The owners are members of an Orthodox Jewish family who bought the company in the early 1970s from Ben Gorodinsky, who had sold spreads for years from a store on the same stretch of East Houston Street where you’ll find Russ & Daughters and Yonah Schimmel Knish Bakery. Gentrification eventually led them to close the shop and move production to Spring Valley.

They aren’t inclined to advertise. Nor do they tend to welcome visitors with open arms.

“I’ll be very frank with you,” Jonah Friedman, the company’s figurehead, told me when I dropped by on a Monday afternoon. “Normally, nobody passes through the front door.”

Mr. Kaufelt of Murray’s Cheese had warned me. “They are as grouchy as the waiters at Sammy’s Roumanian used to be,” he said, referring to the Lower East Side restaurant. “In other words, classic Jewish curmudgeons.”

Nevertheless, I found Mr. Friedman, 63, and his son, Simon, 40, to be warm hosts who seemed to enjoy being playfully coy about the methods that have made their cream cheese so sought-after. It was clear they had no interest in sharing a recipe.

“How many years is the secret with Coke?” Jonah said. “We are going in the footsteps of Coke.”

Besides, the way they see it, the real secret is basic freshness. They use dairy products delivered directly from upstate New York farms. They decline to add preservatives, because their cheese shouldn’t take up permanent residence in the back of one’s fridge; it is meant to be eaten soon.

“We have nothing in stock,” Simon said. “We only produce the orders we get in.”

Lately they’ve begun mulling whether it’s time for those orders to multiply.

“People are looking for us,” Simon said. “People keep calling up saying, ‘Where can we get your product?’ ”