Getto's Top 30
Red meat, great treats and more
By DENNIS R. GETTO
Posted: June 7, 2007

Of the four new restaurants that appear on this annual list of Milwaukee's best eating establishments, two have the word "grill" in their names, a third beckons with a carnivore-friendly name, and a fourth has built a reputation for great slabs of red meat cooked to order.
Together, they show that more of Milwaukee's elite restaurants are stepping up to satisfy the area's seemingly insatiable appetite for steak.

Over 22 years of assembling the top 30 (originally top 25), I've watched the number of steakhouses making the cut
grow steadily.

The newcomers are the Mason Street Grill, Jackson Grill, Carnevor and the Savoy Room.

Carnevor and a returning top 30 restaurant, Dream Dance, are even betting that some Milwaukeeans are so intoxicated by the taste of steak they will be willing to shell out $140 to $160 for the privilege of eating true Kobe steaks from Japan, which are considered the world's best. (See story on 14E.)

But not all of the restaurants on this list are steak establishments. French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Cuban and American cuisines are all represented. And for those interested in vegetarian dishes and organic foods, two restaurants - Roots and Barossa - both serve dishes guaranteed to satisfy.

All of these restaurants have been accorded a full review within the last 18 months, some very recently. All earned at least 3 stars, many 3½ or even 4. In addition to their ratings, each of these 30 restaurants has distinguished itself with a high quality of both food and service.

For this annual listing, I've compiled capsulized descriptions with busy readers in mind. While strict dress codes are a thing of the past in even the most elegant establishments, I've tried to offer apparel guidelines based on how patrons in each restaurant typically dress.

I also provide details about outdoor dining (where it exists), and the quality and nature of each restaurant's wine offerings.

Once I compiled the list, I looked it over to determine distinctive aspects of each restaurant - the view, the atmosphere, the food - to provide diners with a clearer picture of their choices.

My ultimate goal is to guide you to those places where your meal will transcend mere eating and become an experience you and your companions will remember for years.

SO REFINED
Bacchus
In the Cudahy Towers,925 E. Wells St.
(414) 765-1166
www.bacchusmke.com

What makes it great: World-class food and service and one of the best wine lists in the state.

What to wear: This is definitely a dress-up place; whatever you put on should have a designer label.

A great spot for: That special-occasion meal that you want everyone to remember for the rest of their lives.

You might not notice, but the glassed-in conservatory was first designed, built and assembled in England, then disassembled and shipped to a firm in Chicago, which brought it to Milwaukee and assembled it.

Outdoor dining: Lunch is served in the conservatory five days a week.

Wine list: Draws from the entire world, with whites and reds from all of the major wine-producing regions of the world.

Hours: Lunch 11:30 a.m.-2 p.m. Monday-Friday; dinner 5:30-9 p.m. Monday-Thursday; 5:30-10 p.m. Friday-Saturday; 5-8 p.m. Sunday.

Prices: $21-$45.

Credit cards: All major.

Reservations: Recommended.

Shepard Express
Bartolotta's Best
The view from Bacchus
July 05, 2007

Food, atmosphere and service are the three keys to a truly good restaurant. Few places are able to excel at all of them. One that does is Bacchus, which I consider to be the finest in the Bartolotta Restaurant Group. It benefits from a prime location on the ground floor of the Cudahy Tower, where the wood-paneled lobby presents the solid feel of old money.

While warm brown tones predominate in Bacchus' front bar, the main dining room lightens up considerably with off-white walls and spacious booths and tables. An impressive wine collection, displayed behind glass, fills one wall. Last year another amenity was added: an outdoor terrace converted to a glassed-in sunroom with wide wicker chairs. This is the perfect place for views of Lake Park and the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Bacchus' executive chef, Adam Siegel, holds the same job title at the Lake Park Bistro. Recently, Siegel was a James Beard Foundation finalist for "Best Chef: Midwest," an impressive accomplishment. Bacchus' menu allows his creativity to flow. The theme is contemporary American with seafood and meat entrees, including a selection of steaks. The lunch menu adds sandwiches and pastas.

Crab cakes seem to be on every menu lately, but Bacchus' lump crab cakes ($12) depart from the norm. The three cakes are the size of jumbo sea scallops, meaty but with small, diced pieces of vegetable to add some crunch. A few dollops of spicy aioli pack a jolt of hot pepper—a good touch on crab cake. A citrus salad is on the side with frisee, oranges and pink grapefruit. The orange tames the slight bitterness of the frisee, putting everything in balance. At dinner there is tuna tartare ($12), raw tuna layered over a bed of chopped cucumber with a hint of rice vinegar. Crispy won tons add texture and wasabi tobiko caviar injects vivid hues of green as well as a pungent shot of horseradish.

Although soups change daily, the lobster cream soup is often available. The pieces of meat are tiny, but the luxuriant, buttery broth is abundant with lobster flavor. The roasted beet and goat cheese salad ($8) has been slightly altered from its previous incarnation. Arugula is substituted for mesclun greens, and the new vinegar is aged sherry. The roasted red beets still work with these updates.
Rarely encountered locally, barramundi is an Australian fish living in both fresh and brackish water. The flesh is firm, much like Chilean sea bass, but a hint sweeter. At Bacchus the wild barramundi is sautéed ($26). How does a fish shipped from Australia retain freshness? The answer: very well. A slice of the fish is placed over a bed of fennel with artichoke hearts and bits of carrot and onion in another skillful preparation.

Bacchus has it all, from the soothing dining room to the inviting sunroom. The accommodating service, much improved from the restaurant's early days, is the best in the city. How many restaurants replace flatware at every course? The menu has depth, the ingredients are fresh and the preparations are confident. Don't be surprised if Adam Siegel is a James Beard finalist again in 2008.

- Journal Sentinal

Bacchus aims for, reaches stars
By Dennis R. Getto
Journal Sentinel dining critic
Published: May 21, 2004


I watched as my dining companion spooned up her first bite of chocolate-hazelnut mousse cake ($8.50) at the new Bacchus restaurant.

She closed her eyes for a moment and smiled.

"You're not going to believe this," she said.

"I'm not much of a chocoholic," I told her.

"You won't say that after you've tried this," she answered.

So I took one small spoonful from the cake as its dark filling - made with Valrhona chocolate from France - softly oozed out onto the plate. I lifted it to my lips.

The restaurant, which is named after the Roman god of wine and revelry, stocks 230 wines.

It tasted rich, round and not at all bitter, like something that had soaked up the flavors of rich earth and tropical sunshine. And for once I understood why people make so much noise about good chocolate.

It wasn't enough to make me abandon my Coconut Bavarian Cream ($7), a lighter dessert made silky by the addition of gelatin to a cream-and-coconut mixture. But it deepened my appreciation of the overall quality of both the food and experience of Milwaukee's newest elegant restaurant.

Named after the Roman god of wine and revelry, Bacchus is a 160-seat, sleek restaurant that replaced the long-revered Boulevard Inn on the first floor of the Cudahy Towers. With its 1940s dark wood trim and shiny hardwood floors, it may be the biggest undertaking yet for Joe Bartolotta, the man who heads the Bartolotta Restaurant Group. The other restaurants in the group are Lake Park Bistro, Ristorante Bartolotta, Mr. B's Steakhouse and Pizzeria Piccola.

This is a top-dollar destination. While main courses at the new Bacchus come with bread, vegetables and a starch, the rest of the menu is a la carte. A meal that includes an appetizer, a main course, a dessert and a glass of wine (Bacchus stocks 230) could cost as much as $75 per person.

But there is an alternative: Bacchus offers a prix fixe three-course dinner that delivers a soup or salad, a choice of one of three entrees and choice of one of three desserts for $32. I sampled a couple of the dishes that could have been part of that three-course meal and found them just as good as the dishes that were not on the prix fixe list.

So is it worth it?

After two recent dinners at the new restaurant, my answer is a resounding yes. Almost everything at both meals, from the first bite of asparagus and lobster soup ($9.50) to the last lick of luscious chocolate mousse cake, was outstanding.

Here are some details: These days, with many diners concentrating on reduced calories for their waists and healthy oils for their hearts, many restaurants offer salmon. I just wish more of them would send their cooks to Bacchus to taste salmon as it should be done - lightly browned in olive oil and slightly crisp on the outside, creamy and warm, but not dry on the inside. Its rich flavor tasted as if the fish had just been brought in from the water. Fresh artichokes and shiitake mushrooms had given their flavors to a white wine sauce that gave the fish an even more complex taste.

My dining companion and I might never have known what "day boat" halibut was if we hadn't seen it on the Bacchus menu and asked our server about it. Many halibut fishermen, she explained, take their boats out for days and keep their catch on ice on the boat until they return to port. Day-boat fishermen return to port each night and get their fish into commercial channels immediately. The result is fresher fish on the restaurant table.

That fresh fish ($26.50) had been roasted, and then served in an equally fresh vegetable broth made with asparagus, spring onions and carrots. The broth tasted as delicate as the perfectly cooked halibut and the fresh leaves of spinach that had been seared and served on the side along with baked fingerling potatoes and sauteed oyster mushrooms.

In the meat department, a "steakhouse cut" New York strip steak ($29.50) had been cut horizontally along the bone of the loin to ensure a more tender slice of beef. Tender it was. This was one of the softest and most flavorful New York strips I've eaten - slightly firm and full of earthy flavor. Ordered medium, it had been done to a perfect warm pink center, drizzled with a fresh peppercorn sauce and served with sauteed Swiss chard and expertly made au gratin potatoes.

Rack of lamb ($29) was of the same impeccable quality. Like the beef, it had been perfectly roasted so that it remained moist, firm and full of the restrained flavor that lamb lovers cherish. That wonderful mild flavor was accented by a roasted garlic-thyme sauce. A baked polenta cake and slightly sweet, aromatic caramelized onions and carrots rounded out the plate.

Appetizers engaged us as much as our entrees. The most extraordinary, a baked custard called a Parmigiano Cheese Royale ($12.50), brimmed with the flavor of fine imported cheese. Spring peas, dainty asparagus tips and slowly cooked ramps (an onion-like vegetable that grows wild in the eastern United States) bathed the rich custard with the flavor of spring.

A Maine lobster salad ($17) had at its heart a small, tender chilled sweet lobster tail with a rich seafood cream sauce and crunchy radish sprouts and other tiny greens on top.

More lobster, flaked out of the shell, lay at the heart of a spring asparagus soup ($9.50). Our server brought a large, shallow porcelain bowl to our table with the lump of lobster in the middle, and then poured the warm, silky asparagus soup around it. The result was a rich spring celebration that combined the best of the vegetable and seafood worlds.

A roasted beet salad ($8) looked like something from a glossy food magazine - thinly sliced yellow and red beets circled creamy goat cheese and mesclun greens. Small drops of balsamic vinegar dressing dotted the plate.

One dish, a buttermilk blue cheese salad of frisee with walnuts, walnut vinaigrette and Serrano ham ($8) delivered the only disappointment of the two meals. Someone in the kitchen had used large-crystal sea salt on it. When we bit into those crystals, they made the salad unpleasantly salty.

Those two earlier-mentioned desserts put a sumptuous finish on our meal as did a napoleon of fresh strawberries ($8) - three crisp cracker-like sheets of sweet pastry separated by fresh strawberries and sweetened whipped cream.

Almost as important as the food at Bacchus was its superior level of service. My bread plate was never empty more than a moment before a server came up to offer my choice of French, olive-rosemary or raisin-walnut rolls. Another kept water glasses filled without our having to ask. Empty wine glasses and plates disappeared at just the right moments.

Yet with all that service, no one hovered - I never felt pressed to speed up or order another drink. As my friend and I walked out to the parking area, the attendant asked us what we'd had for dinner.

My friend, still entranced from her dessert, said one word - chocolate.

"Isn't it great?" the attendant added. "Later at night, we get some people who come into the bar just for dessert and a glass of wine."

I intend to keep that in mind the next time I come downtown for a show.