Borough Market Gourmet Cheese Shop: Tuesday Counter Picks

Nine in the morning is the honest hour at Borough Market. The arches are still cold, the delivery vans are still reversing, and the cheese counters are being dressed rather than shopped. Mons Cheesemongers occupies a corner of Three Crowns Square at 8 Southwark Street, London SE1 1TL, and its shutters go up at ten from Tuesday to Friday, at nine on Saturday, and at ten on Sunday. Monday is the exception: the stall does not trade at all, which catches out anyone who treats the market as a seven-day operation.

The company opened in the UK in 2006 on a small stall at Borough Market, at a moment when the streets around Southwark Cathedral were still being reimagined as a food destination. A second stall followed in 2011 at Maltby Street in Bermondsey, and in 2017 the business opened its first permanent shop on Lordship Lane in East Dulwich. Borough has been the constant through all of it, and the counter still reads like a market pitch rather than a boutique: wheels stacked shoulder to shoulder, portions weighed on the spot, names written up by hand.

That continuity matters when you are buying. A market counter cannot hide behind refrigeration cabinets, so the staff tend to talk about where a cheese is in its life rather than reciting tasting notes. Ask how long a piece has been open, and you will get a straight answer.

The list leans French. St Nectaire Laitier is sold by the eighth, from £7.75 for a piece of roughly 185g, and Saint Christophe, a soft washed-rind cheese, is £14.90. Parmigiano Reggiano begins at £13.40 for a minimum 250g wedge and rises with the weight you request. Edmund Tew, a British soft cheese, is £11.85, while Kirkham's Lancashire is sold as a 1kg selection at £60.00. If you are putting together a board for a dinner rather than a picnic, the larger selections start around £62.50 and the Christmas Franco-Suisse box begins at £51.95.

Buy less than you think you need. Three cheeses at 200g each will feed six people comfortably once bread and something sharp are on the table, and a market counter rewards a short, specific order over a vague sweep of the display.

A first order that works for four people: an eighth of St Nectaire for the soft end, 250g of Parmigiano Reggiano to grate and nibble, and the Bread & Butter Pickles from the sundries shelf. Add a cured meat from the same counter and a bag of bread from elsewhere in the market and you have a lunch that needs no cooking. Skip the larger selections unless you are feeding eight or more, because a £62.50 box is a lot of cheese to get through before it starts to tire.

Saturday is the day the market belongs to visitors, and the stall feels it. Aim for the nine o'clock opening if you want a conversation about a cheese; by eleven the crowd is three deep and the questions get shorter. Tuesday and Wednesday are the quietest trading days, when the same staff have time to cut a sample and explain why two wheels of the same cheese taste different.

Have your order ready in weights rather than recipe names. Saying 'two hundred grams of the St Nectaire, and a wedge of the Kirkham's' moves the line faster than asking what goes into a fondue. Sunday trading runs from ten until four, two hours shorter than Saturday, so the display thins noticeably by mid-afternoon.

The stall carries the supporting cast as well. Cured meats, wine and beer sit alongside the wheels, and the sundries shelf holds Bread & Butter Pickles at £9.90 and an insulated Cool Bag at £12.95 for anyone travelling home with a soft cheese in July. Gift cards are sold at the counter, which is the simplest answer when the cheese lover on your list already owns a cheese knife.

Delivery is worth knowing about if you live outside London. The online shop ships free on orders above £75, and the site warns that parcels can land a day either side of the date you pick, so build that into a dinner plan rather than ordering for the same evening.

Leave the stall and head towards the river. Southwark Cathedral sits a few minutes away, and the railway arches behind the market lead through Borough Yards towards Flat Iron Square. From there, Bermondsey Street runs south with galleries, coffee rooms and pubs along it, and the walk up to the top of the street takes about fifteen minutes at browsing pace. It is a good route for a bag of cheese, because the whole stretch is flat and mostly undercover when it rains. Bermondsey is not incidental to the shop either: Mons opened a second stall at the Maltby Street market in 2011, so the walk south is a short history of the business as well as a pleasant hour.

Address: Mons Cheesemongers, Three Crowns Square, 8 Southwark Street, London SE1 1TL. Opening hours are Monday closed; Tuesday 10:00 to 17:00; Wednesday 10:00 to 17:00; Thursday 10:00 to 17:00; Friday 10:00 to 17:00; Saturday 09:00 to 17:00; Sunday 10:00 to 16:00. London Bridge is the nearest station, roughly four minutes on foot. Online orders over £75 are delivered free.

This is a counter, not a cafe. If you want to sit down with a plate, walk a minute to Borough Market Kitchen and eat there instead. If the stall is out of the one cheese you came for, Neal's Yard Dairy's Borough Market shop on Park Street carries the British end of the same argument, and the two are close enough to compare a wedge of cheddar bought at each.