How Chefs are Deconstructing the Cheese Course

The cheese course is a fine dining fixture, and a classic. Common in France and religiously served after a meal, it’s been long adopted by restaurants all over the world. A great way to showcase local cheeses, the course, in its traditional version, is normally a display of different styles of cheese varying in milk, style, texture and flavor profile, and is often served with bread and fruity condiments. While it’s a classic for good reason, it’s also a bit expected and dare we say it, perhaps a little boring?

Instagram Beautiful

Look on Instagram and you’ll find evidence that chefs in North America, Australia and Europe have started flipping the script; taking the basic ingredients of the cheese plate and deconstructing them, creating new interpretations that are texturally and visually surprising and in the process reinvigorating the staid cheese course. And sometimes they are reimagining the single course and expanding on it.

3 Dishes Are Better than 1

Consider the three different cheese courses at Merchant Roots in San Francisco. Once a deli, and now a restaurant serving a prix-fixe menu titled 42 Plates of Summer, Merchant Roots offers not one, but three cheese courses, arranged in bowls or masked as tiny cookies; Beemster Gouda with dry blueberry compote and fresh thyme, Cowgirl Creamery Mt. Tam triple cream with charred fresh apricots marinated in bourbon, and Marcona almonds, and melted Raclette cheese served with pan con tomate - slices of grilled ciabatta covered in vibrant shaved tomatoes. “With the cheese dishes, we began with the garnishes we wanted to use: a good spread of cheese accouterments: dry fruit, fresh fruit, and savory vegetables,” says Merchant Roots chef Ryan Shelton. With these three dishes, Shelton says, “we’ve provided three textures of cheese in 3 plates - firm, soft, and melted, and also served to highlight summer’s bounty.”

Waverly. Photo credit to Joann Van Noy — Photo credit to Joann Van Noy

Mix and Match

At The Waverly, an all-day restaurant in Cardiff, a beachfront town adjacent to San Diego, upon ordering a cheese course you get a sculptural dish that evokes the TikTok aesthetic of symmetrical, colorful foods; a thick slice of caramelized brioche; Humboldt Fog cheese in one corner, blue cheese in another, honeycomb, berries and walnuts scattered just so. It’s a choose-your-own-adventure dish, inviting diners to combine ingredients liberally.

Skip the Bread, Bring on the Cake

The trick of providing a sweet component in lieu of bread is also present at The Bristol in Chicago, where Executive Chef Larry Feldmeier had recently included a dish of Délice de Bourgogne, a French cow's milk cheese from the Burgundy region of France, in the tasting menu. The savory creamy cheese is served with olive oil cake, rhubarb jam, strawberry and almonds, making for an interesting sweet-savory deconstructed sandwich.

Photo courtesy of Black Rabbit.jpg — Photo courtesy of Black Rabbit

Art on a Plate

Occasionally, the reinvented course might not look like it at all; at Black Rabbit in Moncton in New Brunswick, Canada, the new pre-dessert cheese course is an artistic crattering of mysterious ingredients: “This dish is summer on a plate,” says Executive Chef Luc Doucet of this invention, consisting of goat cheese mousse, watermelon, and pickled watermelon rind, cantaloupe balls and coconut water "caviar" added for texture. The dish is finished with chocolate crumbles. “I kept going to restaurants with cheese courses that were pretty traditional,” says Doucet. “Which is good, but cheese, jam, and bread don’t really make you think.”