou at Hyelzas, on the Causse Méjean in Lozère. Each one is wrapped by hand in a band of spruce bark, which holds the soft paste together and gives the rind a woody, resinous note. Inside it is creamy, almost runny when ripe, with the gentle sweetness of sheep's milk.
Beside them: toasted baguette, a spoon of stingless bee honey, and our green apple and fig chutney, cooked with red wine, shallot, ginger, mustard seed and star anise.
Mala Mont d'Or, from Friday
The second dish arrives on Friday 6 November, at 690 baht. Mont d'Or is a cow's milk cheese from the Haut-Doubs in the French Jura, ringed in spruce like the Claousou and made only in the colder months. Ours comes from the same house in Nancy.
We take 125 grams of it, add Sichuan chilli paste, and send it out in a steel cup on a tray of our double-fried frites. The chilli runs red through the melted cheese, the top blisters and catches, and the frites are there to go in.
Take a seat at the counter and you can watch it leave the pass. That is the point of an open kitchen.
We are open every day from 5:30pm to 11pm at No. 3 Saladaeng Road, third floor, Silom. Book a table on the reservations page, or walk in. The full menu is here.