The Olivia and Joe Cheese Show | The Cheese Professor

Editor’s note: Contributor Pamela Vachon was the perfect person to share Olivia and Joe’s story. She shares, “My boyfriend made a salad with blue cheese in it the first time we had dinner together. He didn’t know I was a cheese writer yet, so I thought it was a bold move, and one that suggested that things could work out for us! (I love blue cheese.)”

There are people who love cheese, and then there are people whose love is rooted in cheese. (I think this is the appropriate forum where this can earn solid #relationshipgoals.) Comedians, YouTubers, and cheese lovers Olivia Vessel and Joe Russell are the duo behind The Olivia and Joe Cheese Show: a weekly, short-format comedy program centered around the tasting of one cheese per episode. Replete with sassy couple banter, copious cheese puns, and even a musical parody number each week, (i.e., “Ding dong the brebirousse is red…”) the show now has over 80 episodes to its credit and almost 1000 followers. Each cheese is rated—or “ratted,” utilizing cheese-loving rat icons as mascots—on a 5-point scale.

In a recent episode featuring homemade mozzarella—“it’s the cheese that you buy to make big pizza pie, MOZZ-a-rella,”—Joe proposed to Olivia on camera. (Fresh, warm mozzarella and an engagement ring? That’s amore, indeed!) So, I think this qualifies as...The Cheesiest Marriage Proposal Ever. Naturally, I had to hear all about this, so I chatted with Olivia and Joe about their very cheesy life together.

Did you learn of your mutual love of cheese early in the relationship?

Olivia Vessel: So...we met on Tinder, and I always tease him that his Tinder “About Me” just said “Comedian. Magician. Lover of cheese.” And it made me laugh out loud because I liked cheese a lot but I wasn’t obsessed with it the way that I am now.

Joe Russell: I don’t even think I really meant it as, “I love cheese so much; it’s the most important thing for me,” I just thought it would be a funny punchline. The fanciest cheese I ever bought was, like, cheddar with little peppers in it.

OV: So then, when we met, I think for the first year or so that we were dating, any time we would go out to eat if there was a cheese platter on the menu we’d always order it because it was a fun thing that we would do together; it felt fancy.

What inspired the YouTube series?

OV: Joe and I kind of realized that, because he’s a comedian and an editor, and I’m an actor, and a director and a singer, we realized that between the two of us, we could create something pretty cool.

JR: We’re just weird on our own. I remember saying to Olivia, “somebody’s got to see this.” So we racked our brains for a long time thinking about what should the show be about? Okay, there’s always going to definitely be a bit in the show where we eat cheese, so there will be a cheese segment, and then after a while, it just became the whole thing.

OV: It will just be a cheese show.

I found that your episodes aren’t just funny, but informative! Where does your background cheese knowledge come from, or where do you get your information?

OV: I had also worked for a little bit at this fancy French restaurant on the Upper East Side, and they had a cheese platter that was on the menu, and all the cheese was supplied by Murray’s, and when they were teaching us about the cheeses, I was like “oh my god” and I just kept taking notes!

JR: She came home with a notebook full of handwritten cheese notes. I’m like, “what are you doing?”

OV: All of the other servers were saying “you don’t have to know that much about it,” but I was like, “no this is so cool!” I just found it fascinating. There was someone who had come from Murray’s to teach the servers about the cheeses, and she had told us that Murray’s teaches classes and that you could get on the volunteer list and then take the class for free and still get to take all the notes and everything.

So, Murray’s classes gave me the foundation, and it also helped show me just how much information there is out there, so now when I pick a cheese, I kind of will pick the next 3 or 4 episodes, and then I research them as much as I can. I spend probably an hour or two online for each cheese before we film. And the more research I’ve done, the more helpful it is to be able to write jokes about it and be able to come up with lyrics for the song.

How do you choose your cheeses each week?

OV: I follow a lot of cheese people...I just kind of scour the internet for interesting stories. I think it’s fun when we have holidays coming up to try to find something fitting, like last year for Halloween we did Mimolette, because that’s fun, it’s orange, and it’s got cheese mites on it, so it’s kind of scary. I kind of use what else is on the calendar as a way to pick stuff. And between holidays, it’s just about “what was last week’s episode,” and I want this one to look and feel very different, or we haven’t a done blue cheese in a while, or, we haven’t done many cheddars…I try to not do 3 goat cheeses in a row.

JR: She’s got this crazy spreadsheet where everything’s color-coded and numbered, and it’s got memorable moments from the show, and the “ratting” we gave it, and whether it was cow or sheep, and so she tries to space them out.

OV: Through The Cheese Show I’ve been able to collect some cheesemonger friends that are invested in the show…

JR: So if there’s a question that no internet thing can answer…

OV: I’ll reach out to them, or if we need ideas for different cheese shows I’ll reach out to them. We have a friend, Josiah Baird who works in California, and he actually gave us the idea to make mozzarella for our anniversary episode, because I asked, “What would be fun, something different, kind of romantic…”

CP: Are either of you tasting the cheese for the first time during the episode?

JR: Definitely for me.

OV: And most of the time for me as well. In the beginning, I knew a lot of the cheeses, and I was picking cheeses that I’d had before, whether in Murray’s class or in a restaurant somewhere. I used to taste them when I would buy them to make sure this would be a good cheese for the show, but a lot of shops since the pandemic haven’t been doing tastings, but I think now I know enough about cheese that, based on how it’s made, or what it’s infused with, or where it’s made, I can kind of get a good guess of at least whether or not Joe’s going to like it. I know I’ll love it.

JR: Yancey’s Fancy sent us four different cheeses, and in one of the episodes I got blindfolded and had to guess the flavors.

OV: It was literally a blind taste test for him.

Are there any favorite cheeses you learned along the way or anything that stood out or surprised you?

JR: Our favorite one is the Meredith Dairy Feta.

OV: A sheep and goat cheese from Meredith dairy ...oh my god...it’s marinated in oil instead of brine.

JR: That’s the one cheese in all of the 80 episodes we just buy, and just covet it, and savor it.

OV: It got 6 out of 5 rats.

CP: It’s an overacheeser. (I’ll see myself out.) Joe, in the proposal episode, were you inspired specifically because you were singing to the tune “That’s Amore?”

JR: I had to keep it a secret that I was going to do that! For the song, we’ll take the title of the cheese, or something about the cheese, and figure out if it sounds like the chorus of any song…

OV: So we had just done fontinella, and then we were doing mozzarella, and we’d already done (Rhianna’s) “Umbrella” song so we couldn’t do that again...I think I came up with “That’s Amore.”

Are you planning for a cheese-themed wedding?

JR: Cheese has to be involved somehow.

OV: Has to be, in some way. Maybe like a giant cheese “cake.” Instead of cake maybe we’ll have 3 giant wheels of cheese stacked up...

Planning a wedding?

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