Let’s start by saying I’m not sure quite how to understand ‘Living Museum of Cheese, but I can say it’s a lively museum. It’s also a cheese shop and a small cheese bookshop as well.
I put it on my list for a visit while in Paris this Spring, remembering that we had published news about its opening last year.
The let’s-not-be-TOO-serious tone started at the beginning with cheesy quotations, and then a quiz. From de Gaulle, “How do you expect to govern a country where there are 258 varieties of cheese?” and from Churchill, “A country capable of producing 300 different cheeses for the world cannot die.” On the opposite wall, the famed gourmet Brillat-Savarin rather ungallantly opines that “a meal without cheese is like a beautiful woman with one eye missing.”
I didn’t look closely enough at the ‘cheese map of France’ to see who had the right count for all the varieties of French cheese, but I suspect they both had underestimated.
Around the corner, just past several displays of antique and currently functional cheesemaking equipment, there is a light-hearted “cheese quiz,” which I took.
I’m not sharing all my answers with you (mainly because I didn’t note them all, but partly because every cheesy story should have some intrigue), but I am sharing the result, which compared me with a cheese I’ve not yet eaten. When I have a chance, I’ll find out whether I, or it, should feel slighted.
It’s not all fun and games, of course, although no one will mistake this for an academic institution. Many of the exhibits are family- or youth-oriented, which allows us older folk to look things over indulgently and pretend we knew things we were just learning.
The museum is on the Île Saint-Louis in the Seine, in a building that dates to the late 16th or early 17th century; its cellar is lined with thick stone foundation blocks and is deep enough and cool enough that it can be used for aging cheeses. Until recently, the space was occupied by a restaurant featuring recreated cuisine of ancient Gaul.

Visits to the museum are by appointment, because after time to wander the exhibits, which include interactive projections on screens around the large room, it’s time for a cheese lecture and tasting, led by, not surprisingly, one of the shop’s cheesemakers; my group was mixed in language and he switched back and forth between French and English with ease.
He walked us through the steps of preparation, separating solids from the milk, controlling temperature and time, with different steps for different cheeses. Those are samples of today’s soft-cheese production on the table, and some of the tools used, as well as some older ones.
And the lasting lesson, new to me despite all the cheeses I’ve known and loved, is that there are, at bottom, only six kinds of cheese in the world. Everything else fits one or another of the categories, varying by which animal’s milk is used, what it’s eaten and where, how long it’s aged, and what flavorings might be added to it. Here are the six… at least in this system!
And the delicious ones we sampled… from the top left: Pressed cooked, such as Comté, then soft washed rind such as Brebichon and soft with bloomy rind, such as Camembert.
Continuing, lactic, or acid-wash cheeses, many of them with goat milk, then pressed uncooked such as Fontina or Cheddar, and finally the veined cheeses.
If you ever decide you want to know about more cheeses than you can imagine or where your favorite belongs, it’s easy to get lost in The Cheese Atlas, but it’s fun. And that applies to the museum as well, especially if you are traveling with children.