Culture Magazine

30 culturecheesemag.com E N T E R TA I N I N G 202 2 VO I C I N G S I t's hard not to smile around Sarah and Boo Simms. The twin sisters and co-owners of Santa Monica cheese shop Lady and Larder are effervescent, exuding a familiarity that welcomes you like a lifelong friend. With over 70,000 Instagram followers, these two have single-handedly changed the cheese board game with dynamic, cornucopian spreads that nab the attention of celebrities like Oprah—first through their catering outfit La Femme Epicure, then out of their kaleidoscopic storefront. Leveraging texture, realism, and dare I say joy, the Simms have infused a juicy spark of vitamin D into an at-times-stodgy cheese culture—and they've done it through crises both global and personal. After COVID-pivoting with the rest of us, the twins were dealt another blow when Sarah was diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma in 2021. Thanks to aggressive treatment, she's now cancer free, advocating for the American Cancer Society, and sitting on the board of directors of the L.A. chapter of the American Red Cross. She also hosts daily huddles to check in on her employees' health, serves as VP and education chair of the California Cheese Guild, and plays pickleball. When not at the shop, Boo works as Creative Director of a national restaurant group and volunteers painting murals for schools in her community (which you can see on her personal art account @wyliewestcreative). When we spoke in August, the twins had just returned from ACS, and Boo was nine months pregnant. Read on for a glimpse into their busy, rose-tinted world. This interview has been edited for length. Sarah and Boo Simms w r i t t e n by L I N N I KR A L culture: I like to start by asking people how they got into the world of cheese! I think I read somewhere that your parents taught you everything you know about snacking. SARAH SIMMS (SS): We grew up in an extremely food-centric household—we come from a couple generations of restaurateurs—so our family has always been a food family. Both of our parents are also incredible entertainers, so we thought it was very normal that if anyone came to your house, they just started putting out food and making drinks. To this day, they're still cooler than us. They're the coolest people we know. Like, our dad is a hobbyist winemaker, he makes his own charcuterie. They have olive trees, they make their own olive oil. My mom has chickens, she's constantly experimenting with new cocktails, syrups, tinctures. Where do they live? SS: They live in the Monterey Bay area, but we grew up in L.A. Definitely California girls through and through. BOO SIMMS (BS): Sarah and I both went to the same college [San Diego State University], but Sarah studied hospitality and tourism management with a focus in restaurants. And then she worked in hotels after college and became a somme— SS: Really into wine for a while. BS: Yes, really into wine. Then went back to school, to Cordon Bleu in Seattle, and she's also been in restaurants, and then a private chef for the last 10 to 12 years for a bunch of different wild clients. Then I was a graphic design major turned multimedia arts major. But always, since our first job—which for both of us when we were 14, was at a burger place making milkshakes—always in restaurants. It was kind of cool when we finally figured out that whatever we worked on, we both had been studying different sides of what we needed to do to make one thing. It's kind of how we run our shop now, Sarah leads the food and beverage side, then branding and marketing's kind of my side. That's how we ended up with the cheese boards. SS: At that time, Instagram was just starting. And I could never talk about my clients because of NDAs, but I could post pictures of my work and my food, and Instagram kind of became a portfolio. People would just DM and be like, "Oh, could I get this?" There were people in L.A. that had private chefs that did all their meals and food for them… the only other thing you could go to [for event food] was the plastic tray at the grocery store or a full-bore catering company with minimums, service charges. And Boo and I at the time, we got to a place where we were doing events start to finish. And we realized that catering is such intense work. BS: It's just so much labor. And we'd find ourselves at the end of the day packing up our cars, like, "What are we doing?" SS: Like, there has to be another way. And, quite frankly, the statistics in working in kitchens, the executive chef drop-off for females? Huge, because you start having kids and then you're like, "I don't wanna be gone every night for dinner…" I kept thinking over and over, there has to be a way to build a business doing work I care about where I can be done at six o'clock and home for dinner. And you guys didn't have kids yet at that point? SS: No, but we knew we wanted to! Actually, this is crazy, I found out I was pregnant three weeks after I bought the domain, and I think if it had been reversed, I never would've bought it and started it. So, the whole first year of building Lady & Larder, I was literally waddling around L.A. pregnant. And how many kids do you have now, between the two of you? BS: Well, almost three, she's here, she's just inside. I'm due with my second daughter next month [Bertie Lou was born two weeks after this interview] and then I have a 13-month-old, Mavis, and Sarah has Maverick, who's our first born. He's five. And they're basically siblings. I mean, our kids are very close. SS: Maverick's first word was cheese. I was five days out of the hospital, and I had him strapped to me making boards for Christmas. You're known for having tons of produce on these cornucopia-style boards, do you go to farmers' markets a lot? SS: Yeah, even to this day, the boards change based on what's available at the market. We still shop the market three days a week, and we have spreadsheets. Like, right now, there's so many varieties of melon at the market that we keep notes from last season to remember when they drop, which flavor, which texture we like.

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