Bloomsbury Gourmet Cheese Shop: Plates Until 10.30pm

Lamb's Conduit Street is one of the last streets in central London where a specialist shop can still look like a shop rather than a brand. La Fromagerie occupies 52 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1N 3LL, and it trades from nine in the morning until half past ten at night, Monday to Saturday, with Sunday closed. Between three and six in the afternoon the kitchen closes, but cheese, charcuterie, toasted sandwiches, wine, tea and cake carry on.

The front half is the cheese counter: a long case of cut pieces, boards, and jars of things that go with them. Behind it the room turns into tables, and by evening it is a restaurant serving dishes built around the same cheeses. That layout is the reason to come twice in one day, once for a wedge and once for dinner, and it is why the shop feels busier than its size suggests.

There are no reservations for the outside tables, and the staff are direct about it: turn up and wait, or book for the inside room. On a wet Tuesday in February this is the most pleasant place in the neighbourhood to sit for an hour with a glass of wine and a plate of cheese.

The case leans towards farmhouse and small-production cheese. Crozier Blue is £13.00 for 250g, Beauvale is £9.00 for the same weight, and Picos de Europa, a Spanish blue, is £8.75 for 250g. Rollright, a soft British cheese, is £14.85 for a mini of about 300g, which is the right size for two people and a baguette.

The shop also sells boards and hampers, and a celebration cheese cake that has become a fixture for weddings and birthdays. If you are buying a gift, ask for the board rather than a bag of loose pieces: the presentation is half the point, and the staff assemble it while you wait.

Three cheeses, 200g each, will feed six people as a starter with bread and something pickled. Choose one soft, one hard and one blue, and buy the soft on the day you plan to serve it. The counter will cut to weight rather than to a price, so say the number of people and let the staff work out the sizes, which is faster than naming grams and then changing your mind.

Ask for the cheeses to be wrapped separately. A soft cheese next to a blue in one bag will pick up the blue's aroma within a short walk, and the shop will happily use separate paper for each. If you are serving within a couple of hours, ask them not to chill the pieces too hard.

Patricia Michelson started the business after falling for cheese on a skiing trip in Meribel, coming home with a wheel of Beaufort Chalet d'Alpage that she sold from her garden shed. The first shop opened on Highbury Park in September 1992, a second, a cheese and wine bar, followed on Moxon Street in Marylebone in November 2002, and a restaurant arrived in 2017. The company now runs three shops with a wholesale business alongside them.

That origin explains the range. The counter is not built around British cheese alone, and French, Italian and Spanish pieces sit next to the domestic ones without any hierarchy. It is a shop for people who want one perfect piece rather than a survey of a region.

There is a particular kind of shopping that happens here on a weekday morning: one customer, one question, one piece. The staff will open a cheese for you if the piece on display is not the one you want, and they will tell you when something is past its best rather than sell it. That is a small thing until you have bought a tired wedge elsewhere and found out the difference at home.

Morning is for shopping. The counter is fully dressed by nine, the deliveries are in, and the person behind it has time to talk. Lunch runs through the middle of the day and is the busiest stretch, especially at weekends. Between three and six the kitchen shuts, which makes it a good window for a toasted cheese sandwich and a quiet table, and dinner starts after six with the full menu.

Saturday is the day to avoid if you want space, because the street fills with shoppers and the room fills with them. A Wednesday at four in the afternoon is the opposite: half-empty, warm, and easy to linger in, with the street outside quiet enough to hear the coffee grinder from the shop next door.

Lamb's Conduit Street runs between Theobald's Road and Guilford Street, with independent clothes shops, a bookshop, a pub and a butcher along it. Turn right out of the door and Russell Square is five minutes away; turn left and Gray's Inn Road leads towards King's Cross in about fifteen minutes. The British Museum is a ten-minute walk east, and Coram's Fields, a park that bans adults unless accompanied by a child, is two minutes north.

A good route for an afternoon: buy cheese, walk to Russell Square, sit under the plane trees, then follow the streets east towards the museum. The cheese travels well in a cotton bag for an hour, though a soft piece should go home first if the day is warm. If it is raining, the walk to Russell Square is under a minute of open sky, and the square itself has enough tree cover to make standing still worthwhile.

La Fromagerie Bloomsbury, 52 Lamb's Conduit Street, London WC1N 3LL. Hours: Monday to Saturday 9am to 10.30pm; Sunday closed. The kitchen is closed between 3pm and 6pm, when toasted cheese, cheese and charcuterie, wine, tea and cakes are still served. No reservations for outside tables. Russell Square and Holborn are the nearest stations.