Each week on This Bites, dining critic Ann Christenson from Milwaukee Magazine and Radio Milwaukee’s resident foodie Tarik Moody dig into the city’s culinary and restaurant culture to help you find new spots, old favorites and the best ingestibles around Milwaukee.
Sometimes, the universe just doesn’t want you to make a dish. You hand-pick all your ingredients, do your chopping and dicing and mixing, pull out your go-to cookware and … the stove won’t light.
This food metaphor is meant to soften the blow of there not being a full podcast this week. Ann and I were in the studio with our rundown of food news all set to go, and then our fancy audio equipment did the equivalent of the stove not lighting.
So we did what any great chef does in this situation: Scrap the five-course meal you had planned and make a decent salad.
Most of what you’ll hear in this salad-ified episode comes from my HYFIN colleague Megan Matthews — one of the DJs providing the “sound” half of our upcoming SoundBites event Feb. 27. She has the good fortune to be paired with Centraal Grand Café & Tappery’s Rebecca Berkshire, who welcomed Megan into the kitchen for a chat about what they both have cooking for the big night (tickets for which are on sale now).
I also didn’t want to miss an opportunity to talk about another cookbook that caught my eye recently: Black Power Kitchen from Ghetto Gastro. The Bronx-based culinary collective put together 75 recipes — mostly plant-based — that blend cultural heritage with innovative cooking techniques.
Strong Back Stew, Triboro Tres Leches and their version of a classic bodega chopped cheese are just a few examples of what you’ll find in these pages, which include way more than just recipes. The photography is incredible (there’s nothing like a great good photo), plus they fold in original artwork and essays that draw the connections among food, community and Black excellence.
A quick note also to the folks from Three Brothers, the Serbian restaurant in Bay View that’s been at it for close to seven decades now. They just got a nod from USA Today as one of best in America — a pretty exclusive list of just 44 eateries. Compared with a lot of places that get these plaudits, Three Brothers is a testament to “slow and steady wins the race,” so kudos to everyone over there.
