My favorite restaurant is in Madison fucking Wisconsin
400 restaurants in 42 cities in 12 months–why Mint Mark was my favorite
Over the course of the year, I went to Mint Mark as a reset point when I felt like food in other places had failed to make me feel anything, surprise me, or inspire me.
After a two week roadtrip in October with bad biscuit after bad biscuit, I headed out of Louisville early betting I could make it to Chicago by nightfall so that in the morning I could drive to Mint Mark. A multi-step process to just, ya know, eat somewhere I loved. Or–I had a reservation at a Michelin starred restaurant in Chicago in December and even though it meant I had to eat the prepaid menu cost, I couldn’t stand going to another restaurant with white table clothes that served me teeny tiny dishes with no soul for the second night in a row.
So I peeled out of Chicago in the frigid cold to go to Mint Mark, leaving behind a restaurant everyone thought was gorgeous and I think is probably just okay.
A man sat next to me at the bar and ordered the biscuit (a standard) and a hot toddy–because it is cold, he said, and because these are things that remind him of comfort. He had plans. They fell through. He lives down the street. He knows the bartenders. So–he came.
He tried to describe the biscuit to one of them–and why he likes it even though he hates biscuits. “It’s because it’s not flakey,” I said without looking up. “It’s because it is like cake. It’s like dessert.”
“Ahhhh,” the three of them said together.
I am not always good at describing food in great detail, but this, I can do: I can tell you, maybe, why you like something, and if you give me enough information about other things you enjoy eating, I can give you a restaurant recommendation in almost any city.
“Why are you here,” he asked.
“I’m bored,” I said. I didn’t mean like this night, I meant like in general.
The night before, I was itching to get out of somewhere, so hungry by the end of the night that I went to get pizza with a dear chef friend in an evening gown.
Food is a huge part of my soul, always had been, but in 2023 it solidified and gelled inside me in a way it hadn’t before. I was on a mission to find beautiful food–and myself–and I thought I would find those things in certain kinds of restaurants (really fancy ones). I ended up finding it in other places, mostly neighborhood joints with ex-fine-dining chefs. If I feel lost within the walls of restaurants where I am eating, if I don’t believe in the restaurants I am going to, I feel a kind of sadness that few people understand–mostly industry folks, or writers. I don’t eat for sustenance–I eat to feel something. And if I feel that for too long? I go to Madison fucking Wisconsin.
Sitting at the bar at Mint Mark and splitting both desserts with the guy next to me who I did not know, I felt something I feel every time I go into Mint Mark: magic.
When I tell people that my favorite restaurant in the country is in Madison, WI, I am usually met with a face I can only describe as you telling someone about a kink you have that they’ve never heard of before. “What,” they’ll say, “Madison?”
They say this because in 2023, I ate at almost 400 restaurants in 42 cities with significant swaths of those being JBF and Michelin winners. They say it because I am hard on restaurants, disliking many highly acclaimed places other people love, mostly because I think they are recycling old dishes and doing the same shit everyone is doing. So the idea that a woman who is incredibly hard on restaurants, who has never (not once!) thought a meal at a restaurant with three Michelin stars was all that special thinks a restaurant in Madison fucking Wisconsin is up there with the best of the best? It surprises people. But it’s true–it’s here.
And while Mint Mark took me by surprise, it doesn’t surprise me that my favorite restaurant is in Madison. My second favorite bread in the country is there, too, (Madison Sourdough), my favorite donuts are here (Greenbush) and my favorite egg roll (Ahan).
If you get your ass off the coast and out of the major cities long enough, you realize that something is happening in the Midwest right now that is incredibly special.
While menus that follow the seasons and change over more than once a week are dying on the coasts and being replaced by drinking broth/caviar/milk bread with foraged herb butter from Chef Matt’s backyard/Hudson Valley foie gras/maitake in maitake broth with maitake foam/a cut of Wagyu so small that it that makes the cow roll over in their grave/truffle carbon copies, etc… somehow, here, chefs are still determined to make those kinds of restaurants work. Not for fancy people in fancy outfits with fancy jobs who got up at midnight to snag a fancy reservation, but for you.
My first time walking into Mint Mark was on the heels of being at another (acclaimed) Madison restaurant that left me starving. I didn’t mean to go to Mint Mark. It wasn’t on my list.
It was the summer of carrot pasta. I’ve written about carrot pasta, more in depth in my love letter to the bar at Martina. But when I saw carrot pasta on the menu at Mint Mark, I still had not had a carrot pasta that I liked–yet.
Each one was bad, and I ordered them like it was a sport, planning to release a list of the power rankings of bad carrot pasta around the country. Most carrot pasta is sweet in a way that is confusing. It tastes like soup someone poured over pasta. And often the cheese choice in the sauce was dissonant to the rest of the flavors.
At Mint Mark, the pasta was the first thing to hit my table and as soon as I put it into my mouth, I said, “What?” Look, people who have been my friends for a long time, and people who have followed me for a long time, and my favorite bartenders know that the more pissed I look and sound eating the food, the happier I am. But this bartender didn’t know that. He asked me if everything was OK.
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s perfect.”
I ordered another one before I was finished. Look–I don’t want carrot pasta in a menu of other options. But I wanted to understand what made this pasta good and made other carrot pastas bad. It was the level of salt, the underplay of acid (most carrot pastas lean into lemon in a superbly confusing way), and it was the herbs.
Me saying, “What?” was me saying that the pasta surprised me in a way that threw me back. It was me saying the pasta made me feel some thing that I hadn’t felt before.
Look–it’s hard to make me feel anything about food anymore and I grieve that. I grieve going into a restaurant and eating something average and being blown away, but if you serve me something average or derivative now, I can clock it. The beautiful thing about that is that I can also clock perfect. I can also block brilliant. I can also clock new. I can also clock food that you should eat. After eating the same bad carrot pasta dish after same bad carrot pasta dish at every single restaurant that had one for sport, I somehow ended up in a restaurant I didn’t intend to go to and found the first good version of that dish. Not in New York. Not in Chicago. Not in Atlanta. In Madison fucking Wisconsin.
Immediately, Mint Mark took my breath away. I went from hungry and grumpy to inspired and feeling alive eating a dish I was dead set on hating.
But at that point, I knew nothing about Mint Mark. I had no idea that this dish was probably not concepted to death in a back kitchen over months or years but thrown together by Chef Sean Pharr and his team the same way most dishes are thrown together: in the way of old neighborhood joints, where the menu changed almost nightly with a small selection of always on the menu staples.
I hadn’t yet watched Mint Mark’s menu change over every night from afar on my laptop, jaw dropping in disbelief at the way they moved deeply inspired dishes on and off the menu with rarely a miss. I didn’t know yet that this dish was here today gone tomorrow. I just thought it was a good dish.
The magic of Mint Mark is that when you look at the menu daily over a long period of time (I did—I set an alarm for 6pm every night for 6 months), you watch the menu change rapidly and with a micro-seasonality we hardly ever see see—meaning you get to see baby beets all the way to pickled beets on a menu in a way that shows intention for the seasons. Mint Mark does this in a way that I think is Midwestern in the best way—like we have always been people who can things or have the potatoes in the basement. Like we have enough to last to spring.
Maybe you think most farm to table spots are doing it that way—but I’m here to tell you most of them are not. Most farm to table spots are changing their menus once a month with a couple of specials or once a quarter so you’re eating things that definitely are no longer local, and calling that seasonal, while Mint Mark appears to be getting boxes full of the freshest things and figuring it out like a goddamn CSA. Mint Mark’s menu doesn’t change every week. It changes daily.
I have something to say about over concepted restaurants designed for Instagram: most of them suck.
Last year at Matsu in Oceanside I sat at a table with a spotlight over the table and ate what I can only describe as an entire bouquet of flowers. Were they the most beautiful plates I are in 2023? Yeah. They were also some of the worst.
I have similar complaints about lots of tasting menus (and I love tasting menus!!) where the dishes feel over edited the same way writing or music can be, where it’s so perfect it is nearly soulless. You can just see the vision of the chef is perfection and they miss it because perfection in food is something like this: in the middle of service, Mads Rufslands putting an entire tin of caviar on a sweet potato and saying, “Fuck it, ship it,” sending that dish out to a table totally untried, totally untested, just on the sheer faith that it is going to be very good because the kitchen team is very good.
Mint Mark has that attitude. I call it audacity. If I tell you that I think a restaurant is audacious, it’s not an insult, it’s a compliment.
So many dishes that Mint Mark puts up shouldn’t work. So many of those dishes would fall flat at other restaurants, no matter how long they concepted them, because so much of why Mint Mark is perfect is because they have learned how to make their “good enough to land on the menu” excellent every single time. In other kitchens, sous chefs are sent back and back and back to rethink a dish until the dish is fucking dead. That’s not how it works here—you can feel it.
I think that restaurants that over concept their dishes do themselves a disservice in that they are now used to always having tons of time to prepare a dish with lots of edits, meaning that a first draft is just okay—because you have a net. Restaurants that move through dishes rapidly teach the chefs in their kitchens to execute well the first time. You can feel when restaurants operate that way, because they take more risks, and the chefs that come out of them open killer restaurants because they’ve trained on dish after dish after dish after dish—not 12 a season. They don’t have to think about the rounds and rounds of edits on a dish—they can put something up that’s a little bit wild and maybe it will make the menu or maybe it won’t.
That’s how Mint Mark winds up with dish that I affectionately named Pumpkin Spice Pasta, a dish that isn’t within my taste profile (I don’t like pumpkin or squash pasta all that much). The name I gave it is a misnomer. It doesn’t have pumpkin in it, just the spice. It was called sugo and it was butternut squash, madeira, feta, gingersnap and cinnamon. The pasta came drenched in the gingersnap and cinnamon. It was blanketed in it, in a way that I thought it probably was going to overpower it, that it probably wasn’t that good. But it was, somehow, remarkably good. Not just good but excellent, thought provoking, and audacious. That dish was served alongside a simple ravioli in butter sauce so good that me and my dining companion (who had never been in a restaurant like this and was audibly responding to every dish) ordered a second one. Both of these dishes feel organic, like of course in any kitchen there is editing, but they feel like someone let them ride without over editing.
In another world Pumpkin Spice Pasta would come with less spice on top for refinement or someone might say, “The ravioli needs something to stand up next to our other weird pasta,” but in this restaurant, they were (correctly) left to rock.
This kind of attitude is how Mint Mark ends up with creative dishes–I think that everyone in the kitchen is probably encouraged to dream big. Things like leek fonduta, carrot bolognese served with carrot top salsa verde, and heirloom tomatoes served with whipped beef fat are dishes you might expect to find in restaurants with white table cloths with small portions and stuffy service for like $35 a plate. But they happen here every night for under $20, as the menu changes over with dishes coming on and off almost nightly, so that next week it is almost unrecognizable. Those dishes are served alongside standards like a cheeseburger and a cookie cooked in a skillet (a must, I get it when I eat alone even though it is giant).
In many restaurants, this kind of menu (one with the weird and creative alongside the standard) would feel inconsistent, incoherent, or disjointed.
But at Mint Mark what unites the food is something that goes beyond genre–what unites the food is that I think you can probably hand Chef Sean Pharr and his team a box of anything and they’ll make something beautiful out of it.
And that’s how Mint Mark feels, like it moves with the Midwestern seasons, and like those seasons it is unpredictable.
Mint Mark is changing. Moving to a restaurant with 90ish seats. I went to Mint Mark three nights in a row in the lead up to their temporary closure, because I just had to.
I am not sure yet if this essay is an ode or a eulogy. When Mint Mark moves, change comes with it.
A bigger menu, maybe expanding outside of small plates. A new chef de cuisine (CDC, for shorthand) who must make the menu representative of them, as is their right, as is the joy of chef changeovers. A restaurant twice the size, going from around 40 seats to about 90, with an expanded patio. Other changes I’m sure, that I haven’t heard about by eavesdropping at the bar.
Some of the things that make Mint Mark so special are things that feel, to me at least, only available in the footprint they occupy. Rapid menu rotation, so tight it feels a little bit crowded, hyper seasonality, playfulness, deep knowledge of the regulars in the bar even if they’ve moved hundreds of miles away–these are not things we see in 100 person restaurants most of the time. So I had to go, at least one more time, to eat at this place that holds some of my most fond recent food memories because you just never know when a restaurant starts to change if it will make it work or not.
Even as the end approached, the menu was still rotating, flipping, like they were going out with a bang in their small location—like nothing could stop them.
Restaurants are a brutal business. I have to remind myself that some of my harshest critiques of the most acclaimed restaurants in this country is that they never change–the same menus from the 2010s carried today, sometimes still executed with heart, most often executed with something akin to drone-like precision.
But there is something a little sad about the loss of this restaurant as it is, because unlike lots of restaurants I’ve been to who are changing things up (or aren’t and should), Mint Mark still feels fresh, inspired, and close to perfect.
I’ll be back when they move. You’ll see me standing like I always do at the door, with a deep hope that the things that make me feel most alive still live there, just now… with more space for more people to eat them. I’ll tell you what I think when it reopens, sometime in June, driving to Madison just to eat there—just hoping and hoping and hoping it is still magic.