Weekend Getaway: Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Chefs embrace the culinary traditions in Wisconsin's largest city while pushing them forward. Let's go eat Spam omelettes, Thai sausages, and custard with verjus cherries.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:
Weekend Getaway: Milwaukee’s dining scene is the perfect blend of old-school favorites and new-comers making their mark.
Featured Field Guide: Download our Field Guide to Milwaukee, a 56-page dining guide formatted for your phone that includes a curated four-day itinerary with 35+ recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks. It’s free this month for paid subscribers!
Favorites List: All month, we’re sharing picks for where to eat and drink if you’re traveling for the April 8th solar eclipse. Bloomington, Indiana is in the path of totality, and we share a favorite spot there. We’ll also be offering suggestions for Rochester, Cleveland, Indianapolis, and Burlington.
Weekend Reading: A new addition to the dining scene in Portland, Maine, a dose of “newstalgia” in Los Angeles, plus a list of spring food festivals.
A Weekend in Milwaukee? Give Us Any Chance, We’ll Take It
MILWAUKEE, WIS. — While there are many cities I’d love to live someday (Portland! Charleston!), being based in the middle of the country means it’s easy to travel to so many places. We keep a list called “10-Hour Cities,” with destinations we can drive to with just one overnight on the way (in fact, we’re going to one of these next week!). But no good dining town is closer to us than Milwaukee. We’ve been many times – including twice in the last four months – for one main reason: on each visit, we eat and drink so well. Some restaurants and bars are brand new, others just new-to-us, but all help tell the story of what this city is about.
That story is about a city that embraces its culinary traditions but is not bound to them. Chefs are pushing classic dishes and ingredients like bratwurst, beer, fish fries, and cheese into new directions — you can try old-school German favorites like schnitzel at Mader’s Restaurant, then visit The Vanguard and order Thai-inspired pork, ginger, and lemongrass sausages topped with peanut sauce and carrots.
Whenever we travel, we seek out both the old and the new — you get to the soul of a place when you visit longtime establishments like Zaffiro’s Pizza, while newcomers like Birch can show you where the city is going. In this case, that’s a city that just landed on Eater’s Where to Eat in 2024 list and will be one of the hosts for the upcoming season of Top Chef, which starts on March 20 (and will feature local chef Dan Jacobs of DanDan).
Ready to go? Let’s start with coffee.
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