Renard’s Cheese on West College Avenue is a Wisconsin cheese shop, which sounds redundant until you spend twenty minutes inside and realize most cheese shops are not actually this serious about it.
The Appleton outpost is part of a Door County operation that the Renard family has run since 1961. The man behind the counter on a given Tuesday morning might have been slicing wheels since before you were born. That’s not sentimentality — it’s the staffing model. Renard’s leans on people who know what they’re selling, which in Wisconsin should be the floor, not the ceiling, but here we are.
Paul Cunningham, who has worked the cheese counter longer than some of his customers have been alive, has the particular quality of someone who could talk you into buying three pounds of aged cheddar you didn’t budget for without making you feel manipulated. He knows which wheels are peaking this week. He knows which pepper jack runs hotter than the label suggests. He will cut you a sample without theater — no wooden board, no explanation of milk provenance, just a clean slice and a look that says, well?
The selection runs wide: cheddars in various ages, gouda, havarti, string cheese sold by the bag, curds that squeak properly, smoked varieties that actually taste like smoke instead of liquid smoke applied to something sad. There’s also a solid wall of Wisconsin-made sausages, a refrigerated section with specialty meats and spreads, and gift boxes for the people in your life who are impossible to buy for. The prices sit comfortably below what you’d pay at a specialty grocer in a larger city, which feels slightly unreal if you’re used to paying eight dollars for four ounces of mediocre manchego at a Whole Foods somewhere.
The shop itself is not fancy. The lighting is fluorescent. There’s a rotating rack of Wisconsin-themed merchandise near the door that you will probably ignore. None of this is the point. The point is the cheese, and the people who know the cheese, and the fact that you can walk in without an appointment or a credit score and have a real conversation about what you’re making for dinner and walk out with something good.
Fridays tend to get busy — there’s a particular crowd that stops in before heading up to Door County for the weekend, stocking up like they’re provisioning for a voyage. Weekday mornings are quieter, which is when Paul is most likely to actually talk to you. Ask him what he’d take home if he were you. He’ll tell you.
Parking is easy, the shop is open seven days a week, and a serious haul — a couple of good wedges, a summer sausage, some curds — will probably run you between fifteen and thirty dollars depending on self-control, which most people overestimate when they walk in. Plan accordingly.
It is not the most glamorous afternoon activity in Appleton. It is, however, the kind of place you stop meaning to tell people about and then forget, because it seems too obvious to mention. Mention it anyway.
