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Oysy Sushi and Seafood Buffet is an exercise in abundance
on 11/06/09 at 9:00 am | Sushi is the kind of food you can't really, in good faith, dumb down. In an age when elitism has become the dirtiest word, it remains an unapologetically elitist specialty. And that's justified. Genuine sushi chefs, the kind who turn the tradition into an art form, train for years to do justice to one piece of perfect yellowtail sashimi. |
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Luedtke's Wonder Bar fulfills the meat-and-potato ideal
on 09/18/09 at 9:00 am | It's always surprising to stumble on fresh pockets of Madison history, sometimes in the most unexpected places. I've passed the stone bar on East Olin Avenue for years and noticed the successive name changes, from the Wonder Bar, to the Madison Cigar Bar, the M.O.B. Roadhouse and the Bar Next Door. But until we sat down for dinner, drawn by the promise of a new steakhouse menu and the lure of a reclaimed name -- it's Luedtke's Wonder Bar now -- I didn't know the spot flaunted such a lurid past. |
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Spring Green's winning dining options
on 08/21/09 at 9:00 am | Given Spring Green's status as a cultural center, the town should be crammed with top chefs playing with the culinary culture. But the dining options, at least until recently, have been limited. |
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New Scandinavian menu pickles and tickles at Restaurant Magnus
on 07/10/09 at 9:00 am | The only really surprising thing about Restaurant Magnus' recent conversion from a pan-Latin to Scandinavian menu is the surprised local reaction, and the fact that someone hasn't hauled out the pickled herring sooner. |
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No pufferfish, but simple successes at Fugu Asian Fusion
on 06/12/09 at 9:00 am | Fugu is about the only place in town where you can order up the entire digestive tract -- stomach to intestines to kidneys -- and get it quivering on a plate. And that's all to the restaurant's very big credit. While most of Madison's Chinese kitchens have opted for a timid, Anglicized and in some cases wholly invented version of Asian cuisine, Fugu is to Chinese dining what places like La Mestiza are to Mexican: a new wave of actually authentic local kitchens that do justice to ethnic food. |
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Sofra in Middleton features Albanian dishes
on 04/24/09 at 9:00 am | Sometimes it's important to stress what a restaurant isn't. Sofra Family Bistro, and that name is a tip-off, isn't vying to be a stylish contender, or a hipstery clubhouse where men in porkpie hats pick at some fashion plate and compare it to a dish they just ate in Williamsburg or Wicker Park. |
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Madison: Sandwich city
on 04/17/09 at 9:00 am | The food you love most is the food you covet when you're the hungriest, and for me that isn't anything stylish or haute. I don't salivate over foie gras and caviar. I don't fantasize about any cunning molecular amuse-bouche, or a deconstructed strawberry shortcake, or duck three ways (one way is enough, thanks). No. What I picture when I'm really starving, when I'm itchy for the best bite, is something simpler. |
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New menu at Cafe Soleil keeps it local
on 03/06/09 at 9:00 am | If the Top Chef judges ever actually made it to Wisconsin, they'd see a bulging culinary harvest, and if they stopped at L'Etoile or Harvest, across from the best farmers' market in the country, period, they'd find out what serious chefs can do with that bounty. |
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Pretend you're in Paris at La Baguette
on 01/30/09 at 9:00 am | I've been hearing raves about La Baguette since it opened last year, in a strip mall across from West Towne Mall. Even if I hadn't heard a word, though, I'd be hungry to try it, for two reasons. First, the bakery cum cafe (open for breakfast, lunch and early dinner) specializes in sandwiches. And the sandwich, if it's done right, can be the perfect meal. |
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Dayton Street Grille is a global smorgasbord
on 12/05/08 at 9:00 am | I surprised myself when I joined the two other judges and voted Charles Lazzareschi top chef in the final heat of a recent cook-off sponsored by Madison Magazine. Not that he didn't deserve the award. |
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New menu at Café Montmartre goes serious with food
on 10/24/08 at 9:00 am | Authenticity is a hard thing to fake. All those faux hipster clubs that have opened the last few years around State Street look too shiny and self-conscious, like an exploded Urban Outfitters or a new neck tattoo. But Café Montmartre, running since 1992, comes by its boho credentials honestly, and it shows. |
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Muramoto on the move
on 09/05/08 at 9:00 am | Here's a one-second guide to what's worth eating in Madison, for incoming students with serious palates. For Italian go to Lombardino's; for Japanese, Wasabi or Sushi Muramoto; for steak, Tornado or Smoky's Club; for bagels and sandwiches, Gotham Bagels; for a reliable, scenic brasserie, Sardine. |
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Bistro 101: The summer report
on 08/01/08 at 9:00 am | At the end of a glowing July, country trips are a constant lure, though Madison is oddly lively for midsummer and about to get livelier with the reopening of the original Muramoto on King Street. I'm especially enjoying the peaches at Brennan's (the kind that spit juice, not the mealy, potato-like versions that most groceries sell) and the fish tacos at Tex Tubbs' Taco Palace, which are elegantly designed little meals-in-one, and cheap. |
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Gotham Bagels: Holy cream cheese, Batman!
on 07/04/08 at 9:00 am | We were heading to Mount Horeb for lunch when one of those oddly apocalyptic summer storms whipped up, the kind that seems to have become, suddenly, freakishly routine. The radio was making noises about running for cover, and we decided maybe it wasn't worth the broken bones and twisted neck, and that long, tempting tunnel of light, even for a really good lunch. So we turned back to Madison, and that's how we ended up, drenched, at Gotham Bagels for lunch instead. |
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New Glarus Hotel : Yodel for your supper
on 06/06/08 at 9:00 am | So why did we end up at the New Glarus Hotel? I like the sense of history. The hotel, one of the first buildings in New Glarus, was constructed before the Civil War, and the dining room was once a theater hosting traveling vaudeville revues |
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Harvest: Local accents
on 05/02/08 at 9:01 am | When Tami Lax jumped from foraging at L'Etoile to co-founding her own Harvest restaurant virtually next door eight years ago, Madison's reputation for seasonal, locally sourced, almost reverentially cooked contemporary cuisine seemed cemented. Suddenly there were two nationally recognized Capitol Square restaurants sitting almost side by side and overlooking, symbolically, the Dane County Farmers' Market — itself an epic ode to the bulging local harvest and maybe the best metaphor for a movement that had come of age. |
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Quivey's Grove: Dairyland jubilee
on 03/28/08 at 10:00 am | Every chef worth his or her salad spinner these days forages for homegrown regional produce, but the latest culinary trend takes patriotism one step further. Now stylish cooks are starting to reclaim what used to be considered the most unstylish food -- the kind of backroads Americana recipes that lean more toward deep-dish casseroles and shoefly pies than truffle foam and crème brûlée. |
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Perfect pies
on 03/07/08 at 10:00 am | Reviewing is always a subjective thing, but reviewing pizza is especially dicey, since it's a dish we all grow up eating, and we all feel passionate about. So I figured it was best to take a democratic approach in approaching Pizza Brutta. |
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Food bank
on 02/01/08 at 10:00 am | Spring Green has deserved better food for a long time. While the town offers almost as many powerhouse cultural landmarks as Madison — this, after all, is the home of Taliesin and American Players Theatre — and draws a steady stream of arty visitors, it hasn't been able to dish up any kind of tour de force dinner in recent years. |
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Carnivore's delight
on 01/04/08 at 10:00 am | Apparently it's no longer enough for a restaurant to simply serve food. The growing trend among restaurateurs is to throw a full-blown fiesta, and nothing exemplifies the fashion better than Madison's own recent trifecta of big new openings: the west-side Tex Tubb's (think Latin Mardi Gras), Icon (tapas gone wild) and now the Brazilian grill-cum-performance space Samba. |
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Tapas time
on 12/14/07 at 10:00 am | The Icon really wants you to have fun, and a lot of people seem to be diving right in. It's getting rave reviews from critics, and the crowd on a recent buzzing Friday night all seemed to be enjoying themselves. In fact, the woman sitting at the table next to us — and Icon is a convivial place that invites confessions, partly because the tables are so tightly spaced — said she thought the tapas were great. |
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A little Texas on University
on 11/02/07 at 10:00 am | What to say about Tex Tubb's Taco Palace? Kids — especially really little ones; the toothless kind — seem to love it. In fact, when we dined at the University Avenue Tubb on a recent Saturday evening — the new west-side outlet that recently joined the original at 2009 Atwood Ave. — we were about the only childless table of adults in the room, conspicuous as the group who'd left their dribble bibs at home. And what we took, at first, to be a children's birthday party was just — according to our waiter — a typical early evening at the Palace. |
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Monroe Street eats at Brasserie V
on 10/05/07 at 10:00 am | How desperately does Monroe Street need a bona fide hangout? The answer is obvious at Brasserie V, the newly renovated bar cum bistro (previously known as Relish), which was so packed on a recent Friday night that the crowds were two deep at the long wood bar, and diners weren't just lining up for a table. They were actually spilling out the door, clustering on the sidewalk and facing a very long wait for food |
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Sushi Muramoto revisited
on 09/07/07 at 9:42 am | Hilldale finally has what it needs to fully rebound — a restaurant that qualifies as real destination dining. Sushi Muramoto, which got off to a rocky start (and which I gave an earlier tepid review to) hasn't just evolved quickly; it has become one of the best Japanese restaurants in town, and better than any of its overhyped but mediocre Chicago competitors. |
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Windy City vittles
on 09/07/07 at 9:39 am | If you're considering more of an urban retreat than a rural one for your last-gasp-of-summer getaway, Chicago has never looked better or offered more world-class food. In fact, the purely dated notion — mostly only held by a few stubborn bicoastal snobs now — that Chicago is somehow stuck in a nursery-food time warp of deep-dish pizzas and dawgs has been retired for good. |
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Drive time
on 08/02/07 at 2:36 pm | An obligatory part of summer in Madison — along with the Farmers' Market, a brat on the Terrace, a jerk platter at Jolly Bob's backyard patio, and the Dane County Fair, where the corn dogs are as big as a cone of cotton candy — is the Country Drive. Some people know lots of country drives, but we've only mastered one, and our houseguests, frankly, are getting a little sick of it. But then they're guests (a.k.a. freeloaders), and I still say it's the best daytrip in southern Wisconsin. |
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Sundance skid
on 07/05/07 at 3:32 pm | Madison is at heart a charitable town, and like most people, we wanted to like the Sundance Cinema's second-floor restaurant, which goes by the name Bar Bistro 608. If Hilldale is going to become the near-west cultural anchor it desperately wants to be, food will be a big part of its lure. |
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Maki at the mall
on 05/31/07 at 9:22 am | Adding to the mall’s new luster, and bringing a real shot of downtown cred, is Sushi Muramoto, which recently opened directly across from Sundance. Nothing seems like a better fit for a mall that wanted to up its style quotient. |
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Aji de pollo and polenta con funghi
on 05/17/07 at 10:24 am | |
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The unfriendly skies
on 05/10/07 at 10:05 am | Counting on a United Express flight to take off from Madison on time is wishful thinking. But it was the check-in clerk’s response that offered the added flourish, the blustery, self-satisfied note
of sadism, which makes the airline so inimitable. |
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