Brian Harkin for The New York Times

“CONSIDER the knife on your table, its curved, forked tip like a devil’s tongue. It is a sign. You are not here for balance or restraint. You have come for one thing: bring out the cheese.

Murray’s Cheese Bar opened in late July in Greenwich Village, a few doors down from its mother ship, the venerable and encyclopedic Murray’s Cheese Shop. The mood is less clamorous at the restaurant, which aims for a kind of pastoral chic — whitewashed banquettes and a marble counter, offset by lipstick-red chairs — but there is still that Murray’s streak of geeky irreverence in a chalk diagram of the cheesemaking process, illustrated with a ninja, an elephant and a cactus, and in a mural of cows with winking mantras (“Ewe betcha!”).

The star attraction comes in two forms. It is the perennial dichotomy of raw and cooked: curated cheese plates versus permutations of melt, bake and fry. The former is the true path.”

via Hungry City – Murray’s Cheese Bar in Greenwich Village – NYTimes.com.