Inside Paris' new highly immersive cheese museum

When French winemaker Pierre Brisson moved from his home in the Beaujolais region to Paris more than a decade ago, he noticed one key factor missing from the city that had built a reputation as a cheese capital. “There was nothing for cheese,” says the owner of the Musée Vivant du Fromage, which opened in June on Paris’ Île Saint-Louis as the first cheese museum in the city. “There are many great cheese shops, but they are just shops. I thought, we should do with cheese what they’ve done with the two wine museums here.”

Brisson started this passion project more than 10 years ago as an immersive cheese school, training and sharing his knowledge of ancient techniques with cheesemakers and cheesemongers, but quickly noticed the interest from travelers to learn more about the French way of making, cutting, tasting, and even pairing French cheeses. With the help of a cinematographer, he translated his cheese school into an immersive, living museum that truly captures the essence of French cheese, highlighting the producers and techniques that make each bite so memorable.

“The idea is that all visits are guided by a cheese expert,” Brisson explains. “Of course you could visit the museum just by itself, but it’s a living cheese museum. That’s very important to us. Sometimes museums make us think of something that is dead or has passed, that is not moving, but cheese is definitely something that is alive. So you can speak with the cheese expert and see live cheesemaking; it’s not just a place where you look at old stuff, there is also a big importance for us in sharing.”

The museum is housed inside a 300-square-meter building that dates back to 1639, where exposed wood beams and stone caves add a natural ambiance to the very high-tech and modern museum. A petite boutique welcomes visitors inside and is a great place to pop in to buy some hard-to-find French cheeses, gourmet souvenirs, and wines organized by which cheese they pair with best.

Museum tours start with a window into the art of cheesemaking, as a real cheesemaker is hard at work behind a glass wall, molding and forming in real time for all to see. Visitors can find out which cheese fits their personality while in the staging room for the tour or can plan out a cheese-centric journey through France with an interactive display that emails routes and contact information for regional producers to reference and make reservations for Paris extension trips.

“We are a window,” Brisson explains. “We want people to come here and leave thinking, ‘Wow what a great region. I really want to meet the producers and taste their cheese. So they will go a little step further and pass from the thinking to action.”

The highly immersive museum tour begins behind a classic cheesemaking drape. There are hands-on opportunities to see how many classic French cheeses are traditionally made and to learn about the classifications and brotherhood of these highly regional products. The tour ends with a tasting of four cheeses in front of a dynamic video projection that offers the chance to hear and visualize that specific cheese’s origin story, mountain goats grazing on green pastures, or the sound of wind whispering through vineyards creating a sense of place for each piece sampled.

Brisson and his team offer tours in French and English and provide add-on options, like food tours through the Île Saint-Louis, where participants forage at local bakeries (i.e., La Tour Argent) and bring back their finds for a bespoke wine and cheese pairing. Visitors can also sign up for cheesemaking workshops in the production cellar or attend cheese and wine tasting courses offered by Brisson’s company, Paroles de Fromagers, in the tasting cellar.

Food & Wine