Make it local. Episode 2: Food carts for the masses.

Despite Madison being the 82nd largest city in the United States, it does have a pretty vibrant food cart scene. Between Library Mall and the Capital square, there are quite a few choices in terms of ethnic cuisines and styles. My current favorite on Library Mall is Surco, a Peruvian cart that serves the best Chicken Adobo over cilantro rice and green lentils. I buy a half-order and a soda for lunch and it sets me back $6. So damned tasty!

Speaking of food carts, Madison is celebrating it's food cart scene with Isthmus ala Carts. It's at Olin Park on Friday, May 11, 2012. 4-8pm $15 in advance or $20 at the gate gets you all the food you can eat. All of the participating carts will be serving sampler-sized portions of their best dishes. Try out any and all of the carts you like for one low price. I will most likely be there! Come say hi to me!

The Great Madison Burger Challenge: brought to you by...me.

I've posted about hamburgers once before, but it's a topic I will happily rehash time and time again. I am an unrepentant carnivore. I can appreciate vegetarianism from an intellectual point of view. I understand some of the health benefits of a veggie diet. I can also appreciate vegetarian cuisine when it's done right. Indians and Greeks have had thousands of years to perfect their all vegetable dishes and they do them well. Vegans, on the other hand...

...that's for another post.

Let's get back to burgers, shall we? Madison has surprised me in that I am not lacking for choices in the tasty burger department. We have chains here, same as anywhere else, (Culver's Butterburgers started not too far from here in Sauk City, WI) but Madison has a fair number of local places, restaurants and bars, that serve a good to great burger. I've tried most of them. Now, I'm going to try them all.

This coming week, I will start my Great Madison Burger Challenge. I am going to make up a list of restaurants and bars to find the best burger in town and report my findings here. If it is a place I haven't been to before, I will go more than once before writing about it. I have a list in my head that I'll write down here. If I am missing anyone's favorite burger joint, feel free to offer your suggestions to me. I do have two caveats: no fast food burgers. This includes Culver's. There will be a few chains on my list, but fast food burgers, after all is said and done, simply don't measure up to the standards I have for a truly great burger, so they will be avoided. And, all bars and restaurants must be within Madison city limits. No suburbs.

Here's my current off-the-top-of-my-head list:

Dotty Dumplings Dowry
AJ Bombers
Weary Traveler
Plaza Tavern and Grill
Five Guys Burgers
Harmony Bar and Grill
Blue Moon Bar and Grill
Old Fashioned
Cooper's Tavern
The Great Dane
Graze

Again, if I'm missing anywhere you find to have an awesome burger, please let me know.

Make It Local: Episode 1, Pimp My Apiary

I have a laundry list of things I want to do and try with this blog. My mind doesn't focus on any single thing for very long. (those of you who remember my banana bread making escapades may beg to differ, but I digress) One of my goals in writing here is to promote the eating and production of sustainable local foodstuffs. I believe very strongly in the idea that local, sustainable food production goes a long way to promoting a healthy lifestyle, plus a healthy and vibrant community. In my mind, being able to produce and distribute quality local food at a decent price and make a buck or two in the process is a win/win for all! So, without further adieu, allow me to 'pimp' my first local producer, or in this case, potential local producer: Mad Urban Bees LLC.

Mad Urban Bees LLC is the brainchild of a good friend of mine, Nathan Clarke. For the purposes of full disclosure, no, Nathan is not paying me to write about this. He wouldn't need to even if he wanted to. Nathan is an all around great guy. I have known Nathan and his wife, Beth, for a number of years now. They are what you could most certainly call 'self-sufficient' and 'sustainable'. A high percent of the food they and their two daughters eat throughout the year they grow themselves. They buy local whenever they can, including meats, cheeses, and veggies. Nathan brews his own beer, mead, wine, and other goodies that he loves to share with friends and loved ones. (I have partaken in eating and drinking in his humble abode more than a few times. My memory has been a bit 'fuzzy' regarding these events, but a good time was always had by all!) Nathan has also been beekeeping for the last five years. He owns two hives in his back yard and has helped others start their own. His commitment to all things local and sustainable has lead him to start Mad Urban Bees. He wants to expand his two hives to forty or fifty hosted by local businesses and residents throughout the city of Madison. This would be one of the first apiaries in an urban setting in the United States. He has a page on Kickstarter.com where people can donate to the start-up of his business. As of this writing, forty seven people have contributed $2,275. His goal is $7000 by January 3rd, 2012. He has some awesome gifts awaiting those who contribute, ranging from a personal thank you and updates on the project's progress for a $10 donation, all the way up to a honey themed four-course meal for two, a case of honey, t-shirts(gotta have the swag!) and a beehive donated in your name to Heifer International for a $1000 donation.

I think it's an awesome idea and I want to support Nathan in any way I can. One more local, sustainable business in Madison is good for our economy, our health, and our community as a whole. Donate today. Do it!!!!!

A short rant about mediocrity and Madison.

There are those days where I get mad at the city I currently live in. I'm not from here, but I do take some pride in my adopted home. I was far beyond proud when my fellow Wisconsinites took to the streets this past February to protest the heavy-handed, short-sighted, and downright mean policies of an incoming governor. I'm proud to live in a state that loves its cheese heritage and craft beers. I love that I live in a city of 230,000-plus, yet I can drive 20 minutes to the west and fish for brown trout in a fast-moving stream in the middle of nowhere. I love not living amongst a sea of strip malls and used car lots like I did down in suburban Illinois. I do like it here.

What I get angry about is the fact that, while Madison, Wisconsin is said to have the highest number of restaurants per capita of any American city over 200,000 people, it has A LOT of mediocre food. There is an abundance of chain stores here, but there are plenty of locally owned establishments as well, and some of them are quite good. But, the food culture here seems stunted, as if there is no real sense of identity. Again, please don't get me wrong, there is good food to be had, but for every L'Etoile and Shinji Muramoto, there's twenty or thirty Samba's or Parthenon Gyros.

What has set me off was a trip to Chicago this past weekend. Some friends and I celebrated a birthday at Fogo de Chao in the Loop. It's part of a Brazilian steak house chain that opened in Brazil in the late seventies and now has sixteen restaurants around the U.S., mostly in major cities. The experience was amazing! The meat never stopped! It was quality food, tasty drinks, excellent service, a wine list that wins awards, and an upbeat atmosphere. It wasn't cheap, mind you, (a date night could easily set you back $200+,) but it was well worth it.

Here in Madison, we have Samba. It's owned by a couple who also own several other restaurants and a couple of liquor stores and are taking turns serving time in prison for tax evasion! The last time I was there, (also for a friend's birthday,) the lamb was game-y, some of the other meats weren't very well cooked or spiced, the salad bar was pretty good, the drinks were ok, and the service absolutely sucked. All of this and I only paid $10 less for the meal than I did for Fogo de Chao.

I'm not sure I have anything constructive to say about Madison's food scene at the moment. There are quality restaurants here and places I love, but some folks here have an attitude that the scene here is on par with Chicago, and I'm here to tell you...it's not. I'm going to sleep on this one and we'll see if I have anything more to say about this issue. /rant

The critic within us all.

I love to eat out at restaurants. The food is, of course, the main motivation for my visit, but I do enjoy the full experience of dining out. However, if the food is REALLY good, I have no qualms about overlooking the more negative aspects of my meal. I have dined within houses of ill repute with nothing but fond memories. Sketchy kitchens, war zone-like neighborhoods, bad service, and restaurants with the personality and charm of a maximum security prison will not deter me from a great meal. Food is king in my dining experiences. Everything else is just filler.


During the time I have spent so far putting this blog together, I have thought about what direction I wanted to take it and I, ultimately, asked myself this question: do I want to write as a food writer, or do I want to write as a food critic?


I have my favorite food critics. The one I turn to for restaurant reviews, first and foremost, is Raphael Kadushin. He is a regular contributor to Bon Appétit, National Geographic Traveler, Condé Nast Traveler, Epicurious.com and Concierge.com.  He also writes restaurant reviews for a local alternative newspaper here in Madison called the Isthmus. (He's based out of New York, but he's also an editor at the University of Wisconsin Press.) His word is law when it comes to my choosing of restaurants to frequent. His tastes and his opinions have been spot on with my own since the very first article of his I read back in 2006. He's honest, first and foremost; sometimes to the point of brutality. There are restaurants here in Madison, (as, I'm sure, in other places,) that hate his guts. But, he will honestly try to find some good in a bad restaurant, as well as criticize individual dishes in restaurants he likes. These are the qualities I look for in a restaurant critic. There are other critics that write for the Isthmus that I don't like so much. Either they are nothing more than free advertising, not seeming too willing to criticize anything, or they exude a snobby, "too-good-to-eat-here" attitude that rubs me the wrong way. I'll stick with Raphael, thank you.


A new favorite of mine here in the blogosphere is Eating Madison A to Z. Some years ago, I was involved with a few friends of mine in a group we called Saturday Lunch Group. Almost every Saturday afternoon for more than two years, we would get together to eat lunch at a different restaurant. We had a simple rule that at least two people in the group, (there were three of us most of the time,) had to have not ever eaten at that restaurant. We complied a list of nearly one hundred restaurants. I was impressed with this number for a long time...until I ran into the Eating Madison A to Z folks here on the internet. As I'm writing this, they just posted their 734th restaurant review!!!! I feel like a slouch by comparison! They use the "Eats" list of the Isthmus as their guide to choosing restaurants to review, put them in alphabetical order, and off they go. 734...that boggles my mind!


So, then the question becomes, "Do I want to write restaurant reviews?" The short answer is: yes. But, I won't do them very often. As I have said before, I'm a student and I live on a students' salary. (Thank goodness I like ramen noodles!) I think, for our purposes here, I'll do one restaurant review per month and incorporate the format into the blog, along with the rest of it. As an amateur food writer and as an anthropology student, I think a holistic approach works best; a little bit of everything will work well with what I envision this blog to be. Food writer or food critic? The answer is...yes.


Next time, we'll talk about chili. I even have a recipe for ya! Until then...cheers!

College town=Mecca of Pizza

In the spirit of fairness, I think I should provide a disclaimer for this post.

Disclaimer: I was born in the city of Chicago. I was raised in the northwest suburbs. I grew up having a very narrowly defined view of what pizza should be. As I have traveled about, that view has slowly changed. But...I still have my opinions.

I love pizza. I was raised on the stuff. There was a pizza place just up the block from my parents first apartment together when I was an infant. It was a "family" run Italian pizza joint called Nancy's, (which is now a chain in Chicago and the suburbs.) When we moved out of the city and into the suburbs, their were three pizza restaurants that would come to dominate my childhood, two great pizza places and a mediocre one. The great one's were Village Pizza in Carpentersville and Bill's Pizza in Mundelein. Both of these restaurants were and still are institutions in their respective areas. Both were old school, plank wood floored, shabby supper club chic with peanut shells strewn about. The pizzas were as close to divinity as one could get. And...they WERE NOT Chicago-style deep dish pizzas! If I wanted deep dish, I did the traditional route: Lou Malnati's, Pizzeria Uno, (NOT the chain!) or Giordiano's. Bill's and Village Pizza were different. They served thin crust pizzas that were just as good sitting down in their restaurants as they were sitting down at your dining room table. The mediocrity came in the form of Rosati's Pizza. There's one here in Madison, and they are a chain. The one I went to was in Lake in the Hills, Illinois (I lived there throughout high school) and it wasn't very good...unless you had a six pack of MGD or a dime bag worth of weed in you, then it was greasy, greasy deliciousness!

All this being said, I'm a bit disappointed with pizza here in Madison.

I do understand that Madison is much more than just a college town. This city has an identity all its own without the university. But, it still is a college town and it's missing something as far as pizza is concerned: an institution.

I'm not saying that Madison has nothing but bad pizza. That would simply be untrue. Madison has some very good pizza. What it doesn't have, however, is GREAT pizza. We do not have a mecca of pizza that nearly every college town I've ever been to has. I had asked friends on Facebook living here in Madison to name their favorite pizza place. I got the answers I pretty much expected: Glass Nickel, Ian's, Roman Candle, Falbo's, Pizza Brutta. These are all good choices for pizza, but they're not GREAT. I also noticed that quite a few people named more than one restaurant, and even a few named individual pizzas as well: the feta-licious at Glass Nickel, or the mac-n-cheese pizza at Ian's. But Madison has no great pizza mecca that everyone points to when talking about the best pizza in town.

And so, my fellow Madisonians, I put another question to you: do you agree with my assessment of Madison pizza AND, if you do agree, why do you think this is so?

The pizza-gods await your input.