Cheese, Charcuterie, and Celebrity Sightings: A Culinary Journey with Dominick DiBartolomeo

Dominick DiBartolomeo is a Los Angeles food personality, entrepreneur and owner of The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills, one of the oldest and most iconic cheese stores in the United States. As the country's leading importer of hard-to-find Italian foods and ingredients, Dom infuses his passion and expertise into every aspect of his culinary ventures.

Dom is a native New Yorker with a big personality and an even bigger appreciation for great Italian food passed down through generations of family recipes. It's this same love of food that he shares with the Los Angeles community, both with his customers at The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills and his vast network of top LA chefs who rely on Dom for his access to exclusively imported, super-premium Italian foods and ingredients in addition to his own pastas, sauces and fresh-made Italian products sold under his Domenico's Foods brand.

But his pathway to his current day success wasn't a totally smooth one. After graduating from USC in the late 90s, Dom took a job as an assistant with a large LA public relations agency (a job he admittedly was not cut out for) while also working in the butcher department of Bristol Farms on weekends for minimum wage. Dom eventually landed his first real food industry job at The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills, where he traveled to and from by bus (lacking the money for a car). Over the next 20 years working at the Cheese Store, Dom not only became one of the city's foremost authorities on cheese; it's also where he met and proposed to his wife and launched Domenico's Foods, which started with the sale of his sun-dried tomatoes, based on a family recipe handed down for generations.

While running The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills, which offers over 600 cheeses from all over the world, Dom also frequently visits Italy to curate rare food items not widely available in the United States. He maintains relationships with some of the top food purveyors, restaurants and chefs worldwide, continually creating, discovering and introducing new, exceptional products. With his dedication to excellence and incomparable enthusiasm, Dom continues to leave an indelible mark on the culinary landscape of Los Angeles, and he's got big things in store as The Cheese Store of Beverly Hills and Domenico's Foods grow in exciting new ways.