Nobody named “Grey” works at Greys Fine Cheeses. “Greys” — with no apostrophe — is a play on the word “graze,” says Kurt Mullican, 42, cheesemonger and, with his wife Jackie, co-owner of the cheese shop/restaurant at 709 South Mendenhall Road.
“A lot of the time the term ‘grazing’ is used around cheese,” he says. “So, I changed the spelling. I thought it had a little more panache.”
For the first time, Mullican will be a participating chef in Le Bon Appétit, the Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital fundraiser, to be held June 5th at The Kent. “I’m going to be doing a little fondue plate,” he says.
Mullican got involved after becoming friends with chef/restaurateur and event founder Kelly English. “I just love what he does and the way he interacts with the community,” says Mullican. “He asked me one day and I said, ‘Man. Awesome. Let’s go.’”
Cheese wasn’t on Mullican’s mind growing up in Lebanon, Tennessee. He liked to draw. “Mostly things from horror movies. Just a lot of zombies and things like that.” That led to his interest in acting. “I was in a lot of musicals as a kid. I spent a lot of time on stage.” He performed “multiple times. Maybe until halfway through college.” His roles ranged from a Lollipop Guild member with knickers and red-and-white-striped socks in The Wizard of Oz to the lead in a tattered shirt in Oliver!.
He stopped acting in college. “I was going to audition for Equus. I read the script and I was uncomfortable with it.” And, he says, “The nihilism of life set in. Just, ‘Is anything worth pursuing in that way?’ And then, of course, your parents want you to take the safe route.”
So, he majored in education at Tennessee Tech University in Cookeville, Tennessee. “It didn’t take long to figure out I wouldn’t want to do that,” Mullican says, and he ended up dropping out of school after two years. “I hated school.”
As for food, Mullican was “the total opposite of the picky eater.” But, he says, “Being in the ’90s in Lebanon, Tennessee, we didn’t have a lot of exotic foods.” Back then sushi was exotic, he adds. Also, Mullican says, “My mom’s a terrible cook. I’m that rare exception where even my grandmother wasn’t a great cook.”
Mullican recalls how he became fascinated with cooking. “I got this bug one time when I saw a TV commercial for an electric wok. Like a hot plate you’d plug in.” His first creation was his “Cajun Chicken” — a fried concoction made of chunks of chicken and Tony Chachere’s spice. “I thought it was awesome.”
Cooking “started out of necessity,” Mullican says. “My mother was busy a lot. She was gone quite a bit and I was left to cook for myself. But I enjoyed the process. When I was 21, 22, I got a job in dietary at a hospital. My mom worked in the administration office.”
He was hired by the manager who ran the Morrison’s Cafeteria account at the hospital. “We did some catering gigs. He gave me an official kitchen shirt that chefs wear.”
Mullican, who also worked on more upscale dinners at night, liked “the chaos of it.” But, he adds, cheese was “underlying this whole time. When I was in my early teens, I did family trips with my dad to the beach. My aunt would take me to the liquor store where they had a really nice cheese counter.”
He sampled cheese and talked about the history of it with the store’s employees. He’d leave with 20 “little nubs” of different kinds of cheese. “Then as we sat on the beach and unwrapped one to snack on, we’d try to recall what the lady told us about it.”
The idea of cheese coming in different varieties was new to him. “Being in middle Tennessee in the ’90s, I’d never seen stuff like that. I thought, coming from Lebanon, that the Colby they put in eggs in Cracker Barrel was fancy.”
It became a tradition for him to buy cheese in Destin, Florida, and take it to the beach. “It was kind of a hobby I didn’t know I had. If and when I saw something cool and could buy it, I’d try it.”
His boss at the hospital invited Mullican to join him when he decided to go into a Cici’s pizza business. “I didn’t do that. I just had this image in my mind of mopping up throw-up from little kids rather than learning the management side of the food service industry,” Mullican says.
He sold construction equipment for the next eight years or so. But, ironically, this fueled his interest in cheese. “I traveled around the country on other people’s money and ate at really fancy restaurants a lot of the time.” Mullican also loved to eat at diners. “I had a piece of apple pie with a piece of sharp cheddar on it. That’s THE dessert to me.”
He eventually opened a gym in Lebanon. “I generally have always been in pretty good physical shape. I was a wrestler as a kid in high school, and I do jujitsu.”
Mullican then began making online infotainment podcasts for athletic training. He’d come to Memphis to shoot commercials and content for his gym. “I liked Memphis a lot. I still do,” he says.
He began doing little meal preps for athletes when he took a job managing CrossFit Memphis in Cordova, Tennessee. “And that kind of relit the candle,” he says, adding, “I would make it really great. Do a steak, green onion, and cucumber salad. Just trying to bring some flavor to fitness meals.”
And he continued to buy cheese. “I always bought stuff to play with and taste. Being in Memphis gave me a little more exposure to stuff. We didn’t have international markets in Lebanon.”
One thing he likes about cheese is that “everything has a story. And I love that. I think a great example is raclette. It’s a stinky, melty cheese. The cheesemakers in the Swiss Alps, that was the cheese they made for themselves. They would gather by a fire in the evening with their little wheels of raclette.”
Mullican met Jackie at his gym. “We had a lot of great mindset talks and world view talks,” he says. They got the idea to open a cheese shop after Jackie visited one in Paris, France. “We opened it in May, 2021. I was bringing in cheese.” It’s now “kind of a cheese and wine cafe with sandwiches and salads.” The food is Mullican’s vision. “An extension of me, if you will. It’s got to be cheese-centric.”
Cheese is added to every menu item. “Our turkey sandwich has brick cheese on it,” Mullican says. Comté is his favorite cheese. “When it’s young, like six to nine months, it’s a lot of hazelnuts and brown butter. And then as it ages, those things get way more intense and you start to get some dark, chocolatey, fruity notes out of it.”
Choosing a favorite cheese is difficult “when you’re around different cheeses all the time. But I think that’s definitely one I never swept under the bus for anything else. I don’t ever get tired of it.”
He and Jackie opened a second “Greys Fine Cheeses” location in 2022 in Nashville, Tennessee. They love to travel. “We go all over the world and meet cheesemakers and tour the various facilities,” Mullican says.
Customers might be seeing “some cheese tourism in the future,” he says. “I want to bring other people with me.”
Meanwhile, Mullican will continue to sample cheese at Greys Fine Cheeses. “Definitely a lot of grazing, if you will. A little bit at a time all through the day.”
