At Pickles & Pancetta, Nicole Mancini Mountain follows the seasons through unusual imported cheeses, fresh-sliced salumi and sprawling grazing tables.
A Cheese Haven at Pickles & Pancetta in Oakmont
Fall starts in the cheese case at Pickles & Pancetta.
Limoncello Gouda and lemon-honey Wensleydale are making way for truffle goat Gouda and cranberry Gouda. Owner Nicole Mancini Mountain is adding apples and pears, fig preserves and nuts to her boards. This time of year, everything gets a little darker, richer and moodier, she says.
“You see not only the flavors but the colors changing, too,” Mountain says.
Mountain, as you might guess, has strong opinions about cheese. At her small Oakmont cheese, charcuterie and Italian specialty shop, there is no standard board trotted out year-round with the same Brie, salami rosettes and “emergency handful of grapes.”
“If you order a board from me in July, you are going to get completely different cheeses than if you order a board from me in September or October. My main rule is, ‘What grows together goes together,’” she says.
Family Traditions, Deliciously Updated
One thing does stay put: the artichoke. Mountain’s grandmother, Mina, made stuffed artichokes for holidays. After she died, Mountain took over making them. There are artichokes on her wedding china and around her house, and when Mountain began making grazing tables, she started placing whole ones among the meat, cheese and produce.
“That is a way that I put a little touch of her in every single grazing table that I do,” she says.
Her grandfather has a place in the shop, too. Rindo, whom everyone called Dee Dee, made Mountain a chocolate-and-cherry cake every year for her birthday. Friends at Bellanini Biscotti turned those flavors into Dee Dee’s Dunkers, a biscotti made exclusively for Pickles & Pancetta. Her grandparents called biscotti, and really any hard cookie meant for dipping into coffee or tea, “dunkers.”
The sprawling grazing tables themselves have roots in Mountain’s food-loving Italian-American family. “We did not call it a grazing table or even a charcuterie board at the time,” she says. “It was just taking the antipasti out of the refrigerator and putting it on the kitchen counter. Sun-dried tomatoes, peppers, bread. My husband and I joke that when people come over to our house, it is like we don’t even have a living room. Everybody goes right to the kitchen.”
Charcuterie Made to Look Good and Taste Better
Pickles & Pancetta was born, funnily enough, because her husband ate somebody else’s charcuterie. At a party around 2019, he made himself a plate from a professionally prepared board. It looked great.
“This is terrible,” he told her. The cheese was generic, the meat was disappointing and nothing seemed to work together. It was, Mountain says, “made to look pretty, but not to taste good.”
“Nicole, you could do this so much better,” her husband told her.
Mountain was a corporate trainer at the time. She took food classes, researched licensing and used the pandemic to get the business off the ground. Pickles & Pancetta began selling to the public in early 2021.
The name came from two of Mountain’s rescue dogs, Pickles and Pancetta. (A third is named Mascarpone.)
The boards eventually became a brick-and-mortar specialty shop, which opened in Oakmont in fall 2024. Mountain traces the idea partly to a trip to Spain in her late 20s, where she became fixated on food markets. “I did not want to tour anything else,” she says. “All I wanted to do was go to the different food markets.”
She remembers olive shops, pastry shops and produce markets — and crusty bread rubbed with tomato and olive oil for breakfast. Later trips to Italy and Greece only deepened the fixation.
At Pickles & Pancetta, Mountain skips broadline food distributors in favor of small importers from Italy, Spain, Greece and the United Kingdom. She expects more than a catalog from her distributors; she wants a phone call when something particularly interesting turns up. Sometimes that is Dorothea, a Dutch Gouda made with potato, basil oil and chives. Mountain says her importer told her only about 4,000 wheels are made each year. Another seasonal find is Beemster Graskaas, a limited cheese made from the first spring milk after the cows return to pasture.
Would You Like a Beer With Your Boards?
These unusual finds make their way into the case. There is also a beer lovers board pairing cheeses with ales and IPAs, mustard and pretzels. This fall, Mountain is adding take-home tasting flights with four or five cheeses from different regions, an accompaniment and pairing notes.
“Most people don’t even know that there are six or seven different types of Gouda,” she says. “They think Gouda is one yellow cheese that they see in the store.”
The cheese is only part of it. There is Italian salumi sliced to order, scoop-your-own olives and antipasti, fresh pasta, DOP San Marzano tomatoes and a private-label Tuscan olive oil with, fittingly, an artichoke undertone.
“If you order a board from me, I’m standing there and I’m slicing that salami,” Mountain says.
The shop draws well beyond Oakmont. Mountain estimates that if 10 people are shopping at once, about eight may be from elsewhere. Customers come from Shadyside, Fox Chapel and Plum; she has had people drive from Beaver County and New Castle after finding Pickles & Pancetta online.
What Mountain wants them to find is the kind of food shopping she fell for abroad. “Less errand, more tasting, a tiny pleasure-filled European experience.”
Story by Aakanksha Agarwal
Photos Courtesy of Pickles & Pancetta