Cedarburg’s Brandywine enduring with handmade pasta subscriptions
From his first job to his own restaurant, Andrew Wilson’s cooking journey has always been driven by ingredients.
In 2018, Wilson and his wife, Rhiannon, opened Brandywine, W61-N480 Washington Ave. in Cedarburg. The parents of four children, ages 14, 11, 8 and 1, met as high school students in Sheboygan.
Making pasta is also one of Wilson’s passions, and the former executive sous chef at Bacchus takes pride in the varieties he offers daily.
From the very start of the pandemic, like restaurants everywhere, Brandywine faced limited in-house dining. That spurred the Wilsons to get creative, not only offering carryout but adding pasta subscription kits featuring different handmade pastas every month for patrons to prepare a meal quickly at home. Those have become increasingly popular; December’s pasta was a greenand-gold nod to the Packers. They also added outdoor private dining domes and a greenhouse open by reservation only, and a small grocery area in the back of the restaurant.
Currently, the restaurant is open 5 to 8 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 5 to 9 p.m. Friday and Saturday. Reservations and menus are available online at
For additional information, email info@brandywinecedarburg.com
Question: What made Cedarburg the perfect place to open a restaurant?
We moved from Madison to Milwaukee when I took a job with Bartolotta’s. Our children were still pretty little and my wife’s parents live in Fox Point. I had a former sous chef who was from Cedarburg, and I met him one summer up here for Wine & Harvest Festival. We had a blast. I was charmed by the city, so we started taking trips up with the kids. We were toying around with the idea of opening a restaurant. They have great little independent stores and restaurants downtown. We ended up finding our space and went all in.
Q: Was opening your own restaurant something that you always thought about, or did that come later?
Early on, I never really considered my long-term cooking career. Cooking was what I was doing in the meantime. I was going to go to college. I went to a semester of college and figured that wasn’t for me either. One day, I was thinking about what I was going to do with the rest of my life, well maybe I’m already doing it. Owning a restaurant, that (thought) came later.
My first job was at Trattoria Stefano in Sheboygan. Seeing that small kind of chef/owner mom-and-pop business, I really enjoyed working there. It really made an impression.
Q: What was the first thing you had to have on the menu for your restaurant?
A fried cheese curds dish. We did a few different versions of it. Ironically, they’re not on the menu anymore. I like to change stuff up.
Q: You have a variety of pastas on your menu. When did you start offering pasta subscription kits?
Like everybody else, when we had to shut down in March, we shifted to carryout. We started slowly trying to do more retail stuff we could sell online along with other lines. The pasta kit came out of brainstorming things we could produce and package. We would make certain quantities and sell them, but the frustration became having the right numbers. We’d make something and sell out immediately, then we’d make something else and it wouldn’t. Packaging has become a big thing these days, so to package something and not sell was hard.
We came up with a subscriptionbased option so we could know exactly what quantities are each time. We started really small back in April. There were 11 people. It has grown each month, and January is our biggest month yet.
Q: What do you want people to know about the pasta you make?
Everything we do we do in-house, from noodles to every other part of the dish. We generally do two pastas, fresh or filled. We have a pasta extruder, we can control the ingredients that go in, play around with flavors, herbs, spices — sky’s the limit. It offers a huge range of shapes we couldn’t make otherwise.
I keep collecting dies. I think I have about 10 different pasta shapes. They’re definitely not cheap, nor was the machine. When we first opened, the first two, three months, everything was made absolutely by hand. We had a spaghetti, we rolled it out and cut each order through a chitarra, a guitar string cutter (for pasta). The labor-intensiveness of it was kind of crazy. We had four different pasta dishes on the menu. When you’re doing it all by hand, 20-30 orders every night is incredibly laborintensive. Streamlining and learning what shapes we could produce quickly, then buying the specialty pasta extruder and upgrading equipment made a difference.
Q: Tell me about what you’re doing for winter.
We have three little B-domes; they seat two to six people. We only do one seating, one reservation per evening, to give us time to air them out, sanitize. Early on, we figured that was safest and easiest for us to handle. We designed a menu for the greenhouse and domes. It is served family-style, designed to be served quickly and efficiently.
Q: What other shifts have you made during the pandemic?
We have some regulars only getting carryout. We are still doing midweek family-type items, an affordable meal that would feed about four. We’ll be changing that weekly.
Our pasta kits, that’s a weeknight meal that is focused on convenience and can be put on the table in just a few minutes or sit in the fridge for a few days. Each pasta kit serves two, and I think it shakes out to $11 per person on the subscription. We’re trying to do things that are affordable. We still offer the full menu for carryout, and dining in-house with limited capacity for people who are still going out.
All the well-known festivals Cedarburg is known for, Wine & Harvest, Strawberry Fest, were canceled. People are still coming up, but definitely less than previous years.
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