Settle Down Tavern Reflects the Heart of Wisconsin
Cover Story: In Madison, a trio of friends run modern takes on classic corner taverns and supper clubs.
Welcome to the weekend! Here’s what you’ll find in this week’s newsletter:
Cover Story: In Madison, the team of Brian Bartels, Ryan Huber, and Sam Parker capture what’s great about Wisconsin drinking at Settle Down Tavern along with their two other spots, Turn Key Supper Club and Oz by Oz.
Weekend Getaway: Madison, Wisconsin has many great restaurants and bars. Get all our recommendations by downloading our Field Guide to Madison, a 38-page dining guide organized into a curated three-day itinerary with 25+ recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks. It’s free this month for paid subscribers!
The Order: At Slyman's Deli in Cleveland, the towering corned beef sandwich is on every table.
Weekend Reading:
shares his favorite spots in Detroit, Jennifer Wilson explores Martha’s Vineyard, and returns to St. Louis.
Settle On In
MADISON, WISC. — No matter which city or town you’re in, drinking establishments in Wisconsin have a distinctive identity. There’s wood paneling on the walls, the Brewers, Packers, or Bucks on TV, a house serve for the brandy old fashioned. These bars are often located in a house smack in the middle of a neighborhood. Maybe they have a Friday night fish fry or a simple burger or fried cheese curds, often made in a tiny kitchen that might just be behind the bar. This is true for whether you are looking for a cheap beer or a good cocktail, or whether you’re in Milwaukee, Viroqua, Beloit, or Green Bay. The corner tavern is Wisconsin.
In Madison, Brian Bartels, Ryan Huber, and Sam Parker take this classic Wisconsin tavern as a jumping off point for Settle Down Tavern. We love it so much, it’s where we head to kick off any visit to Madison. The Bloody Mary is bar none (Bartels wrote the book on it). It’s fresh and spicy, and comes with a snit of Settle Down lager made for the bar by Full Mile Beer Company in nearby Sun Prairie. The brandy old fashioned is terrific, and so is the Good Idea burger, which has two smashed patties, grilled onions, housemade pickles, Monterey Jack, and Settle sauce. But if it’s Friday, order the fish fry — you can go back to get the burger on Saturday. The beer-battered cod comes served with seasoned fries, peppadew relish, jalapeño coleslaw, and housemade tartar sauce. It’s a fresh take on the dish that I’ve eaten many, many times around the state.
Bartels, Huber, and Parker met in the late 1990s working at the Great Dane Pub & Brewing Co. “We’ve been friends since our time at the Dane,” Bartels says. “We spent a lot of time closing the Dane down and I think when you do that often, you build camaraderie with the right kind of people. That enabled us to not just work really well together but build friendships outside of the bar-restaurant life.”
The trio remained in touch over the years as their careers went in different directions. Bartels moved to New York City, where he was the beverage director for Gabe Stulman’s Happy Cooking Hospitality (which included spots like Joseph Leonard). Huber and Parker started Context, a men’s boutique. “We always talked on the back burner about being able to open something together,” Bartels says. “The signs pointed to that happening around 2019, when I started being interested in not being in New York the rest of my life. We had a lot of conversations and found a space connected to Sam and Ryan’s space. We started discussing the idea of opening a classic Midwestern tavern.”
Settle Down captures that feel with neon signs, retro photos on the walls, and sports on the televisions. But the bar feels fresh, in part from the menu that includes items like deviled eggs with paprika panko or grain bowls with housemade vegan kimchi, and in part from the fact that the tavern spills out into the light-filled atrium and onto the extensive outdoor patio. When Settle Down opened in May 2020, it was take-out only and outdoor dining provided a lifeline. Food was the focus in those early pandemic days: “Our Good Idea burger was the driving force of the menu; everything was built around that,” Huber says. “The kitchen is absolutely tiny; it was previously a barbershop closet. We knew we were operating with a limited space, so: burgers, fries, cheese curds.” Over the four years the tavern has been open, Huber says, “it’s starting to feel like we wanted it to feel in the first place. Our late-night business is picking up, we’re doing more happy hours.” This week is the bar’s fourth anniversary, and if you’re near Madison, they’re having specials this weekend.
Turn Key Supper Club, which the trio opened in 2022, also takes inspiration from a classic Wisconsin establishment — here, the supper club. “Our supper club influence has been around since we were kids,” Bartels says. “My first job was at Ishnala in the Dells. We’ve been around supper clubs our whole lives, we love going to them, talking about them, the history of them. The way we modernized the tavern aesthetic with Settle Down was what we were aiming for with Turn Key Supper Club — to bring the best of what we were experiencing in our past and what everybody loves but bring a little modern design to it as well.”
One example of a modernized classic on the menu at Turn Key — which includes a Wednesday spaghetti dinner, Friday fish fry, and Saturday prime rib — is the Party Time Relish Tray, which comes loaded with dips, chips, beet-pickled eggs, local veggies, pickles, and more. There’s also another supper club staple at the bar: brandy. “We’re such a brandy state,” Bartels says. “I wanted not just your typical brandy options; we have ginger brandy, apricot brandy, coffee brandy.” Those appear in drinks like the Exotic Beaches of Dane County, with pineapple rum, apricot brandy, Aperol, pomegranate, chai, and absinthe.
And next door to Settle Down is Oz by Oz, a cocktail bar that, by design, is not neatly categorized. It opened in 2021 in the space that Context filled until 2020 — “When Covid hit, nobody was buying expensive jeans or American-made boots, they were buying sweatpants and Kleenex,” Huber says — but they hung onto the space with the idea of turning it into a bar. “I do a lot of the aesthetic concepts and I was hired by Gabe Stulman to go around Wisconsin and find bar ephemera,” Huber says. “Covid hit so Gabe didn't need the stuff, and we had all these artifacts and antiques. We started talking about working this into a new concept for a bar that had this fact-fiction, storytelling aspect to it.”
Oz by Oz is a good spot for a nightcap after dinner at Settle Down. The back bar and menu highlight amaro, but I’ve also had nice local wines from American Wine Project in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. I also love the house cocktail, The Oz. It’s a riff on the Pendennis Club and Seelbach cocktails made with bourbon, apricot brandy, lime, and Peychaud’s bitters. “Oz was meant to be use-your-imagination, choose-your-own-adventure, find your inspiration wherever that may be,” Bartels says. “That drink is the first one I came up with and I called it the Oz because I felt like your palate would be familiar with it, but you haven’t tasted something like that before.”
These bars feel like they could only exist in Wisconsin, and that's because the trio is deeply ingrained in the state’s bar culture. “We’re all born and raised Wisconsinites, so it’s not something we have to try to do,” Parker says. “It just is.” That deep knowledge is also something they achieve by frequently traveling throughout the state. “We all love going to bars and taverns,” Huber says. “If we’re driving down the road we’re not going to pass up an opportunity to jump in a little dive bar on the side of the road, or if someone gives us a tip for a good supper club, we’re going to go visit it. All of us are very familiar with the entire state — we really like it here.”
Settle Down Tavern 117 S Pinckney St, Madison, WI 53703 | @settledowntavern
Oz by Oz 113 King St, Madison, WI 53703 | @ozby.oz
Turn Key Supper Club 1344 E Washington Ave, Madison, WI 53703 | @turnkeysupperclub
Download all our Madison Recommendations!
Madison, Wisconsin has a thriving food scene, and we’ve put together a guide to all our favorites in our Field Guide to Madison, which is free this month to paid newsletter subscribers. This 38-page dining guide includes a curated three-day itinerary with 25+ recommendations for breakfast, lunch, dinner, and drinks. It’s downloadable for offline reading and formatted for your phone — perfect for easy reference on your next trip.
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Corned Beef Sandwich at Slyman’s Deli
CLEVELAND, OHIO — Slyman’s Deli is only open on weekdays and there’s usually a line out the door, but it’s worth the effort to secure a towering corned beef sandwich at this Cleveland institution, which opened in 1964. Their corned beef is well-seasoned with just the right amount of fat, and while you can get it turned into a reuben or melt, the classic on soft rye is what everyone is getting, and so should you.
It comes piled with an uncountable number of very thin slices of corned beef and Swiss cheese (on request), and no condiments so you can doctor it to your taste with mustard or Thousand Island dressing from squeeze bottles at the table. This is a big sandwich, but be sure to save room for some of their good coleslaw and potato salad on the side. Sometimes the corned beef sells out, in which case, we have trusted reports that the pastrami makes a fine back-up plan.
3106 St Clair Ave NE, Cleveland, OH 44114 | @slymans216
MICHIGAN
Don’t Forget the Motor City: In his newsletter
, writer Danny Palumbo pointed his readers to some of his favorite spots in Detroit. His recommendations included the galette at Sister Pie, which we also endorsed in our Overnight Stay: Detroit issue from last winter. “Most of the baked goods at Lisa Ludwinski’s shop are seasonal — save for the ceaseless rosemary cookies and salted maple pie — but everything else rotates with seasonal ingredients and creative moods,” writes Palumbo. “Scones change frequently, as do the cookies, and the galette is no different — its form changes from week to week, but every time it hits.”MASSACHUSETTS
Charted a Course to the Vineyard: Jennifer Wilson spent some time on Martha’s Vineyard for Travel + Leisure, where she checked out the Ritz (a popular local dive bar), Cottage City Oysters, and Deon’s Kitchen (a Caribbean restaurant), and more. While on the island Wilson “learned about a new generation of small-business owners and chefs — young, diverse, and progressive — who are remaking Martha’s Vineyard, trading in deck shoes for a rising tide that lifts all boats.”
MISSOURI
Meet Me in St. Louis: Writing for his newsletter,
, our friend guided his readers through a recent trip to St. Louis. “Gioia’s was at the top of my must-visit list,” writes Parsons. “Gioia’s first opened in 1918 and in 2017 they were honored by the James Beard Foundation with an America’s Classic Award. Among the many sandwiches on the menu — the Porknado, Hogfather, Spicy Daggett, Big Italian — their homemade, original HOT SALAMI (always capitalized) is the top seller.” He stopped in at many other places including Union Loafers, The Gin Room, New Society, and the classic Ted Drewes Frozen Custard. I think it’s time for a road trip to the Show Me State.— Compiled by Kenney Marlatt
Want more? Chat with us on Substack, download our Field Guides, check out our archives, or follow us on Instagram @americanweekender. We’ll be back next week.
Thank you both for the St. Louis shout-out! And loved seeing and reading about my guy Brian and the team at Settle Down.
I used to travel to Madison for work, and had a best friend that lived in Milwaukee for a few years. I’m so nostalgic for those days, I can feel the essence of the state come through in your writing!