Rebekah Flamenbaum

General Manager

Raised on Long Island, Rebekah has been a resident of Pittsburgh since 2008. She has worked at some of this city’s best restaurants – including Morcilla, Casbah, and Eleven. Her time in fine dining helped sharpen her palate, experiencing some exceptional meals. She has a fond memory from Eleven of a deceptively simple pasta dish with raw egg yolk, Parmigiano Reggiano, shaved fresh truffle – a first time tasting real truffles, seeing an egg yolk broken over fresh pasta.

And fine dining also introduced her to American artisan cheese.

In her time at Eleven, Rebekah had a lot of questions (she always has a lot of questions) about the cheeses they were serving. The sous chef, having run out of answers, encouraged her to continue learning on her own. She found she loved how versatile and varied cheese is even as it has only four ingredients: milk, salt, cultures, and coagulant. This love led her to Right by Nature, a now defunct grocery store in the Strip District. Her interest deepened and her time as a cheesemonger at RBN was “the best job ever”.

In 2020, in response to the Pandemic, Rebekah left the restaurant industry and began working at Trader Joe’s, which ignited her passion for cooking. Many hours were spent watching Bon Appetit to learn skills, and techniques were swapped with customers as she asked their plans for their groceries… Parmigiano Reggiano rinds in pasta water… how to layer seasonings throughout her cooking… so many more. And not everything requires cheese, she makes a killer curried beans and vegetable dish (loosely based on a friend’s recipe) served with roasted cauliflower over rice with naan.

But cheese was still calling, leading her to Whole Foods before fortuitously finding out that Chantal’s was looking for a cheesemonger, an opportunity she jumped at. The amount that she has learned since is staggering. At Chantal’s Rebekah is able to combine her passions for cheese, cooking, specialty food products, and making things beautiful. 

Under the tutelage of Chris & Anaïs, Rebekah has grown and found her purpose; she looks forward to many more years of success at Chantal’s. Rebekah sees cheese as a representation of history and culture, a connection to the past. She is passionate about supporting small farms and building relationships directly with cheesemakers.

She lives in the North Side with her husband, Robert, dogs Sadie & Jax, and parakeets Kanai & Dogen. She greatly enjoys reading novels and historical fiction.