Long before Dallas had a Michelin star or a James Beard semifinalist list to argue about, it had Paula Lambert making mozzarella by hand in a small Deep Ellum storefront, and most of the food world thought she was out of her mind for trying.
Lambert grew up in Fort Worth, studied art history as a college student in Perugia, and fell hard for the fresh mozzarella she found in Italy, the kind that barely resembles the shrink-wrapped block sold at most American grocery stores. When she came home, she couldn’t find anything close to it anywhere in Texas. So in 1982, with no formal training as a cheesemaker, she started making it herself. An Italian cheese professor came to Dallas to teach her the process, and on his last day in town, the batch failed completely. Lambert and her team had orders to fill and no cheese to fill them with. They came in early the next morning, started over, and got it right. That’s essentially been the operating model ever since: figure it out, fix it, keep going.
The early years were slow, and what turned things around was the same wave of chefs who were busy inventing modern Southwestern cuisine right alongside her. As Stephan Pyles opened Routh Street Café and Dean Fearing returned to the Mansion, the local dining scene finally had the ambition to match Lambert’s cheese, and business started to follow. Pyles in particular became something close to a creative partner in those early days, and Lambert has credited him and fellow Southwestern chefs like Robert Del Grande with pushing her to start folding herbs and chiles into her fresh cheeses rather than sticking to straight Italian tradition. The two have stayed close ever since, traveling together, teaching joint cooking classes, and appearing together at Dallas food events decades later still swapping stories about the city’s early culinary rise.
Mozzarella Company has been at 2944 Elm Street in Deep Ellum for over four decades now, still making cheese the old-fashioned way, by hand, in small batches. What started as a single fresh mozzarella has grown into more than 30 artisanal cheeses, nearly all of them developed by Lambert herself, from Blanca Bianca and Hoja Santa, a goat cheese wrapped in the herb of the same name, to smoked cheeses, queso fresco, and a rotating Cheese of the Month program.
Nearly every one of them has picked up an award somewhere along the way, including four wins in a single year at the World Cheese Awards in Italy, a genuinely remarkable feat for a factory that started with a handful of pounds of cheese and a lot of trial and error.
The résumé that’s built up around Lambert personally is just as long. She’s in the James Beard Foundation’s Who’s Who in Food and Beverage in America, she picked up the Specialty Food Association’s Entrepreneur of the Year award through the IACP, and in 2021 Food & Wine named her one of the Top 50 Cheesemakers in America. In 2022, Les Dames d’Escoffier International gave her its Grande Dame Lifetime Achievement Award, voted on by 2,400 members across 43 chapters worldwide, a genuine peer-selected honor rather than a press-release title.
She’s written two books, The Cheese Lover’s Cookbook and Guide and Cheese, Glorious Cheese!, and she still teaches cooking classes on both sides of the Atlantic. In 2011 she launched her own travel company, Viaggi Deliziosi, taking small groups of food lovers to a villa in Tuscany for a deep dive into the cuisine, wine, and countryside that started this whole thing for her in the first place.
What makes Mozzarella Company worth visiting in person rather than just ordering from is the factory itself. The Deep Ellum storefront runs behind-the-scenes tours paired with cheese tastings, and past events have paired six to eight of Lambert’s cheeses against a lineup of craft beers, guests seated at one long table working through the pairings together while someone from the company walks through the basics of what makes each match work. It’s a small operation by design, tours capped at a limited group size, which keeps the whole thing feeling like a visit to someone’s actual workshop instead of a manufacturing tour.
More than forty years in, Lambert is still the same person who once looked at a shipment of failed mozzarella and decided the answer was to come back the next morning and try again. Dallas has a real claim to being one of the birthplaces of the American artisanal cheese movement, and it’s largely because one Fort Worth native refused to accept that good mozzarella had to stay in Italy.
Mozzarella Company is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., at 2944 Elm Street in Deep Ellum. Cheese can be ordered directly and shipped nationwide, and classes and factory tours can be booked by calling (214) 741-4072. More at mozzco.com.
