Business
40 MARCH 2018 I LIC COURIER I www.qns.com
BY ANGELA MATUA
AMATUA@QNS.COM
InLong Island City, Michele
Buster and Pierluigi Sini
have been running a mini
cheese empire for 20 years.
Buster and Sini have been importing
cheese and other speciality food items
from the Mediterranean to be enjoyed by
food lovers nationwide.The duo has run
Forever Cheese out of an office at 36-36
33rd St. in Long Island City since 1998
and import just under 500 food items
from Italy, Spain, Portugal and Croatia.
Though Buster began her career in
sports marketing — working for U.S. Open
Tennis and World Cup Soccer — her
travels led her to Sini and his family of
cheese makers.
After Buster and Sini began dating,
she moved with him to Long Island City
in 1992, where they both worked for his
family’s company. Sini’s family makes
Fulvi Pecorino Romano, a sheep’s milk
produced in Nepi, a town near Rome.
“I kept hearing that his importers were
not doing what they should for his family’s
cheeses,” Buster said. “I said, ‘teach me
cheese and I’ll figure out how to do it.’”
Instead of just focusing on Fulvi
Pecorino Romano, Buster and Sini ex-panded
their company to import other
cheeses from Italy, Spain, Portugal and
Croatia. They officially changed the name
of their company to Forever Cheese
in 1998.
“After spending numerous years where
nobody quite understand the name of our
company, how to pronounce the name and
it didn’t really reflect that we were import-ers
of cheese, we decided to change the
name,” she said.
But just as they changed the name,
the duo decided to expand their selec-tion
and began to import items to pair
with cheese — fig cakes and tomato jam
from Spain, Mostarda, a fruit mustard from
Portugal, and extra virgin olive oil from
from small producers.
“What we’ve always tried to do is bring
very iconic products from Italy, Spain,
Portugal, Croatia and introduce them to
the American public,” Buster said. “Not by
making them American but importing the
things we’re impassioned of and making
everybody fall in love with them.”
Masters
of Cheese
Photos courtesy of Forever Cheese
