About Barrel Wine and Cheese
Owner of Barrel Wine and Cheese Allison Sarbin Chlimper has been interested in restaurants from a young age, and was brought to fine dining restaurants as early as the age of 5, even invited into the kitchen to meet chefs. This kickstarted her interest in cooking and kitchen etiquette, as well as guest etiquette (how to be a guest that staff enjoys serving).
She was inspired to cook and learn more, and even took culinary arts classes all through middle school and high school. She eventually decided not to pursue because of her boredom of cooking the same dishes on repeat and the amount of hours that would have to be put in that would take away from family and home life.
However, this didn't stop her working in the service industry as a whole! She worked since the age of 16 starting as a dish washer in the morning and a hostess in the evenings. This taught her more about the industry and gave her a love for customer service and pivoted to more of a waitress role by the time she was 18.
From here, she worked at a small restaurant where the owner was a well connected wine connoisseur which introduced her to sommeliers who would come and give courses and teach her about wine, along with 7 course sit down wine dinner that taught her more about wine pairings. She continued to grow and go from establishment to establishment until she earned a job as a waitress in a high end restaurant that had 2000 wine labels on their list.
This restaurant saw something beneficial in getting her a sommelier license which she ended up pursuing. With the limit of the amount of kosher wines at the time, her passion was put on the back burner while she got married and moved to and from Israel and eventually settling down in Florida, having kids and continuing to waitress along the way. It was at this point that she began to get restless waitressing and the dream to open a wine store began to start forming.
She built up a relationship with Chef David Benrey from Street Kitchen and it was with him that she began to work and learn more, as well as pursue her winery dream with the initial idea being a wine store/speakeasy for wine tasting.
As this continued to develop, she and her husband decided as a family to put the dream on hold for the sake of the family, and it was then that COVID reared its ugly head, and she continued to work on and off with Street Kitchen.
In April of 2022, the idea was planted once again and with the family settled, they decided to seriously pursue her dream. She went into business with David, with a bit of hesitancy at first at the concept of doing business with such a close friend, however they eventually decided to remain partners through it after a talk with investors.
Since opening Barrel Wine and Cheese, she has given all of the credit to her husband and his support as well to David and his guidance and friendship. She opened Barrel Wine & Cheese in order to bring a wine tasting establishment to the public that would be available to (hopefully) any budget with good tasting wines and give the opportunity to taste the wine before you buy; she also wanted to give all budgets the opportunity to experience something upscale that they may not otherwise get the chance to.