Jeremy Wayne’s Top Business Picks – Dobbs & Bishop Fine Cheese, Scarsdale

Cheese, please, Louise! Or, cheese, please, Ruth and Kevin, would perhaps be more appropriate, in the case of couple Kevin McNeill and Ruth Walter, owners of Dobbs & Bishop fine cheese. After 15 years of serving cheese lovers in Bronxville, the couple recently opened a second store in Scarsdale.

Walter has no particular background in cheese and said opening the Bronxville store in 2009 was more of a pragmatic decision than a fulfillment of a long-held passion. After the Great Recession of 2008-09, for the first time, there were empty stores in Bronxville.

“Kevin, the salesman, looked around, did a lot of market research to see what was missing, and we realized the closest good cheese shop was in Darien,” she added.

Indeed, there had already been a quality cheese factory in Bronxville years before, so together they decided to “revive this tradition.” They learned on the job, with Walter studying cheese in New York and the couple traveling to Vermont, California and France while visiting fairs and trade shows around the world.

The bright new shop, housed in the site of a former clothing store on Spencer Place in Scarsdale, has a larger window than the Bronxville location, as well as shelves of artisanal products to browse. The cheese menu, neatly laid out on a chalkboard, includes more than 80 cheeses, though not all are necessarily available at the same time. They run the gamut from cow’s milk to sheep’s milk to goat’s milk, with other headings like “buffalo,” “stinky” and “blue” and some inevitable crossovers between sections. Countries of origin include France, Italy and the United States (of course) as well as Great Britain, Ireland, Spain, Switzerland and the Netherlands.

Bread and pastries are provided by Baltahzar and arrive fresh every day. The cold cuts come from the Larchmont Charcuterie with more cold cuts, sliced ​​in the shop, from the very famous The Oak in Iowa.

But it doesn’t stop at cheese, bread and charcuterie. The stores carry kitchen linens from Emily Grossman, who started her hand-woven textiles business, based in Yonkers Chain and beam, during Covid; and handmade gifts by It is difficult in Irvington. You’ll find all sorts of housewares and locally made greeting cards, as well as honeys, chutneys, oils and vinegars, artisanal chocolates, and a host of other high-end, mostly local edibles. Walter and McNeill support local businesses where they can—“small-batch,” “local,” and “artisanal” are the operative words—though sometimes the limited output of small producers forces them to look further afield to maintain consistency. (Walter mentions a goat cheese maker she admires but who can’t meet her sourcing needs.)

The couple hires younger people, who tend to have more flexibility – and while cheese isn’t particularly seasonal, the stores tend to be quieter in the summer, with customers on vacation, which is when the couple trains staff for an early fall, leading up to the end-of-year holidays “when things are crazy.” The employees are invested and loyal, Walter said, and can work their way up to manager level.

The No. 1 bestseller? It’s Délice de Bourgogne triple crème, a French cow’s milk cheese from the Burgundy region of France. Its high fat content is a result of the extra cream added during the cheesemaking process. Another popular cheese is Irish cheddar. Walter’s current favorite is La Tur, a tangy, sophisticated blend of cow, goat and sheep’s milk from Piedmont, Italy.

His children have also taken a liking to the business, becoming experts and enthusiasts and serving in the shop. One Yelp user asked how anyone could take the shop seriously “when there’s a 14-year-old behind the counter.” Walter’s response: “He’s my son and he’s actually a really good cheesemaker.”