The Cheese Bar: Everything you need to know about the new restaurant dedicated to cheese

The cheese glistens. As I take a bite of toastie heaven, melted fat runs down my fingers. Oh, cheese toastie! Enclosed Welsh rarebit! What a joyful piece of plate-fill you are!

A cheese toastie is no culinary moonshot but a comfort blanket, akin to stroking a dog or having a newborn rest on your chest. It is both a soother and a boost to the spirits. And these ones are good. Deserving-of-love-poems-and-panegyrics good. Sell-your-grandma-and-buy-toasties good. And soon, they’ll have their own restaurant in Camden Stables, The Cheese Bar.

It’s the third baby of Mathew Carver, who started with the Cheese Truck then launched Archie’s in Deptford, where I’ve tried the toastie. On launch day, March 2, Carver is holding a “sandwich amnesty”, where you can switch your supermarket sarnie for a toastie (the donated sandwiches go to FareShare).

The menu is both a Hobson’s choice and the lactose intolerant’s ninth circle of hell. These are, in the best way, cheese toasties with pretensions of grandeur. The classic toastie uses Keens cheddar and rich Ogleshield, with red onion to give a potent tang and bread from the Bread Bread Bakery. Even the humble gherkin is hifalutin, pickled not in vinegar but in pale ale from Villages Brewery across the road from Archie’s.

All outlets use British cheeses, including a queso Chihuahua from Gringa dairy in Peckham and burrata from Action’s La Latteria, where it is made fresh every morning. Carver, who admits he likes to refer to himself as “the big cheese” — a revelation he is no doubt now regretting — studied furniture design at university. However, he hated being stuck in front of a screen so he started working at music festivals selling food. When someone he worked for went bankrupt, owing him money, he was offered an old ice-cream van to settle the debt.

“It was when street food was kicking off, so I thought I should do something,” Carver recalls. “It’s one of those clichéd stories: I quit my job, went to the US and looked at street food there.” He was particularly inspired by Mission Cheese in San Francisco, so he returned to the UK, painted the ice-cream van yellow, put in toastie makers and got a place at Maltby Street Market. He also started selling at festivals since his original dream was to be a DJ: “I have an obsessively large music collection that is the bane of my girlfriend’s life.” Toasties are perfect festival food — “people love them in the morning when hungover, they love them at 2am when they’re drunk” — and Carver did 28 last summer: “It almost killed me.” His cardiologist certainly may worry: during festival season, he eats four toasties a day.

The most popular toastie varies — at Wilderness, the goats’ cheese, honey and walnut was the top seller, while the cheddar and bacon was a Glasto favourite. At the latter, Carver accidentally ended up on a 24-hour stall last year: “When the lull came at 1am I sent everyone home bar one person and me. Then at 2am we had a massive queue. It got out of control.”

Carver has competition, though. Borough Market’s Kappacasein is regularly described as the best thing you can eat in London. The stall is run by William Oglethorpe, who uses Montgomery cheddar, adding onions and leeks to enhance the flavour. Oglethorpe says: “It’s like anything: if you use the best ingredients and put care into making it, it can be brilliant.” Then there’s the Scottish stall Deeney’s — “like a highland breeze wafting up your kilt” — whose haggis toasties are a big hit. After touring London’s many markets, it found a permanent home in Leyton in 2015.

At the Melt Room in Noel Street in Soho, flavours include pulled pork. Grill My Cheese, which made the famous rainbow cheese toastie, is at Leather Lane Market. And at The Wolseley, the star of the café menu has long been the London rarebit.

So what makes the cheese toastie so desirable? In 2015, newspapers reported that cheese was “as addictive as crack”, as it contained casein. This was, of course, scientific bunk. It’s the combo of carbs, salt and fat that prove so compelling. Carver puts it simply: “People who like cheese, love cheese.”

Cheese toasties are also a blast from your student years. I, like many, was packed off to uni with a Breville. But those made sad, soggy things — the new toastie is fetishised.

“I think Instagram has made it a bit crazy,” Carver agrees. “Those gooey cheese shots look so good.” Oh, they do. Be still, my deeply congested heart.