“Show me a woman and I will tell you what cheese she eats,” challenges Fatos Pristine as he ushers me past his candlelit cheese cave to a small table below a loft jammed to the rafters with specialty teas and coffees. An Italian aria warbles skyward. Fatos, the owner of the Cheese Boutique, Toronto’s best and most eccentric gourmet shop, pours me a glass of sugary tea from a pot he picked up on a recent visit to Turkey, the country of his youth. He looks like a psychoanalyst (wire-rimmed spectacles, a cardigan thrown over his checked shirt), an impression compounded by his drawn-out vowels and staccato consonants.

“You cannot lie with food,” he says, tearing apart a fist-size ball of buffalo mozzarella that was pulled and kneaded by an expert cheese maker on the plains of Campania six days ago. By Fatos’s standards, it is ancient. No Italian would dream of eating mozzarella more than one or two days after it was formed. Even so, a mouthful still manages to transport me back to the factory in Campania, where I first tasted it, warm and dripping from its hot water bath. Perhaps there is something of a psychoanalyst to Fatos.

Housed in a former sausage factory in an industrial strip off the South Kingsway, the Cheese Boutique is not the sort of place you stumble across. You have to be sent there to find it. And you have to see it to believe it.

Like a good private-museum collection, the Cheese Boutique grew out of the passions and interests of one man, who has been quietly changing the way Toronto eats for decades. You’ve probably eaten under Fatos’s influence, even if you don’t know him by name. If you’ve ever savoured a wedge of nutty, ripe French brie, thank Fatos—he was the first to import it to Toronto back in the ’70s. More recently, the store has led the renaissance of the cheese plate in local restaurants, and supplies some of their most sought-after ingredients, from Istrian truffles to properly dry-aged steak.

Buying here is an experience—and not in the Muzak-filled, corporate-sloganed sense of the word. In this city, no one ages gouda or cheddar longer—Fatos once opened a 14-year-old cheddar for his best customers—and his work ripening cheese rivals that of the best affineurs in the world. Jean-Charles Dupoire, chef at Epic and a native of the Loire Valley, was dumbstruck to discover Fatos’s creamy Valençay; aged 60 days at the shop, the chèvre tasted better than the rinds of his childhood—even though he grew up only a few hundred metres from the region’s best producer.

And cheese represents only 40 per cent of the business. The store sells an encyclo­pedic collection of gourmet groceries (from obscure beluga lentils to the latest Charlie Trotter sauces); meat sales aren’t far behind, and a once-tentative produce section now stocks exotica to rival Harvest Wagon’s. Restaurant industry types come here to play hooky. Mathew Sutherland, the chef-owner of Fat Cat, drops by a couple of times a week and considers himself an adopted son. Yannick Bigourdan, co-owner of Splendido, calls it his favourite brunch spot (he samples half his purchases before leaving the premises). Travelling regularly to source new products, Fatos adheres to a simple but foolproof formula: introduce a new ingredient to a handful of top chefs and wait for it to appear on their menus; the lay shoppers will follow.