When you're venturing through this wide and wonderful world by car, you always hope to find that bit of local color that you're pretty sure you would never see anywhere else, and that endears a place to you forever. Baumgartner's Cheese Store and Tavern is definitely that place for Monroe, WI. We drove into the town square and parked next to a City Hall that looks more like a tiny German castle. On the other side of the parking lot from its green there was this strip of late-19th/early-20th century cookie-cutter brick storefronts. Only, right in the middle of that line of uniform brick facades, there's one that looks like it's trying to be a  rustic Swiss chalet, complete with a goat climbing the awning.

I cracked up and demanded to go in. The proprietor and staff had every bit as much joviality as the exterior of the store implied, and I will never forget the murals of dwarves mounting cheeses on catapults and weilding battle-steins. But the amusing ambiance aside, their sign that promises "The worlds best cheese sandwich" is not wrong. The only image we managed to add is that of the cheese plate, unfortunately, since the camera holding most of the mouth-watering images of our meal was lost prior to my actually writing this review. Every last one of the house-made cheeses was stellar, though we actually ended up buying multiple of the Swiss Style Landjagers for the road because they were even more amazing than the house-made cheeses. 

Our only regret is that Baumgartner's is so very far away and that they don't ship their products anymore. I often find myself craving one of those landjagers now, and nobody within 500 miles of me makes them anywhere close to the quality and taste of Baumgartner's.