Culinary Madison

Daisy Cafe and Cupcakery
2827 Atwood Ave
Madison, WI
608-241-2200

Hours:
Cafe Menu: Monday to Friday, 7am to 2pm; Saturday and Sunday, 8am to 3pm
Espresso & Cupcakes: Monday to Friday, 7am to 5pm; Saturday and Sunday, 8am to 5pm

Daisy Cafe and Cupcakery has opened doors on Atwood Avenue, on Madison’s east side.  Located in the building that used to house Bunky’s Cafe (which has reopened in the former Goodman Community Center a couple of blocks away), it is a welcome addition to the neighborhood. Part bakery, part coffeehouse, part cafe, Daisy Cafe fits right in.

As the name suggests, the forte here is cupcakes.  And the cupcakes are great.  But they are not as good as the scones, which have to be some of the best scones offered in the city.  These scones are have the prefect texture, with just a hit of sweetness hidden in with the fruit and nuts.  The subtle icing adds to the taste experience.  Flavors include combinations like dried cranberry and walnut, and raspberry.

But if you go to Daisy for only the bakery, you are missing the interesting and very good menu that they’ve put together to serve to diners for breakfast/brunch and lunch. Stratas are their specialty, and they do their version of this egg casserole very, very well.  We sampled the Chorizo and Pepper Jack Strata, which also contained green onions and red peppers.  A strata is a welcome change from your typical omelet, though if you have a breakfast purist amongst you, they serve omelets as well.

We also tried the Egg Sandwich.  This sandwich had cream cheese, bacon, purple onion and cilantro on grilled rosemary bread.  The bread was high quality, very good bread that stood up to the test of having breakfast ingredients piled between the slices.

Daisy Cafe and Cupcakery also serves lunch items daily.  Meatloaf is their specialty for lunch, and they serve up a plethora of options.  Ground Beef and Bacon, Turkey/Feta/Pesto, Chorizo, and a No-Meat Loaf can be ordered as an entree or as a sandwich.

Other sandwiches available include a pork loin sandwich with pineapple, a grilled Chicken and Onion Chutney sandwich, a “Sloppy Jose” made with Chorizo, and various burgers.

Don’t forget to take a cupcake home.  They take a lot of care in the packaging of their cupcakes, placing them in appropriately outfitted boxes.  Cupcake are iced with butter cream, and include apple with cinnamon cream cheese, banana with chocolate, banana with lemon, carrot with cream cheese, chocolate with blueberry, chocolate with chocolate, chocolate with mocha, lemon with blueberry, lemon with raspberry, lemon with strawberry, vanilla with blueberry, vanilla with chocolate,vanilla with lemon, vanilla with mocha and vanilla with strawberry.

It’s our favorite time of year again!  Madison Restaurant week kicks off on July 26th and runs through July 31st this summer.

Organized by Madison Magazine, the summer Madison Restaurant Week gives you the chance to sample special menus put together by some of the premier restaurants in the area.  We come up with our game plan early and hit as many restaurants as we can.  It’s hard to do, because there are so many tempting options. Restaurants will offer three special, fixed-price, three course menus for just $25 per person (beverages, tax and gratuity not included).

Participating restaurants include:
Blue Marlin
Blue Spoon Cafe*
Bluephies Restaurant & Vodkatorium*
Brocach Irish Pub
Cafe Continental*
Capitol Chophouse*
Captain Bill’s
Dayton Street Grille
Eldorado Grill
Fleming’s Prime Steakhouse & Wine Bar
Fresco
Frida Mexican Grill
Harvest
Inka Heritage
Johnny Delmonico’s
Johnny’s Italian Steakhouse*
La Brioche True Foods
Le Chardonnay
Liliana’s Restaurant
Lombardino’s
Mariner’s Inn
Ocean Grill*
Osteria Papavero*
Quivey’s Grove Stable Grill*
Quivey’s Grove Stone House
Ruth’s Chris
Samba Brazilian Grill
The Continental Fitchburg
The Dardanelles Restaurant*
Zander’s Capitol Grill

* Starred restaraurants also offer a three course lunch for $15/person.

See Madison Magazine for more details!

Liliana’s Restaurant
2951 Triverton Pike
Fitchburg, WI 53711
Phone: 608-442-4444

Hours:

Restaurant
Lunch Monday through Saturday 11am-2:30pm
Jazz Brunch Sunday 10am-2pm
Dinner every day 5pm-9pm

Bar
Sun 10am-2pm, 5pm-9pm
Mon-Thu 11am-10pm
Fri-Sat 11am-Midnight
Happy Hour Mon-Fri 4-6pm

Liliana’s in Fitchburg has introduced a new summer menu.  This menu features  appetizers such as Barbecue Prawns, Shucked Oysters, and Ceviche, salads that include what we believe to be the best salad in town (their Cucumber Watermelon Salad, pictured below), and entrees like Chicken Roulade, Pasta Fresco,  and Pulled Pork Pasta.

In addition to the new menu, be sure to check out their Tuesday Tasting Menu.  They’ve taken a unique approach to what has become a relatively common trend in Madison restaurants.  Each week they offer a unique menu, which is put together by a holding a competition with the chefs.  The best ideas are compiled together for the three course Tuesday Tasting Menu ($30), after which that menu is retired.

Liliana’s also offers music Tuesday through Saturday nights, with no cover charge.  Click the video below to catch a glimpse.

This is the second in a series detailing our recent wine touring trip to Healdsburg, in Sonoma County, California.  Day one can be found here.

Our plan for our second day in the Dry Creek area was to visit the tasting rooms at the northern end of Dry Creek Valley.  These are mostly clustered along Dry Creek Road about 15 to 20 minutes north of Healdsburg.  One of the reasons that we were interested in headquartering our visit in this area was because you literally can’t turn around without encountering an interesting, Zinfandel-producing winery.  This certainly proved to be true on this day.  Rather than trying to write all of the wineries up into an enormous post, we’ve broken each winery into its own post.  You can click on the image of the winery below to read more about each one!

Pedroncelli

Sbragia


Dutcher Crossing Winery

David Coffaro

Bella Vineyards

Preston

Zichichi

Papapietro Perry

Kokomo Winery

F. Teldeschi Winery

With that, we called it a day as we had reservations for Cena Luna.  You can learn a lot listening to the locals.

On the second day of touring the Dry Creek region of Sonoma County, we visited F. Teldeschi Winery.

Our last stop of the day was certainly one of the most interesting.  The Teldeschi’s are an old grape growing family with a long history in the area.  Frank is the fourth generation of the family and the one who started the winery.  He has some unique ideas about producing wines. 

The tasting room is more of an office with a counter in a small building.  A random collection of small bottles sits on a shelf along the back wall.  Part of the philosophy is to never let the wine sit with air above it, so as wine is poured for tasting, the remaining wine is poured into a smaller bottle, a process that is repeated with each tasting.  I don’t know whether this works or not, but the wine was good.  Many of the wines are blends showing the skill of the winemaker.

Wines sampled:
2001 Reserve Zinfandel
2000 Dry Creek Reserve Cinque Terra, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Carignane, Petite Sirah
1999 Terra Nova, Carignane, Valdique, Zinfandel, Petite Sirah
1999 Dry Creek Valley Petite Sirah
2002 Zinfandel Port

On the second day of touring the Dry Creek region of Sonoma County, we visited Kokomo Winery.

This winery was founded by two transplanted midwesterners.  We were greeted at the door by Riley, the winery dog, who while at first showed great interest in us, eventually decided that we were boring.  He showed his boredom by heading to his dog bed behind the counter, falling asleep quickly.

Wines sampled:
2006 Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel
2006 Green Pastures Vineyard Syrah
2006 Dry Creek Valley Cabernet Sauvignon
2006 Cuvee Bela, Sonoma County, 50% Cabernet Franc, 40% Petite Sirah, 10% Cabernet Sauvignon

On the second day of touring the Dry Creek region of Sonoma County, we visited Papapietro Perry Winery.

Papapietro Perry is located in what can only be described as an industrial park for wineries.  Six small wineries have their production facilities clustered together.  With land at a premium in Dry Creek Valley, this makes sense, and doesn’t detract from the wine.  Each winery has it’s own small tasting room. 
As it was getting late in the day and we’d had quite a bit of wine, we only had time to stop at two of them.  The first was Papapietro Perry which was founded by two friends who started out making wine in their garage.  They primarily produce Pinot Noir and Zinfandel with grapes sourced from a number of growers in the Russian River, Dry Creek, and Anderson Valleys.

 Wines sampled:
2006 Pinot Noir, Elsbree Vineyard, Russian River Valley
2007 Pinot Noir, Leras Family Vineyard, Russian River Valley
2006 Zinfandel, Russian River Valley
2005 Zinfandel, Elsbree Vineyard, Russian River Valley

On the second day of touring the Dry Creek region of Sonoma County, we visited Zichichi Family Winery.

In 2000 Steve Zichichi, a doctor from New Orleans and his wife purchased the vineyard and built the winery.  The vineyard is planted in Zinfandel and Petite Sirah with the vines between 40 and 80 years old.  In addition to the wines produced from the vineyard they also make a Cabernet Sauvignon from grapes grown in Napa Valley.  One of the interesting aspects of the tasting was that after we had sampled the wines from the bottle we were also given a barrel tasting of the same wines.

Wines sampled:
2008 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon
2008 Zichichi Estate Petite Sirah
2008 Zichichi Estate Old Vine Zinfandel

On the second day of touring the Dry Creek region of Sonoma County, we visited Preston Vineyards.

The Prestons are proponents of organic farming and are as involved in the making of olive oil and vinegar as they are their wines.  The wines themselves are mostly Rhone varieties and Zinfandel.  The tasting room is in an old farm house at the end of a long winding driveway.  The wines were very good.

Wines sampled:
2007 Barbera
2007 Zinfandel
2006 L. Preston Red, 55% Syrah, 20% Carignane, 20% Mourvedre, 5% Cinsault
2006 Syrah-Sirah, 90% Syrah, 10% Petite Sirah
2006 Petite Sirah

On the second day of touring the Dry Creek region of Sonoma County, we visited Bella Vineyards.

Bella Vineyards is on West Dry Creek Road which is a narrow road running parallel to Dry Creek Road.  One of their claims to fame is a cave tunneled under one of their vineyards that is used for barrel aging wine.  It also contains the tasting room which lets you get into the spirit of things.  They are primarily producers of Zinfandel with some Syrah and Petite Sirah.

They have a very nice picnic area just outside the entrance to the cave.  We had a nice lunch of salami, cheese, and bread with a bottle of the Bella 2006 Dry Creek Zinfandel which they kindly opened for us and lent glasses for.

Wines sampled:
2008 Rose
2006 Sonoma County Syrah
2006 Dry Creek Valley Zinfandel
2006 Belle Canyon Zinfandel
2007 Two Patch Zinfandel
2008 Late Harvest Zinfandel – a nice desert wine