A cheese shop guide to San Francisco

As the former director of cheese and wine at Whole Foods, Cheese Plus owner Ray Bair has a corporate pedigree, but a palette for the fine, funky and local. He stocks his store and Cheese School with selections from California France, Italy and beyond. There’s always a strong showing of the European classics, as well as decadent outliers like a triple cream brie infused with honey, hazelnut and truffle. The Cheese school offers regular cheese-tasting and -pairing classes a lovely, light-strung garden.

This elegant artisan cheese bar lovingly sources top-of-the-line American-made cheeses, local wine and beer and crafts its own charcuterie in-house. Its pressed sandwiches, served on hearty country levain, feature exemplary pairings like the California Gold: the hard cow’s milk cheese San Joaquin Gold, creamy chevre, La Quercia prosciutto and Dalmatia fig preserves.

Rainbow began in the city’s hippie heyday, founded in 1975 by an ashram and staffed by volunteers. Today, the indie grocery store and co-op stays true to its GMO-free roots, which carries over into its cheese section. Gordon Edgar, the cheese buyer since 1994, fills the store’s main case with all varieties and styles of local California cheese: handmade, rennetless, raw, goat, sheep, cow, water buffalo, and more. (There’s also a smaller selection of imported varieties to sample and buy.) Edgar, the author of Cheesemonger: A Life on the Wedge (2010) and Cheddar (2015), knows his stuff—he’s also on the board of directors for the California Artisan Cheese Guild.