Walking into Casellula, a small but bustling new West Side restaurant, customers are greeted with the cozy smell of cheese grilling, roasting , and melting. Cheese is the restaurant’s foundation, its raison d’être.

Fromager Tia Keenan, who oversaw the Modern’s cheese program for two years, presides over close to 50 cheeses from a wide variety of sources. But cheese isn’t just sliced and served here; it makes its way into pretty much everything on the menu, a catalog of rich and hearty fare that showcases the best of the dairy world and pairs excellently with the restaurant’s wide-ranging wine list as well.

Kicking off the menu is a selection of interesting meats, such as a thin-sliced smoked goose breast, a rosy, fatty cut that’s at its best with a dab of the provided hot mustard. Sweet duck sausage is distractingly sweet, Chinese-style — it would make a better ingredient than a solo snack — but bresaola and wild boar sausage are both excellent. Chistorras, peppery little Basque sausages, can be had on the meat platter (three selections for $10, five for $15, or all eight for $22) or rolled in pastry blankets with an accompaniment of tart, petal-thin radish slices.

Cheese regains center stage in a few salads: The “Happy Waitress” ($18), a concoction of great, spicy mixed greens tossed with chewy dried tomatoes and thick-cut bacon, shares a plate with a whole half-pound round of Camembert that is crisscrossed with grill marks and is runny inside. The salad is advertised as a dish for two people, but even divided it’s a lot of cheese.

If I were curating the dish, I might pair a less delicate cheese than Camembert, which struggles to compete with the vibrant salad. But the nutty, full savor of Australia’s Roaring Forties blue cheese suits perfectly a salad of endive and macadamias with sherry vinaigrette ($13). And crumbly feta, in collaboration with olives, makes a classic sweet-salty counterpoint with a pyramidal salad of watermelon chunks, accented by lavender-scented salt ($10).

The macaroni and cheese ($12) tastes very much as though the chef knows that she, and the restaurant, will be judged on it: It’s a golden casserole of sweet and mild Fol Epi and nutty, complex Comté cheeses, with a dusting of salty crumbled goat cheese on top. Amid the gooey cheeses one finds beautifully caramelized strips of mellow onion, fatty bits of pork, and, almost as an afterthought, twists of macaroni. It’s a masterful take on a simple dish.

A Cuban-style hot sandwich of roast pork, two cheeses, and pickles on crusty bread ($12) has good, not great, flavor. In an open-face Reuben sandwich ($12), abundant goose breast makes a wonderful substitute for corned beef, smothered in melted Fontina cheese and house-made coleslaw, with a sweetish horseradish cream dipping sauce.

Before, during, after, or instead of a meal at Casellula, comes the essential cheese platter. Diners choose from a long list assembled from numerous sources and broken down into categories: Fresh, Bloomy, Cooked and Pressed, Washed-Rind, Blue. At $5 a cheese, it’s not hard to assemble an interesting assortment. Ms. Keenan is also happy to help. Each cheese comes with a finely calibrated foil: Brittany’s interesting, crystalline Vendéen Bichonne with cumin-scented caramelized onions; Spain’s pungent, runny La Serena with basil seeds and quince paste. It takes a certain kind of cleverness to smoke a blue cheese over hazelnut shells, as the cheese-makers of Rogue Creamery do; it takes further brilliance to pair that cheese with sweet crumbled chocolate, an unexpected but happy marriage that harmonizes further with, for instance, the Cartlidge & Browne zinfandel ($8/$32) I pitted it against.

A Champagne flute of blackberry milkshake ($6), made with buttermilk and filled with succulent drupelets, stands out among the desserts, even beyond the attention-grabbing French toast pudding ($7), which comes topped with a strip of smoky bacon.

According to the restaurant’s Web site, co-owner Brian Keyser was once called “best server in the world” by the Chicago Tribune, but that talent fails to carry over to Casellula. With approximately one staff member per table, the restaurant functions at a clumsy snail’s pace, with no evident bottleneck but not a lot of activity either. Although the staff is extremely friendly and knowledgeable about cheese and wine, anyone who’s hoping to get in and out swiftly is doomed to a frustrating evening. But if you’re psychologically prepared for a leisurely three-hour parade of treats, Casellula can be a thrilling destination — for anyone, but especially for us cheese aficionados.

Casellula (401 W. 52nd St., between Ninth and Tenth avenues, 212-247-8137).