Everything at the Cheese Experience Gouda is yellow. Cheese wheels are stacked meters high at the entrance. Even the outside of the national monument has the color of a Young Mature piece. Owner Femke van Munster (46) is waiting for us in the café: “It’s so nice to have you here!” On chalkboards in the shape of a coffee cup there are jokes about cheese: ‘It’s only a crisis when the cheese runs out’. The cake of the day is cheesecake.
In the corner is a world map where visitors can indicate where they come from with a pin. “We really get people from all over the world,” says Femke. There are also a few pins near Kiribati in the Pacific Ocean and Kamchatka in Russia. “Everyone is welcome here, but I’m not going to try vegan cheese, we just eat cheese here.”
Femke taps on the menu with her red acrylic nails. “Yes, you have to join us for lunch, otherwise I wouldn’t enjoy it.” We both choose an old cheese sandwich with mustard dill sauce, tomato and arugula – 10.90. She guides us via a staircase to the company canteen above the café. “We have an employee from the asylum seeker center who prays here, women breastfeed here and we eat a sandwich together in the afternoon, a multicultural space, so to speak.”
Femke came to Gouda from Brabant twenty years ago. She ran a flower shop with her mother Mia. “Gouda had a bad image. Moroccan problems, they wrote everywhere in the media, were not like that at all.” The people of Gouda should be able to be proud of their city again, just like Femke and Mia were in Brabant. At the Nijmegen Four Days Marches, Femke’s uncle coincidentally met the designers of the first Heineken experience, which is where the idea arose: “Gouda deserved a cheese experience 364 days a year.”
Yasmine Prangers: “I’ve been eating cheese all day.”
Simon Lenskens
Jeffy Oosterwijk (24) brings us the two old cheese sandwiches. “He is the most handsome,” says Femke. Jeffy takes off his apron and joins us for lunch: two sausage rolls from Plus with truffle mayonnaise and a Red Bull. “Truffle is always possible,” says Jeffy. The head of Yasmine Prangers (32) appears near the stairs. She doesn’t want to join us for lunch: “No, I’ve been eating cheese all day. Coffee, cheese, coffee, cheese. I’m really not feeling well. I have a pasta salad; maybe later.”
The cheese cubes scattered throughout the experience are indeed a danger, Jeffy agrees. “Before you know it, it’s already in your mouth. Coffee, cheese, smoking. We all do that.” “And Femke drinks Coke Zero all day long,” says Yasmine, who joins us for a moment. An Efteling-like tune sounds through the building from downstairs. “That is the end of the Cheese experience,” says Yasmine. “It goes every ten minutes, the first thing I do at the end of the day is unplug it.”
Yasmine talks about the staff outing last week at an all you can eat restaurant with Dutch music: “Sushi, cotton candy and then the polonaise for hours.” Yasmine hates Dutch music and the polonaise. “Yes, but you looked nice on the table,” says Femke, sipping her second glass of Coke Zero. Yasmine nods: “We are a very close-knit club, this is my cheese family.”
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