There’s a startling dessert at Appellation, the wine-bar adjunct to the new Pastoral cheese outpost in Andersonville. It features an Italian cheese called Il Nocciolo, formed from a trifecta of cow, sheep, and goat’s milk and crafted in southern Piedmont, where cheese makers have a talent for soft-ripened formaggio like Robiola. The square of dense, pasty-white Il Nocciolo is served with triangles of rigid, rosemary-scented shortbread and a dollop of sweet cranberry jelly, both much needed to stand up to the tangy barnyard punch this cheese delivers. At first I was shocked and a bit repulsed by it, expecting something less kicky for a dessert. But as I thought about it as the days went on, I came to realize that this was in fact the best and most cheese-forward thing I’d eaten during my visits to the restaurant.
That’s true of snacks such as gougeres, made with raw cow’s milk the funky intensity of which is subsumed in the pate a choux. Or slivers of nutty, sweet Sardinian cow’s milk Podda Classico overwhelmed by white anchovy and sweet onion relish. The same cheese couldn’t be detected among a plate of seared cauliflower with bagna cauda. An otherwise meaty bowl of chicken soup is crowded with bland dumplings made from the Parmesan-like American cheese SarVecchio; any cheesy flavor in popovers with slabs of beef and watery creamed spinach seemed similarly MIA.
5212 N. Clark 773-358-7181pastoralartisan.com/appellation
