As summer quickly approaches, many of us are looking for new places to dine out in Milwaukee. Lori Fredrich is on top of it.
She’s the dining editor for On Milwaukee, and she regularly joins Lake Effect’s Joy Powers to talk about some of the latest restaurants in Milwaukee — and to look back at some of the beloved restaurants that have recently closed.
Openings
"We really don't have Burmese food to any extent here in Milwaukee — well, we didn't — and now we do," Fredrich says. "And I think our Burmese population far exceeds, you know, what we have in terms of representation of the food."
"Omakase is a Japanese coursed menu — and mostly, they're small, bite-sized courses," Fredrich says. "But it's not the type of a 14-course menu where you're going to get out of it and you're going to feel like you need to eat again."
"Kinship is comprised entirely of a group of folks who are, I think, on 16 or 17-month appointments in new jobs where they are kind of learning and getting back into the workforce," Fredrich says. "So what you're doing when you eat at Kinship is you're really supporting these folks. ... The energy in the space is just pretty amazing, and the food is good too."
"When Daniela first first began with bagels, she ate a bagel and said, 'I can do this, I want to do this,'" Fredrick says. "She took that concept of making bagels — something she'd never done before — [and] she went back to the kitchen, and she spent months figuring it out, and she ended up with some pretty darn good bagels that basically helped to put Milwaukee on the map [as a bagel town]."
Fredrich explains, "Mary Kastman is the head of Purslane. She's had a lot of different experiences. She's worked with Luke Zahm at his Driftless Cafe in Viroqua, which has been lauded with James Beard nods. But she's also worked out in Boston, and when she was out in Boston is where she fell in love with Turkish food — which really forms the theme for Purslane — and she will be making all sorts of Turkish small plates, large plates."
Closings
Fredrich says, "They're closing to make way for a new concept called Nadi Plates, which is an Italian concept that sort of serendipitously came through and was looking at properties that belong to New Land. And New Land was like, 'Well, we do have this food hall.' [The owner of Nadi Plates] walked in, it piqued her interest and they decided, I think, to cut their losses."
"Almost every single restaurant that has been on that street corner has had some sort of accident — most have been a car crashing into the building," Fredrich says. "This is another one of those situations, where the Lafayette sustained a pretty serious injury to the foundation and the front of the building — but the repairs, the extent to which it took to make those happen this time, took longer than that than they should have."
"They've threatened to close a couple of times before, mostly due to finances, and have always been able to come back around again," Fredrich says. "And I think this time it's just a matter of — it's been, you know, it's been a lot of years [and] it's a tough business."
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