If there’s one thing you can count on in the craft brewing world, it’s the ruthless acceptance of puns, pop culture references, and jokes. Borough Beer Co. &Kitchen has been open for a year on the ground floor of an apartment building – The Dude Abodes – named after the z line The Big Lebowski for crying out noisy. The opportunities are right there.
And yet! Borough refuses to catch these goofy coat halves by barely adding a hint of wordplay to the names of their beers. There’s not even a White Russian on the cocktail menu.
On the menu, customers will find comfort food classics and New American standards, with an emphasis on sandwiches and tacos. If there isn’t something on the menu that suits you, honestly, it’s probably your fault.
The menu starts with a dozen appetizers and share items. Cheese curds are a fait accompli at the bar, but here they advertise them as hand-breaded, which is a nice touch. The cauliflower “wings” in a sticky buffalo sauce were exceptional and one of the most satisfying stir-fried vegetables I’ve had recently.
Borough fryers deliver the performance you’d expect. Munching on the dough for crispy fish tacos or the impressive verticality of the Nashville heated chicken club sandwich was an enjoyable experience, but some dishes lacked a flavor element — the uninteresting chipotle crema on the tacos and the minimal heat of what should be piquant fried chicken. The decision to put a slice of American cheese on the chicken dulled the spice even more. Not melancholy, but lost and lacking the full promise of being either heated Nashville or a decent club.
In the case of a brewery menu, there are many gigantic variations in the culinary composition. Home-smoked olives, speckled with a bit of chili flakes, make a basic and elegant starter, even if pre-seeded; no date should include the goofy faces we make while nibbling on olive pits. Olives also appear on the chorizo-focused breakfast menu, although more smoke or heat would be welcome.
The fairly standard cheeseburger didn’t wow me as much as the brisket burger with creamy leeks and fig barbecue sauce. Two different cheeses, three different vegetables – there’s a lot going on, a little gets lost (arugula? provolone?), but the sauce is fortunately moderate in its sweetness, and the whole thing came out of the kitchen very fresh in a nicely baked roll. It may be a little showy and the price is high, but it’s a large burger with groundbreaking ingredients.
Truffle is an ingredient that suggests fantasy to some and artificiality to others; I may be one of the few who doesn’t crave or regret a dish with truffles, and the truffle pasta and cheese delivers exactly what you’d expect from it. Big truffle funk, moderate cheesiness and a nice texture of toasted breadcrumbs.
The breakfast bread pudding from the breakfast menu lacked the texture of an otherwise luxurious and flavorful cube of creamy bread pudding baked in a gigantic skillet and sliced for serving. A little flame on these cut surfaces would do wonders. And the maple-glazed bacon side was supple rather than crispy. In the pitifully gaunt BLT lunch, the “crispy” bacon still wasn’t there.
On a recent visit, I tried the carnitas tacos and was delighted that it was served almost perfectly in the style of established tacos: a corn tortilla (two would be great, but one is enough) and a generous helping of shredded pork, a handful of cilantro, and a teaspoon of a lime wedge. I ordered the sauces on the side and, tasting them, I felt that they were indeed liabilities, a case of subtraction by addition. But even if my order accidentally left out other ingredients (onions, cotija), they were excellent tacos.
Borough brews its beers at Delta Beer Lab, and while there is no set timetable for bringing production in-house, drinking three or four house beers with your meal is a good addition. Pilsner and hazy IPA are good choices; a hazy apricot-infused IPA brewed to celebrate Borough’s first birthday is the most flavorful option. If beer isn’t your thing, the old-fashioned program is broad and ambitious.
Since Rockhound Brewing closed its doors in behind schedule 2020, Madison’s brewing scene has experienced some surprising upheaval. Borough’s cautious launch of their brewing program seems to have given them permission to really put the kitchen to the test, with more than a few notable successes. For a brewery named after Madison’s neighborhood identity, a tiny and major operation like Borough really brings the place together.
Borough Beer Co. &Kitchen
street Parkowa 444 S.
608-467-2843; theboroughmadison.com
11:00-22:00 Tuesday-Thursday, 11:00-noon Friday, 9:00-22:00 Saturday, 9:00-22:00 Sunday.
$10-17
[Editor’s note: the photo caption has been edited to reflect this is the Nashville Hot Chicken club sandwich.]
