Not Your Average Cheesemonger: From Italy to the Peninsula, the Story of Georgette Nelson

Georgette Nelson with “Large Marge” at the San Carlos “Horizon Light” Mural.

There’s a moment during one of Georgette Nelson’s Italy trips when dinner stops being dinner.

The plates have made enough laps around the table. Someone reaches for more bread. The conversation has drifted from olive oil to family recipes to the bakery everyone wandered into that afternoon. And outside the stone walls of a hilltop village in Lazio, the countryside has gone quiet without anyone noticing. Nobody’s checking the time. That’s the whole point.

Through Kitchen Table Travel Co., Georgette runs small-group culinary tours through the less-traveled parts of Italy, bringing six to eight people into villages, wineries, olive farms and kitchens. Along the way, savoring long meals that don’t move at the pace most people are used to.

The story usually starts back on the Peninsula, though, next to a tiny three-wheeled cheese truck called Large Marge.

A gift basket by Kitchen Table Travel Co, filled with unique, hard-to-find cheeses plus accompaniments.

Meet Large Marge

If you’ve been around San Carlos or Redwood City lately, you may have seen Large Marge parked at a pop-up or community event. It’s hard to miss. The truck is a Piaggio Ape: the little Italian three-wheeler that is part mobile cheese shop, part artisan food tableau, and pretty much a physical version of how Georgette thinks about food.

The cheeses inside are not Safeway cheeses.
“I seek out cheeses from around the world,” Georgette says, “varieties you won’t typically find in grocery stores. I also try to bring in something new every week.”

That weekly rotation is part of why people come back. Some show up looking for something specific. Others just want to know what Georgette is excited about this week. Tasting is encouraged.

The atmosphere around Large Marge isn’t the kind of intimidating specialty-food experience where everyone seems to know more than you do. People ask questions. They try things they can’t pronounce. Talks go on longer than you’d expect.

That’s what Georgette is after. For her, a cheese is a ‘destination’ which you happen to be able to eat with bread. The same thinking runs through everything else she does.

Cheese boards, Gift Baskets, and Gourmet Finds

Large Marge is the visible piece of the business. There’s quite a bit more behind it.

Georgette makes custom cheese gift baskets, usually built around the person they’re going to rather than picked off a standard menu.
“I love curating gift baskets filled with high-quality, delicious cheeses and accompaniments that people might not choose for themselves,” she says. “Each basket is thoughtfully put together with the recipient in mind.”

She also puts together custom charcuterie boards for Peninsula parties and gatherings. Instead of selling tiered packages, she works to whatever a client’s budget actually is.

The goal, she says, is “a truly gourmet experience.”

Her cheeses have found their way into local kitchens, too. She currently supplies cheese to Gambrel & Co., the Redwood City butcher shop known for its carefully sourced meats and specialty products.

The business has grown, but she still talks about it less like an entrepreneur trying to scale and more like someone trying to defend a certain way of eating.

“It’s so important to support the small businesses working hard to bring quality food to their communities,” she says. “We live in a world overflowing with processed food, and there are a lot of passionate people out here dedicated to offering something better.”

Large Marge brings unique cheese from all over the world, to the Peninsula.

The Italy Behind the Cheese

Talk to Georgette long enough and you’ll end up in Italy. While many know her through Large Marge and her artisan cheese offerings, Kitchen Table Travel Co. also organizes intimate culinary tours through some of Italy’s lesser-known regions. It’s the kind of trip that appeals to anyone who believes the best way to understand a place is through its food.

Kitchen Table Travel’s trips start in a city — Rome, Palermo, Milan — where the group spends a day or two getting over the time difference and easing into Italian food at full speed. Then the pace changes. The group moves into smaller villages and quieter regions, where meals get longer, roads get narrower, and the link between what’s on the plate and what’s in the dirt outside is hard to miss.

Lazio is a favorite. Medieval hill towns, olive groves, Etruscan ruins, Roman roads. The history is layered into the landscape in a way that doesn’t really show up in pictures.

“We stay in a medieval palazzo in the cutest hilltop village and meet many of the locals,” Georgette says.

From there, days tend to look more like a string of invitations than an itinerary. There are olive farm visits, where you see how the oil that ends up on the table gets made. Wineries, where the focus is less on tasting flights and more on understanding why the wine tastes like the place it came from. Cooking classes with locals who learned recipes from their grandmothers rather than from a culinary programs. There are also walks led by a local ecologist who points out edible plants on the way past piles of ancient stone.

Culinary experiences in Kitchen Table Travel Tours: from tasting cheese with farmers, making your own pasta, to foraging truffles in the rural parts of Italy.

It’s genuinely immersive, and not in the curated, photo-ready sense of the word. The whole thing is built to slow you down.
“We move through the countryside, smaller cities, and villages to understand what it means to eat well and seasonally,” Georgette says.

“Eat well” is a phrase she uses a lot — about both the cheese truck and the tours. She doesn’t mean expensive. She means food that someone took time over. Ingredients somebody actually grew. Cooking traditions passed on to generations.

The Best Moments Usually Aren’t Planned

Like love, life, and travel, the moments people remember most are rarely the grand ones. They’re the small, unexpected moments along the way. Like a rainstorm that scrapped dinner plans; an unscheduled stop in a town known for its ceramics, or a night that turned into pizza and cards.

While Italy’s landscapes and historic villages leave a lasting impression, Georgette says the real highlight is often simpler: “small groups, lots of eating and wine, making new friends while enjoying less traveled parts of Italy.”

Dinner in a cave, in Italy.

More Than a Cheese Truck

Calling Large Marge a charming local cheese truck isn’t wrong. It just leaves out most of what’s actually going on. The little truck carries a much bigger ideal.

Somewhere between a San Carlos pop-up and a long table in a medieval Lazio village, Georgette continues to embody this ideal that food is more than what’s on the plate. It’s an invitation to slow down in life and savor the moment.

Places in Italy, as part of Kitchen Table Travel Tours.

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