| rev:text
| - I was surprised when a friend asked to grab lunch here since I thought I had checked out most of the seafood restaurants in Madison - I guess it's easy to overlook some of the restaurants on Monroe! Gates & Brovi has a very casual, cute interior with booth seating near the windows and large tables. It also had a sports bar feel to it as well, with a full bar and bar stools. It is surprisingly quite large outside and seems like a pretty family-friendly restaurant. Despite its location, there is a map outside the front door stating places where customers can park for free nearby which is very helpful.
The food at Gates & Brovi is good, but nothing extremely unique. I do have to say that the presentation of the food is really well-done though - it is all set up tastefully and makes the dish look a lot fancier (and more Instagrammable!) There are multiple fried seafood offerings that aren't found in a lot of other restaurants, but there is nothing in the flavor or texture that really impressed me. A few of the items we tried:
- Clam Pie: 3/5. I was really intrigued by this dish initially but it wasn't what I expected. The clams are very tiny and incorporated as a topping on a pizza. However, the pizza itself is pretty greasy and the seafood flavor is very muted. I ended up adding a lot of seasoning myself and felt that it wasn't something I really ever needed to order again.
- Crispy Shrimp Cakes: 3/5. Again, a really beautiful dish. It comes with about 6 shrimp cakes which good to share, and some remoulade sauce. The battering was really thick though and deeply fried, which masked the actual shrimp flavor as well. I think the shrimp cakes also taste better without the remoulade sauce - I normally am a huge fan of remoulade, but their recipe is very strong and overpowers the natural flavors of shrimp. I think this dish could be a hit with a few minor modifications though.
- Cheese Curds: 3/5. Super beautiful cheese curds - they are really crisp looking and has some sort of green onion or seasoning in it. Unfortunately, they also did not taste as good as they looked. I wish the cheese curds were more melty on the inside, and a little greasier on the outside. In addition, the ranch sauce was pretty weird for me in flavor - something just tasted a little off.
I think that Gates & Brovi has a great foundation, but it could be improved upon easily with improved dipping sauces and a few taste tests. The service was fantastic and while I wasn't horribly blown away by this place, it is a nice place to stop in for some decent food if you are in the area.
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)