Das ist gut: Dinner at Mader’s

Maders Exterior

Mader's German Restaurant

Milwaukee is both my former home and my adopted hometown. Every return visit feels like a homecoming. But this visit to Milwaukee will be a little bit tourist trip.

I want to see and do the things I always meant to see and do. One, I  have never eaten at Karl Ratzsch’s or Mader’s, the two remaining stalwarts of the German restaurant triumvirate that once reigned in this town. (The third triumvir, John Ernst, where I dined many times, closed in 2001.)

Since Mader’s (1041 N. 3rd St) is only two blocks from the hotel, tonight’s choice is easy. At Mader’s, the Germanness is everywhere you look:  the wall plaques, the steins, the ostentatious glass-encased suit of armor and the inexplicable enormous upholstered chair in the foyer. The dining room chairs look medieval, hard and short, made of dark wood with wine-glass shapes cut out of the back.

Maders Beer Sampler

Mader's Beer Sampler

Gene orders a beer sampler, six juice-size glasses with beers arranged from light to dark. I drink a Chardonnay La Crema. Gene selects a wiener schnitzel and sauerbraten platter for his main course. I order the only fish dish on the menu, grilled salmon with wasabi cream sauce. As the only fish dish, I worry it will be perfunctory and boring. So wrong! I also order a side of spatzle, fried gnocchi-like German dumplings. I talk Gene into sharing a Schaum Torte, the classic strawberry-and-meringue mountain of a dessert.

We stop in the German Beer Hall (1009 N. 3rd St) for a draft. I want Gene to see this bar, but I don’t know if is just too early in the evening or if we are too full to enjoy it. The narrow barroom is nearly empty and we leave half our beers on the bar.

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Tribeca Grill becomes a Standard

tribeca_grill_business_cardMy first visit to Tribeca Grill was sometime during my first year in New York, in 1992 or 1993.

I was overly impressed that Robert DeNiro owned the restaurant that I WAS EATING IN. I really  thought DeNiro might be standing quietly at the end of the bar, notice me and my friends and raise his glass to us in a subtle Robert-DeNiro-kind-of-way.

Tribeca Grill’s longevity is not unheard of in New York restaurants, but against the odds. Many restaurants that were once white-hot dissolve into the ether of the forgotten. Good restaurants too—not just the trendy ones. A New Yorker’s memory is short.

Each annual update of Zagat’s contains a tribute page of once-loved restaurants that bit the dust in the last year. Oh yeah, I remember that one . . . too bad, but where are we going to eat tonight?

Celebrity-owned restaurants have an especially high mortality rate. Remember Planet Hollywood? Remember Britney Spears had a restaurant for five minutes? Five points if you can think of the name.

Gene and I ate at Tribeca Grill for the billionth time recently. The place has become a standard for us. Not trendy anymore, like its sister restaurant next door, Locanda Verde, but comfortable. The brick walls emit a homey warmth and the upside-down sombero chandeliers, well, what can you say about the audacity of lit-up, upside-down sombreros?

I ordered an red-wine braised octopus salad and herb-roasted monkfish with lobster ravolini. Gene had the charcuterie plate as an appetizer and the alaskan halibut as a main course. A booth and a bottle of wine made our late, romantic Sunday night dinner perfect.

Will Tribeca Grill still be there next year? The year after? I hope so.

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Mona Lisa: Now That’s Italian

Are we going to find something open at this hour? We find bars with no food; we find tortilla and Thai and Chinese places, take-out places with a chair or two in an over-lit storefront with no bar. Many restaurants are closing down; I see staffers in the windows, putting chairs up and cleaning. Too bad we didn’t arrive a few hours earlier.

I didn’t realize how close our hotel is to the Italian area, North Beach, home of the early 1950s poets and writers known as the Beat Generation. We pass City Lights, the Beat bookstore owned by Lawrence Fehrlinghetti.

Gene spots Ristorante Mona Lisa up the street and it looks open. The Mona Lisa is indeed open late, a long, narrow, sentimentally gaudy Italian restaurant, decorated with gigantic chandeliers and Renaissance-era murals.

We are seated at a small table by a window. We watch a group celebrating a birthday at the table outside. The group has been there awhile judging by the number of empty bottles on the table.

Christmas lights trim the bar and climb up the lanterns over the tables.

The tablecloths are pink, I think. Even the outdoor tables have tablecloths. Pink tablecloths represent the desire to be upscale, rather than actually being upscale. Only simple white tablecloths make a white-tablecloth restaurant. No substitutions.

But pink or white, upscale or downscale, the food is the point. A gnocchi dish on any menu makes Gene happy and The Mona Lisa offers eight gnocchi dishes. What to chose? There must be fifty pasta dishes on the menu. I love pasta and I try not to eat it too often, but with a menu like this, I must order pasta. Can you tell I’m hungry?

Gene chooses Gnocchi Pomodoro and I have Penne San Francisco (when in San Francisco . . .) Penne SF has a creamy pink sauce and bit of asparagus and crab, plus whole pieces of stone crab.

After our meal, we walk through the friendly sleaze of North Beach back to the hotel.