We love “the new.” Especially when it comes to the restaurant scene, we get excited about the spot that just opened its doors or discovering a place the rest of the community hasn’t caught on to yet.
While the rookies get everyone worked up, it’s the veterans who create the foundation of a city’s food identity. And we’ve got two of them leading the lineup for this episode of the podcast.
First up is Bacchus, the venerable Bartolotta-owned restaurant that announced a couple different developments around its 20th anniversary. For starters, executive chef Nick Wirth and chef de cuisine Brent Davis have come up with a new a la carte dinner menu, which will debut along with a new bar menu Feb. 20. Among the items you’ll find are charred Spanish octopus, smoked wagyu pastrami, Seremoni black cod with burnt honey celeriac and couscous pilaf, and Wagyu skirt steak with miso-glazed ube and grilled kimchi bok choy.
The restaurant will also take a night to properly celebrate the 20th anniversary as it hosts a champagne dinner March 6. The aforementioned chef duo have put together a five-course menu for the occasion, which will also include pairings of bubbly from the likes of Dom Pérignon and Laurent Perrier.
Another longstanding Milwaukee eatery got the Ann Christenson treatment recently, as our favorite food writer took a peek inside Pizza Man’s comeback. Once the king of our city’s pie scene (arguably), Pizza Man experienced some slippage as it suffered through fire, a couple location changes and attempted expansion.
It’s now back at the Downer location and trying to recapture its former glory under new owners Thomas Schafer and Krys Zielinski. Ann stopped by a couple times to get a feel for how things are coming along and found mixed results, as well as steady improvement. As she put it in her Milwaukee Magazine story, “This reboot needs to succeed. Downer Avenue needs it to.”
Here’s what else found its way into this episode:
- A juicy piece about Prime Rib you’ll only find in the pages of Milwaukee Magazine.
- A new concept called Outlaw Oyster that’ll pop-up inside Crafty Cow’s Wauwatosa location.
- A chat about What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking, the first African-American cookbook from 1881.
Finally, we have another in our series of interviews with some of Milwaukee’s very best chefs — who just so happen to be whipping up an original dish you can try at Radio Milwaukee’s SoundBites. Egg & Flour’s Adam Pawlak gets the microphone on this episode and talks with Kenny Perez about the tostada he’s working on for Feb. 27.
Adam is one of 12 different chefs lending their considerable talents to SoundBites, a group that includes Dane Baldwin from The Diplomat, Kristen Schwab from The Wolf and Gregory León from Amilinda. To make your reservation at this very exclusive table, head over to the event page.
