Dining Out

Trocadero: Nothing makes me forget I’m in Wisconsin more than sitting on the heated patio (open year-round) at this French-inspired bar-restaurant. Once it’s truly warm outside, the terrace becomes open-air, all the easier to admire the Euro-cafe patio furniture, fountain and the stylin’ people that tend to mill about. 1758 N. Water St., 272-0205. Jackson Grill: What more do you need when there’s the city’s oldest Siberian elm tree in the backyard? The simple steaks-and-chops restaurant allows 90 people to see the tree at a given time – that’s the seating capacity on the patio, whose summer landscaping is tended…

I unfold a lime-green napkin and lay it across my lap. In the low light, the chairs appear to be a cross between pink and orange. The stereo unobtrusively plays what I’d call electronic dance music. The server is fetching Prosecco from the bar. I feel the word “stylish” coming on. Inspired by its location at the corner of Kilbourn and Water, Kil@wat fills the second floor of the former Wyndam Hotel, now remodeled and renamed the Intercontinental Milwaukee Hotel. The restaurant is the hotel’s showpiece for dining – not fine dining, mind you, but “on the high end” of…

The Pfister Hotel’s Celia restaurant was named after the mother of hotel owner Steve Marcus. The restaurant was like a memory. Sweet in its own way, but placid and staid. Celia’s successor, Mason Street Grill, has paved a more current path. For starters, the hotel powers-that-be finally got the notion of a basement-level restaurant out of their system. The grill is on the corner of Mason and Jefferson, with two entrances – one, importantly, a street passage. General manager Peter Donahue, who spent eight years with Bartolotta Restaurant Group, came to the Pfister because of Mark Weber, the hotel’s food…

It’s lunchtime at Downer Avenue’s new Cafe Hollander.The young waitstaff, dressed in stylish logoed T-shirts, hustle from the tables to the bar to the kitchen upstairs. The place is filling up – young hipsters, a few baby strollers, casually dressed boomers, the occasional local celeb (Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra conductor Andreas Delfs). Is Hollander, brother to Trocadero and Hi Hat Lounge, the longed-for replacement for 1980s/’90s icon The Coffee Trader? I want to say yes. Hollander is a shot of adrenaline on Downer Avenue – the Downer Avenue that used to be the East Side lane of hipness. Though not since…

Asiana. Remove the last two letters of the word and you have a vast and mysterious continent. Asia is also the inspiration for a vast, and some may say mysterious, restaurant. Two years went by while Pewaukee’s Asiana, its building guarded by two carved Chinese Foo Dogs, took shape. Now that I’ve been to the restaurant, I see why it took so long to complete. The edifice’s 11,000 square feet contain a teppanyaki room (where chefs cook and perform tricks like tossing shrimp into diners’ pockets à la Benihana of Tokyo), a colorful sushi bar, a main dining room with…

This may or may not come as a surprise, but a lot of restaurateurs hate labels. Once something has a name, it also has a definition that people more or less hold it to. So if you own a Cajun restaurant, your place sure as hell better be what people expect a Cajun restaurant to be. Last September, Bayou had its first days in business. It’s a stylish East Side joint, filling 5,000 square feet of a new multi-use building on Humboldt Avenue along the Milwaukee River (in the area once housing Melanec’s Wheelhouse dinner theater). The interior looks like…

Humboldt and Water streets meet at a four-way stop. Not just any four-way stop but one of the busiest crossroads in the city. Condos, cars, pedestrians attached to little fur balls on leashes, cars, the Milwaukee River. Did I mention cars? On the northwest corner of this intersection sits Good Life. What a fitting name for a business in a gentrifying neighborhood. The new Caribbean place became the beneficiary of a development marrying something old and something new – a 2,000-square-foot, curved-roof structure linked by breezeway to the tiny 1935 red-brick Ward Yard building. It’s a smooth-looking transition. The lofty…

Yellow roses with curling petals, apothecary bottles, new blown-glass lights, vintage photos, a gorgeous old soda fountain bar. At Racine’s The Yellow Rose, past and present live together. Cordially, comfortably. Scott and Patrice Sebastian took over pretty much a museum piece (the place is listed on the National Register), adding another chapter to a place that’s already been a restaurant, pharmacy and soda fountain. If you haven’t been to Racine for a while, it’s a ­curious curious town of simple pleasures found once you’ve trekked from the I-94 exit to the lakefront (it seems further than seven miles). Main Street…

Sitting at lunch recently, a friend asks me the popular food critic question: What’s new Downtown? “A steakhouse just opened on Wisconsin Avenue,” I begin, before he cuts me off, dismissing “yet another” place to get big portions of red meat. Like my friend, I’m of the opinion there can be too much of a good thing. Mo’s, Butch’s (times two), Milwaukee ChopHouse, Yanni’s, Carnevor, Sabor Brazilian Steakhouse – it’s getting crowded Downtown, even as these meating places try to position themselves, be it as the ’40s-style supper club or hip hideaway for the young and moneyed.The latest addition,The Capital…