Culture Magazine

L eah Park loves to travel—so much so that she almost didn't get the job that launched her life in cheese. At 26, after an early career as a pastry chef in high-end hotels in California and elsewhere, she took off around the world for a year-long backpacking trip. When she returned, she realized she wanted to do something different. She had some familiarity with cheese because "in the pastry department at the finer hotels, cheese was always around," Park says. She called the Cheese Store of Silver Lake to ask about an open position but told the owner she was planning to take a road trip before she could start. "He said, 'The job might not be here when you get back,' and I got there in 20 minutes." Thinking she'd stay for two months, she ended up working at the shop for six years. "Cheese changed my life," she says. "Silver Lake was such a hip neighborhood. It kept me connected on the ground floor to people who were moving and shaking and doing things—plus it was fun. It opened my eyes to a different side of the culinary industry that wasn't so laborious and in the basement under halogen lights." She left the Cheese Store in 2013 and opened her shop, Milkfarm, on April 7, 2014, in the Eagle Rock neighborhood of Los Angeles. "The name resonates with me because we're so far away from farms and farmland that we don't actually think about where milk and cheese comes from," Park says. "Sometimes cheese has this stigma of being highfalutin and intimidating. I wanted to make the name accessible to everybody, so I decided to put the words together to create a brand." She tells an impactful story from her time in Silver Lake, when a customer asked for Sage Derby cheese, pronouncing it "Sagé Derbé." "She thought it was a fancier product than it actually was," Park says. At Milkfarm, which was recently named to Wine Enthusiast's list of "The 10 Most Iconic Cheese Shops in America," the casual environment and friendly vibe support her mission to offer a positive experience for everyone. "If someone comes in with $5, I want to make sure they feel comfortable spending it on cheese." FUN FACT: "If COVID didn't happen and I didn't work until the point of exhaustion, I would probably still be playing the accordion. I was in Avignon, France during a wonderful theater festival and saw this performance by a woman called Le Accordion. I was always talking about it and my friend was sick of hearing about it, so she got me lessons to Dave's Accordion School. I kept going until COVID hit and I couldn't go to lessons. " LEAH PARK OWNER MILKFARM LOS ANGELES, CALIF. ZACH BERG CO-OWNER MONGERS' PROVISIONS DETROIT AND BERKLEY, MICH. Z ach Berg always thought he would be a chef. The Michigan native worked at Zingerman's Deli in Ann Arbor after graduating from the School of Hospitality Business at Michigan State University, followed by culinary school in Napa Valley, and stints at Bay Area fine dining restaurants. And then he ran into Ari Weinzwieg, Zingerman's co-owner, at a book signing. "He said, 'You look miserable, go back to cheese.' And he was right," Berg says. He took his former employer's advice and got a job at San Francisco's Bi-Rite Market, where he worked for four years. "I like to say that as the cheese industry was growing up, I was growing up," Berg says. He became a Certified Cheese Professional and won second place in the 2014 San Francisco Cheesemonger Invitational. As his career was taking off, he began to think about moving back home. "The triple threat I used to tell people was that I wanted to start a business, meet a woman, and start a family. I left Michigan in 2008 because I couldn't advance my food career there yet. I moved back in 2016 because of the impossibility of owning a business in San Francisco." While he was still in the Bay Area, Berg reconnected with his childhood best friend, Will Werner, who also moved back to Michigan. The two got jobs at a chocolate company and tried to get the owner to sell it to them while they ran chocolate and cheese popups at the shop and at local breweries. "That's when Will and I realized that there was an opportunity to do something with a little more diversification. We were able to sell more chocolate than before with the cheese popups," Berg says. They launched Mongers' Provisions with an 8-foot deli case they installed in a butcher shop in Metro Detroit. "It went gangbusters. Within the first weekend people were telling us we were outgrowing the space." The partners soon found their own location in Cass Corridor, one of the city's earliest neighborhoods to gentrify, and opened their first store in 2018, right before the holidays. They opened a second location in Berkley in November 2021. Between the two stores, they now have 17 employees. "Two stores are it; we'll figure out how to do more with the resources we have," Berg says. He has a two-year-old and Werner has six-year-old twins. "We walked into this agreeing that it would be important that we recognize when it was enough, and we would always put our relationship first. The goal is balance." FUN FACT: "I love food rabbit holes, whether its monofloral honey or agave spirits— which are my newest obsession, I have enough agave spirits in my basement to open a bar. I guess I'm just a nerd. I love playing with food and connecting with people." PHOTO: Zach Berg photographed by Jacob Lewkow

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