Spread & Co owners turns love of cheese into restaurant

Spread & Co. Owner Rosemary Ewald sports a cheese tattoo, but she said her cheese shop business was actually spurred by her love of making items like jams and pickles from scratch, along with the role food has played in her life.

“My mom worked at the cheese shop, and my parents met working in restaurants,” Ewald said.

Ewald started her business in 2016 as a delivery service. At the time, her husband, Austin, was working as a chef in Austin. Ewald was sourcing the cheese herself, making jams, mustards, pickles and crackers from scratch, and building and delivering large, elaborate cheese boards.At the beginning of 2019, Austin quit his job, and by the end of 2019 they opened their first brick-and-mortar restaurant and cheese shop in the Jefferson Square Shopping Center.

“It is a really loyal area,” Ewald said. “A lot of these businesses have been here for 20 years. I think that helped us survive the pandemic.”

At the end of 2020, the couple opened a second location at The Contemporary Austin’s Laguna Gloria. Laguna Gloria is a sprawling, 1916 Italianate-style villa surrounded by 14 acres that serves as an art museum.

“We were definitely really scared, because growth didn’t seem like a good idea,” Ewald said.

Beyond cheese boards, the menu has been expanded to include all-day breakfast items. Ewald said some of the most popular menu items are the Monger’s Grilled Cheese, which features three cheeses picked by the shop, and two sandwiches that feature pork tartines made from pork shoulder and charcuterie ends—the Frenchie and Spamwich.

“The fact that we were making everything from scratch made it easy to veer into breakfast and lunch,” Ewald said. “And then being a cheese shop, we are able to focus on cheese at the heart of everything.”