Food plus fire is fine math at Birch + Butcher
Now and then, a restaurant comes along with a dish so delicious that you want to tell all your friends to go there, especially for that dish, the It dish.
That restaurant right now is Birch + Butcher, and that dish is the whole chicken, roasted on the wood-fired hearth.
Raised at Three Brothers Farm in Oconomowoc, the bird ($36) is spatchcocked, or butterflied, and its meat is juicy, its skin crisp. The seasoning sings. If there is a pantheon of great roast chickens, this bird deserves to be enshrined there.
The platter is served with roasted carrots and smoked tomato butter — the hearth gets a workout here, smoking and roasting all kinds of ingredients.
Hearths have become the focal point of restaurant kitchens across the country, at places like Husk in Charleston and its outposts, and Elske in Chicago. More restaurants around Milwaukee have been cooking with wood-fired ovens, but the multilevel hearth like Birch + Butcher’s is still a novelty here.
Oh, and one more thing about that chicken: Share a side dish of lightly smoked potatoes smashed and fried in lard and served with chile mayonnaise ($8). It goes with chicken like Sunday and supper.
That meal satisfies to the core, as simple as it is.
Chef and co-owner Miles Borghgraef makes it look easy, anyway, although he gives all credit to the farmers for raising delicious birds.
Borghgraef was chef de cuisine at Lake Park Bistro before he opened Birch + Butcher at downtown’s northern edge with Rebecca Zwiefelhofer (the couple married in February).
The restaurant’s name comes from birch trees outside the restaurant off N. Water St. and from the butchering done inside. The meat supplies the kitchen and a small shop in the restaurant.
That shop, open from early morning to night most days, sells coffee, bagels and a few breakfast and lunch sandwiches at the counter. The cases hold foodstuffs like chunks of artisan cheeses, cured sausages from Madison’s Underground Meats, and aged and fresh cuts of beef and pork, for those who’d rather cook their own. I’m inclined to leave it to Borghgraef. Another platter from his kitchen, grilled rib-eye steak with salsa verde and fried potatoes ($42), was fairly glorious: crisp char on emphatically beefy meat, downright luscious.
Slabs of meat and flame fit a stereotype, but vegetable dishes emerge better for having been through fire here, too, as in barbecued parsnips with chile yogurt ($11). Roasting really is the best thing that can happen to a vegetable, I’m convinced of it.
And the kitchen has a deft touch with fish. The skin-on whitefish fillets ($19) and butter-poached steelhead trout ($23) are grilled crunchy-crisp.
Rye crackers, smoked whitefish — Birch + Butcher makes it all from scratch, including baking its breads from natural starter and culturing its own butter.
A program note: The menu says platters, like the chicken and rib-eye, are for two to four diners. The chicken easily feeds four as a main dish; the bone-in rib-eye, at 14 ounces, amounts to a tasting portion for four.
If your endgame is tasting as much as possible, share away. There’s much to try and enjoy at Birch + Butcher, although there were a few dishes that
needed tweaking.
Potato and kraut agnolotti ($15) with bacon and an Alpine-style cheese were undeniably delicious, like Italian pierogi, but the pasta’s seams were tough and the shape not quite right. Risotto made with sunflower seeds instead of rice ($14) wasn’t compelling.
Birch + Butcher’s dining room, cleanlined and stylish; feels as current as the food. The interior echoes the exterior, in a way, in the concrete and in the hearth
reflecting fire pits outside.
Despite the hard surfaces of the room and despite the buzz in this busy restaurant, it’s possible to talk over dinner without shouting. Refreshing.
Look for Carol Deptolla’s restaurant news column, Side Dish, in Friday’s Weekend Tap section and for dining news in Business throughout the week. Contact her at (414) 224-2841, carol.deptolla@jrn.com or on Twitter, @mkediner.