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| - I was told that this was this was the place to go in Madison, and that the fried cheese curds and Old Fashioned burger were the two menu options that were must-order items. I would confidently repeat that advice to anybody asking.
My trio made it in here around 7 on a foul-weathered June Saturday night, and we weren't the only people who had the idea to do so. It is a pretty large place, but we had about a 45 minute wait for a table. Conveniently, the hostess can take your phone number so their system will send you a text message when your table is ready, leaving you free to wander around the other nearby establishments, hang out around the capitol building, or find a few beers at the bar. There isn't a convenient place to hang out inside if the bar area is packed, which it likely will be, so maybe hanging out somewhere different until our table was ready would have been a better option than getting a beer from the bar and constantly moving around to get out of the way for other people who were going in and out.
The place definitely has a loud and busy atmosphere, but it feels more fun than overwhelming and everybody in the place is smiling and having a good time. There aren't as many TVs inside as I would have expected, but that probably keeps it a little more of a restaurant feel than a sports bar type place. There are at least a couple TVs over the bar, and there might be more around that I didn't see, but if you wanted to watch a game here you'd need to request a table within viewing range. They did have some cool sports memorabilia on the walls, including a lot of Wisconsin focused items.
Almost right at 45 minutes after out estimated wait time was given, my phone buzzed and we were seated. Our waiter was fantastic, although he was a little hard to hear in the more-noisy-than-average setting. We got a round of beers ordered, which was made easy by their $3 pint special of a local Wisconsin brew of which the name escapes me. Aside from that special, they had a very long list of fantastic Wisconsin offerings both on tap and in the bottle, and of course they offered their namesake along with a few unique iterations of the drink. The menu is actually a little tough to read, since you are basically reading a description of each item in order to figure out what it is, but it is mostly filled with offerings of appetizers, salads, and sandwiches/burgers. They offer some charcuterie boards as appetizers that sounded delicious, but we went straight for the fried cheese curds. The smoked paprika sauce that we ordered with the curds put them over the top and made the year that I surely knocked off my lifespan for eating them well worth it.
Just as the 3 of us were starting to slow down on the cheese curds, our entrees came out and I swear the lights dimmed and my Old Fashioned Burger had rays of light emanating from it. Maybe that was just my tunnel vision focusing on the glorious burger piled high with toppings that was now in front of me. It's hard to mess up anything made with flame-grilled beef, fried onions, smoked bacon, aged cheddar, garlic sauce, and a fried egg, but they definitely made sure the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. The meat was cooked perfectly as ordered, and everything tasted like it was top quality, especially the 2 different meats between the buns. I don't think anything beats a runny yolk on top of a burger, and they nailed it. I got fries as my side instead of upgrading to one of the other offerings, and they were good but just standard fries. I would definitely recommend this burger to anyone that wasn't vegetarian, and I'd even go so far as to suggest those who are to make an exception just this one time.
We were offered a dessert menu at the end of the meal, but not one of us had any extra room for any more food. You certainly don't have to worry about leaving here hungry. When I make it back here again, I might stray from their popular burgers and instead get the mac and cheese, since I was eyeing it all night as they were constantly bringing it out to other tables It looked delicious and packed with cheese, but that will have to wait for another day. Hands down one of my favorite places I've ever been in the upscale burger and beer category of restaurant, and that is in a list that includes a lot of other places.
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