David Walsh hopes he and Truffle Cheese Shop make a great pairing.
In June, the longtime ad tech and marketing entrepreneur bought a majority stake in the 25-year-old cheese shop, which lost its Cherry Creek brick-and-mortar location in October.
Walsh plans to reopen the retail portion of the operation in 1,200 square feet at the Evans School in Denver’s Golden Triangle neighborhood later this year.
“Other than eating it, I don’t know the first thing about cheese,” said Walsh, who’s been a customer of the Truffle for years.
Luckily, Walsh is keeping around former owner Lisa Morris, who’s worked at the shop since 2018 and bought the business in 2021. Truffle’s assets ended up being seized by the state for back taxes, which caused the closure of its storefront at 2906 E. Sixth Ave.
Both Walsh and Morris, who still owns 20% of the business, said those issues have been resolved.
“He’s the right person to be taking it over, making the Truffle what it should be. I feel so lucky that he reached out and really cared enough about the shop to do this,” said Morris. She’ll stay on as the Truffle’s “creative person” and help Walsh get up to speed with suppliers, how to cater and the like.
“This kind of thing doesn’t happen,” she continued. “Normally, I’d be headed in the direction where I’d take everything offline and close it completely and find something else to do before retirement.”
When the Truffle reopens, Walsh said he’ll add a more expansive kitchen section, with pots, pans, utensils, charcuterie boards and the like. He also is looking to feature local producers on a rotating basis because a good chunk of the shop’s product comes from abroad.
Eventually, they hope to have wine and beer on-site. The timeline depends on how fast things move through the city’s licensing process. He said he hopes that the shop will be open come the holiday season because the Truffle has historically done about 35% of its annual business from the week before Thanksgiving through early January.
“The idea is it will carry everything that customers were used to seeing in the Truffle,” Walsh said. “The size of the previous space, at over 800 square feet, made it prohibitive to carrying a wider range of products that might have been a little more profitable and less perishable.”
Morris will also continue to run events for the shop, like the mozzarella and burrata making classes she recently held at the Evans School.
“Itap probably my favorite part about it, just teaching people and also having that nonchef background too,” said Morris, a former accountant.
The Truffle’s catering business, which produces cheese boards for galleries and house parties alike, is also something that will carry on.
Morris had kept that arm going while the shop didn’t have a storefront using kitchen solace supplied by a “friend of the business.” But she said sales were about 25% of the normal volume during the time, mainly because people thought the shop was closed down completely.
Events and catering are where Walsh sees the most potential going forward.
“The retail portion of this business is not really whatap going to make real money and keep this afloat. Thatap all high risk and low margin,” he said. “And we’ve got (catering) clients that are consistent, and thatap good, predictable, profitable revenue for us.”
Walsh is a native of France who moved to California with his family in 1988. He graduated from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2001, having studied political science, later moving to Los Angeles with his wife.
He ended up in the internet marketing world before moving back to Colorado in 2010. He founded his own firm, called Visiqua, which he exited three years ago. Since then, he said he’s been “staring at the inside of the windshield driving my kids around.”
Walsh said he thinks itap a good time to get back in the business world with cheese, something he got into during his time in California. He expects to spend in the low- to mid-five figures to build out the space at the Evans School, which he leased for five years.
“I read about the business closing and forwarded it to my wife half-jokingly saying it’d be fun to buy and revive it,” Walsh recalled. “I think it took both me and Lisa a bit of time before we knew I was serious.”
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