Nic Mink says it will feel different when people come to Seven Acre Dairy Co. in a few weeks. The owner of the boutique hotel, restaurant and events space is referring to a new concept that is slated to replace Seven Acre Dairy Co.’s The Kitchen restaurant at the end of April. Little Cloud Restaurant will draw from head chef Ben Serum’s French-cooking background and the cheeses and dairy products in sister operation Landmark Creamery’s body of work in Paoli.
When Seven Acre Dairy Co. opened in an old dairy factory at 6858 Paoli Road in 2023, chefs Ben Hunter and Kyle Kiepert ran The Kitchen and designed the restaurant’s menu around Wisconsin farmstead cooking and hyperlocal produce. “Since [Hunter and Kiepert] left, the food has struggled to find an identity,” says Mink. “It was just very tied to them.” In 2024, former Landmark Creamery co-owner Anna Thomas Bates sold her share of the cheese-making business to Mink, and Landmark Creamery co-owner and cheesemaker Anna Landmark moved the Landmark Creamery cafe and retail space from across the street into Seven Acre Dairy Co., where she had already been producing small-batch butters.
The idea for Little Cloud Restaurant came from figuring out how to best integrate Landmark Creamery’s business with Seven Acre Dairy Co. “I think of The Kitchen as [Hunter] and [Kiepert]’s restaurant,” says Mink. “[Little Cloud] is [Landmark] and [Serum]’s restaurant and they’re bringing their vibe and their food backgrounds to this place.” The new menu concept “will dig into cool, new dairy products that [Landmark is making], as well as featuring some of [Landmark]’s most iconic cheeses,” says Mink.
“Petit nuage” means “little cloud” in French and it also references Landmark Creamery’s award-winning, cult-favorite sheep’s milk cheese of the same name. Landmark is bringing Petit Nuage out of its seven-year hiatus to offer it exclusively on Little Cloud’s menu.
“Petit Nuage is one of Anna Landmark’s great contributions to the cheese world,” says Mink, who adds that the cheese is also going to be produced on-site. Petit Nuage will always appear on the Little Cloud menu as a seasonal rotating dish. Right now, diners can try it during brunch in a Benedict with smoked salmon, hollandaise and smoked trout roe.
Petit Nuage also translates to elation in French, or being on cloud nine. With the diverse range of artisan dairy products Landmark plans to produce for the new restaurant, Little Cloud might be considered a cloud nine for dairy lovers. Quark, mascarpone, cottage cheeses, cultured cream, sour cream and more flavored butters are all in the works. Mink says it’s “something that only somebody with Anna’s background could bring to the table.”
Anna Landmark, owner and cheesemaker at Landmark Creamery, recently moved her retail and cafe operation over to Seven Acre Dairy Co., which now owns a stake in her company. With Little Cloud, Landmark is expanding her dairy product profile with items like quark (a fresh cheese), mascarpone, cottage cheeses, cultured cream, sour cream and more flavored butters.
Photo by Derrick Parsons / Courtesy of Seven Acre Dairy Co.
Landmark has been ramping up soft cheese production on-site at Seven Acre Dairy Co., but will continue to produce its hard, wheel cheeses — like Anabasque and Tallgrass Reserve — at a location off-site. Some new products are already being tested on the menu at The Kitchen, including the French onion dip and the Anabasque and Pipit cheese fondue. A “dairy tower” will also be a feature of Little Cloud’s menu, Mink says.
Aside from being a dairy destination, The Kitchen’s menu concept also prioritized local produce sourcing. Mink says that Little Cloud will have the “same reverence for local food” as The Kitchen but will shift toward Parisian bistro and French influences. Serum, who has cooked in Madison, Scandinavia and the Bay Area, worked in James Beard Award-winning chef Corey Lee’s French restaurant, Monsieur Benjamin, in San Francisco, and brings an understanding of French cuisine to Little Cloud. It’s an apt tie to Paoli’s close proximity with Belleville, where French immigrants from the regions of Alsace and Comte settled in the 1850s and 1860s.
Chef Ben Serum worked with Madison chefs Justin Carlisle and Shinji Muramoto before cooking in kitchens in Europe and the Bay Area. He returned to Madison to work at a pig in a fur coat and DelecTable and is now currently at Seven Acre Dairy Co. helping launch Little Cloud Restaurant.
Photo by Derrick Parsons / Courtesy of Seven Acre Dairy Co.
Little Cloud will meld the nearby French heritage with the area’s Swiss dairy tradition and highlight the surrounding landscape, including the wild forageables growing in Seven Acre Dairy Co.’s prairie on the property.
In the next few weeks, Seven Acre Dairy Co.’s restaurant space will undergo an “aggressive” change. The plan right now is to soft launch Little Cloud Restaurant on April 23.
“It will feel different when people come into Seven Acre in a couple of weeks,” says Mink. Although, Mink isn’t planning to part anytime soon with Seven Acre Dairy Co.’s successful chef dinner series. “They are very much core to our identity,” says Mink, who notes that the events give his chefs a chance to work alongside some of the best culinary talent in the country. This summer, that will include Jose Garces, Adam Pawlak, Elena Terry, and Dan Van Rite and Dan Jacobs.
Emma Waldinger is food editor at Madison Magazine.
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