Cheese Lovers, Rejoice. Bimi’s Canteen & Bar Puts Fondue Service On The Menu.

When I mentioned that I was going to be doing an article about fondue to my dinner hosts David and Debbie, they shared a knowing glance. With a sly smile, Debbie asked: “So, will you be putting your car keys in the fishbowl when you get there?”

Reacting to the puzzled look on my face, the couple (who are about a decade older than me) burst into laughter and explained that at suburban swinger parties back in the 1970s, male swingers used to drop their car keys in a bowl and, at the end of the night, each of their swinger wives would pluck out a set of keys at random and go home to spend the night with whomever. Notoriously, it was fondue that these 70’s swingers used to nourish their wanton amorous pursuits.

I responded by saying that while I was too young for all that, I did remember the fondue craze of the era and that just about everyone I knew growing up had a fondue set their families had used only once tucked away in a forlorn corner of their pantries, usually with some kind of burn mark on it. People stopped using their home pots because, as our other dinner companion Dr. Jonathan K. explained, fondues were not only fire hazards, but also a digestive menace. Don’t drink cold soda when you eat that fondue, he warned me, because it can harden the cheese in one’s digestive tract and possibly form a lactobezoar, a undigested mass of milk protein and mucus that occludes the process of gastric emptying.

Here’s the good news: readers who make it to the end of this article will be disabused of urban legends surrounding adultery in the 1970s and fondue-related bezoars, as well as the alpine legend that fondue is the national dish of Switzerland.

And here’s the better news: any other preconceptions you might have about fondue will be erased by the fantastic version of the dish offered this winter at Bimi’s Canteen & Bar, which opened this year in Chatham. Adjacent to the popular cheese shop also named after co-owner Ellen Waggett’s mother Bimi, the restaurant is both a labor of love and something of a side hustle for Ellen and her husband and business partner, Christopher Landy, both of whom are successful theatrical designers who have divided their time and careers between New York City and the Hudson Valley.

Photo: Albert Stern

The cheese shop opened in 2014 with the motto "Community. Camaraderie. Cheese." and has been one of the anchors of Chatham’s compact, but lively, downtown. Talking with Waggett and Landy, one gets the impression that with the Canteen, these longtime Brooklynites have created the kind of establishment they might want to eat in. They have imbued it with the same vibe and commitment to using locally sourced foods as their shop, giving it the comfortable, unpretentious feel of a neighborhood-restaurant-with-a-serious-kitchen you might find in the city. Additionally, the owners relate to the wants of urbanites who may have just made the hours-long schlep upstate, arrived late, and are looking for a cut-above meal in a low-key setting – the kitchen and bar are open late and on Mondays, a good thing for folks who might elsewhere encounter rolled-down shutters and rolled-up the sidewalks after 9 p.m. The executive chef is Hudson native Jesse Curtain and desserts are by Claire Raposo of Stockbridge’s The Lost Lamb Patisserie.

Waggett says Bimi’s two fondue offerings, which will be rolled out on December 7, are on the menu for a nostalgic reason – she had fun eating it when she was a young Michigander sitting around a hot pot late at night sharing the meal with friends. “Fondue is a food that wants to be played with,” she says. “The Simple Fondue” ($25) is served with chunks of freshly made bread that works as a starter for two or a bar snack. But my suggestion is to go for broke with “The Grand Fondue” ($60), a generous platter of vegetables, fresh and dried fruits, meatballs, cornichons, steak, bread, and merguez — an appetizer for four or a filling entree for two.

The fondue is a house blend of Gruyere, Challerhocker, and Ur-Eiche from Switzerland, and a Raclette from Vermont. That American addition might not have pleased the Schweizer Kaseunion (Swiss Cheese Union), a dairy cartel that ruled the Swiss economy for 80 years and foisted fondue upon the world to remedy an alpine cheese glut. As delightfully recounted on the Groovy History website, to spur Swiss cheese imports the cartel launched a marketing blitz focused on “a dish that a few small towns in Switzerland used to eat and the seeds for the fondue fad were born. Fondue was designated a national dish and served at the Swiss pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair…America, a market not afraid to add cheese to anything, ate up the fondue fad like liquid catnip.”

The Schweizer Kaseunion collapsed in scandal in the 1970s, but not because of a spate of lactobazoars, the dread of which has inspired a spirited debate on what is best to drink while eating fondue – white wine, black tea, or schnapps. At Bimi’s Canteen, I was served a delicious dry Sauvignon Blanc with no ill effects, but if you remain concerned, know that in 2010, a team of Swiss, German and British researchers answered the centuries-old question in a paper published in The British Medical Journal, entitled: "Effect on gastric function and symptoms of drinking wine, black tea, or schnapps with a Swiss cheese fondue: randomized controlled crossover trial." As we’re running out of space, here’s a summary of their findings – drink whatever the hell you want. And the bar at Bimi’s, helmed by mixologist Andrey Matseyev (formerly of NYC’s Restaurant Daniel), has pages of creative craft cocktails to experiment with.

Now for the adultery: Bimi’s Bar is a gorgeous, seductively lit space underneath the main dining room that would be a perfect locale for a clandestine assignation, except that all your friends and neighbors are probably also there having drinks and possibly fondues. Waggett and Landy are set and lighting designers, after all, and the bar is an absolute gem.

I didn’t notice a goldfish bowl for my car keys, but were there ever any goldfish bowls for anyone’s car keys? In his 2018 San Francisco Gate investigation, “Did Key Parties Ever Really Happen?" journalist Joe Kukura cites a 1970 Journal of Sex Research article “Co-Marital Sex and the Sexual Freedom Movement.” Co-authors James and Lynn Smith wrote: “Our data suggest a number of other false myths, but we cannot deal with them all. There is one, however, that bears mention at this time, and that is the ‘key party’ myth.

“We were never even able to find an individual who had attended one.”

So enjoy your fondue – at Bimi’s Canteen, you will surely get lucky with that.

The fondue service will run through March 14, 2024.