Phoebe is one of the co-owners of Lois, a really cute wine bar in the East Village. How’d you begin learning about cheese plates? If I need to make new content for a cheese plate, I’ll just send a text saying, “Cheese party tonight!” and everyone will come over and bring a bottle of wine.Ī post shared by That Cheese Plate on at 8:20am PST I have a group text called the Cheese Party it’s me and eight of my friends. It’s just so fun to have that there to photograph and talk about. So having that communal plate of all these fun different things you can try really affects people, and it creates this sense of community, to have a girls’ night and to make a cheese plate. Anytime you have a cheese plate, it’s usually at a gathering. Why do you think cheese plates bring us so much joy?Ĭheese plates, I always say, bring people together. The following interview has been edited and condensed. I spoke to Mullen on the phone recently, smack in the middle of cheese plate season, about her cheese plate philosophy (there’s an order of operations and everything), Instagram food culture (bowls are out, platters are in), and whether she regards cheese plates as self-care (totally). Even if you screw it up, cheese is still delicious, and the draw of Mullen’s creations isn’t just that they’re beautiful, but that they’re aspirational in a way that’s entirely attainable. You don’t even really need to know anything about cooking. Unlike baking and breadmaking, however, you don’t need to follow a recipe to make a cheese plate. All three offer the chance to make something tangible - a therapeutic exercise in its own right - but they also carry with them the values of community, intimacy, and domesticity, all of which can often feel as though they’re under threat by modern life.Ī post shared by That Cheese Plate on at 1:54pm PST Though cheese plate influencing doesn’t pay her bills yet - Mullen says it accounts for about 10 percent of her income her main job is as the creative coordinator and executive assistant for Jon Batiste, the bandleader at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert - she continues to do sponsorships with food brands, and recently had a major break by appearing on the Rachel Ray Show.Ĭheese plates, much like baked goods and homemade bread, seem to be the subject of a growing fascination among digitally savvy young people. “They paid me in a $100 Whole Foods gift card, which at that time I was like, ‘Yes, I made it!’” she says. Within the first year she’d garnered about 5,000 followers, at which point, brands like Whole Foods started reaching out. In 2014, she moved her work over to Instagram and built a following by searching for cheese-related hashtags and liking every single photo. Before launching That Cheese Plate, which posts photos of cheese plate inspiration, and Cheese by Numbers, a how-to guide for budding cheese plate builders (current combined follower count: 68,000), Mullen was simply just another Northeastern University student trying to make cute cheese plates for her friends.Īfter struggling to find decent sources for inspiration, she launched a Tumblr devoted to pretty photos of cheese plates in 2013, and soon began taking her own photos of the ones she’d created. Marissa Mullen knew this well before most people did, which means that today, she’s Instagram’s premier cheese plate influencer. But perhaps more important than any of those things in the year 2019 is that they look really, really good on Instagram.Ī post shared by That Cheese Plate on at 12:58pm PST But they will probably also be right, because a Cheese Plate Person is generally as lovable and persnickety as cheese plates themselves.īecause cheese plates, possibly more than any other snack, represent everything we want to be: gorgeous, widely adored, the center of attention, and a little bit fancy. This person will always have very high self-esteem (a good thing!) and may be a bit of a snob (a fine thing!). What almost always ends up happening is that somebody, inevitably, will call themselves a cheese plate. (It is also not the same thing as asking, “What is your favorite snack?”) It’s called “What Snack Are You?” - the gist is that everyone has to determine the snack that personifies somebody, and the only rule is that you have to be ruthlessly honest and think really, really hard about it. I have a game I like to play with my friends, or rather, a game I force my friends to play with me.
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