Kyle Nabilcy
A silver container holding french fries and a highly stacked club sandwich topped with a two pickles in an almost sculptural arrangement.
The highly stacked Nashville Hot Chicken club sandwich.
If there’s one thing that can be counted on in the world of craft brewing, it’s the unrepentant embrace of puns, pop culture references, and in-jokes. The Borough Beer Co. & Kitchen has been open for the last year on the ground floor of an apartment building — The Dude Abodes — named for a line from The Big Lebowski for crying out loud. The possibilities are right there.
And yet! Borough resists seizing those goofy coattails, barely deploying a hint of wordplay in its beer names. There isn’t even a White Russian on the cocktail menu.
Patrons will find a menu of comfort food classics and New American standards, with an emphasis on sandwiches and tacos. If there isn’t something on the menu that appeals to you, frankly, that’s probably a you thing.
The menu starts with more than a dozen starters and shareables. Cheese curds are a taproom fait accompli, but here they’re advertised as hand-breaded, which is a nice touch. Cauliflower “wings” coated in a sticky house buffalo sauce were a standout, some of the most satisfying fried veggies I’ve had recently.
Borough’s deep fryers get the workout you’d expect. Crunching through the batter of crispy fish tacos or the impressive verticality of a Nashville hot chicken club sandwich was a pleasant experience, but some dishes were missing a flavor element — bland chipotle crema on the tacos, and minimal heat on what should have been spicy fried chicken. The choice to place a slice of American cheese over the chicken further dulled the spice. Not a sad-wich, but a confused one, and short of its full promise of being either Nashville hot or a proper club.
For a brewery menu, there are a lot of big swings at culinary composition. House smoked olives, speckled with a little chili flake, are a simple and classy starter, up to and including being pre-pitted; no date night should have to feature the goofy faces we make when we nibble around an olive pit. Olives feature in the brunch menu’s chorizo-focused Spanish scramble, too, though more smoke or heat would be welcome.
A fairly standard cheeseburger didn’t lure me in quite like the brisket burger with its creamed leeks and fig barbecue sauce. Two different cheeses, three different vegetables — there’s a lot going on, and some of it gets lost (arugula? provolone?), but the sauce is blessedly moderate in its sweetness, and the whole affair came out of the kitchen very fresh in a nicely toasted bun. It might be a little show-offy, and the price is steep, but it’s a big burger with novel components.
Truffle is an ingredient that implies fanciness for some and artificiality for others; I may be among the few who neither craves nor begrudges a truffled-up dish, and the truffle mac and cheese delivers exactly what you should be expecting from it. Big time truffley funk, moderate cheesiness, and welcome texture from the toasty bread crumbs.
Texture was a missing feature in the brunch menu’s breakfast bread pudding, an otherwise rich and flavorful cube of creamy bread pudding baked in a large pan and sliced to serve. A little torching on those cut surfaces would’ve done marvels. And a side of maple glazed bacon was floppy rather than crisp. In a woefully thin lunch BLT, the “crisp” bacon was still not quite that.
On a final visit I tried the carnitas tacos, and was thrilled to be served almost perfectly to-style traditional tacos: corn tortilla (two would be great but one will do) and a generous portion of shredded pork, a handful of cilantro and a lime wedge. I ordered the sauces on the side, and tasting them, I felt that they were indeed the liability, a case of subtraction by addition. But even with some other components (onions, cotija) unintentionally missing from my order, these were excellent tacos.
Borough brews its beers at Delta Beer Lab, and while there’s no firm timeline for moving production in-house, it’s a good value-add to have three or four house beers to pair with your meal. The pilsner and hazy IPA are fine choices; the apricot-infused hazy IPA brewed for Borough’s recent first birthday is the most flavorful option. If you’re not into beer, the old fashioned program is broad and ambitious.
Since Rockhound Brewing’s closure in this space in late 2020, the Madison brewery scene has witnessed some surprising upheaval. Borough’s cautious start with its brewing program seems to have given them license to really put the kitchen to the test, and with more than a few clear successes. For a brewery named for Madison’s neighborhoody identity, a small and earnest operation like Borough really ties the room together.
The Borough Beer Co. & Kitchen
444 S. Park St.
608-467-2843; theboroughmadison.com
11 a.m.-10 p.m. Tues.-Thurs., 11 a.m.-midnight Fri., 9 a.m.-midnight Sat., 9 a.m.-10 p.m. Sun.
$10-$17
[Editor's note: the photo caption has been edited to reflect this is the Nashville Hot Chicken club sandwich.]
