Think of this high-end restaurant and adjacent bar as restored old Cream City brick building meets Ernest Hemingway-esque hunting lodge. The service aims to match the expensive house dry-aged steaks. Steaks are a menu highlight.
“Fine dining” has more than once been pronounced close to death’s door. Despite those claims, there’s still life in the concept. But what constitutes fine dining has changed, in keeping with broader lifestyle trends of the last 15 years or so.
The center of this open, modern space is a wood-burning hearth, used for everything from bread-baking to roasting meats and fish. High marks for shareable menu items like roasted parsnips, sunflower seed risotto and whole chicken with BBQ carrots. Open for Sat-Sun brunch as well.
When I talked with co-owner Miles Borghgraef by phone a few months before Birch + Butcher’s opening – in Barry Mandel’s North End development on Water Street – the carpentry was finished, light fixtures installed and Borghgraef and his crew were christening the wood- burning hearth at the center of his kitchen.
Friday Fish Fry, Open For Lunch, Reservations Taken,
This dive (meant in the kindest way) overlooking Pewaukee Lake offers almost no place to stand comfortably when it’s busy, but you stand, awkwardly, near the bar or the wood-accented, nautical-themed dining room, and just hope that someone gets up and leaves soon. It’s all worth this period of limbo. The crust is like a round, uniformly thin piece of lavosh lavished in toppings that improve when you add “super,” as in Super Special. That’s pepperoni and sausage, black olives and onions, green peppers and mushrooms.
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