“Chefs are a nomadic tribe,” Milwaukee chef Dave Swanson says with a laugh as he talks about his traveling culinary school, Braise on the Go. For a few years now he has been hauling his portable kitchen to farms and orchards in counties surrounding Milwaukee to serve dinners using local ingredients. But the real reason for heading out to the farms was “connecting people to the farmers.”
I hadn’t been able to make it to one of his events, so when I heard about Braise, his restaurant without wheels, I had my mission: Find out how can he connect with a farmer in the heart of a big city?
On a street corner in Walker’s Point on Milwaukee’s south side, Braise occupies a former tavern and bowling alley. The dining room itself is inviting, with both private and communal tables fashioned from reclaimed bowling lanes, a deep counter — bowling alley wide? — for casual dining facing the kitchen, and Ball jar lamps and strings of lights hanging from the open rafters above. Candles flicker at each table, and across one wall is a collage of food photography and recipes stripped from gourmet magazines that I can imagine may have accumulated in someone’s corner.
The menu changes almost daily depending on what’s in season and what was harvested last weekend. Braise offers small and large plates and even does its own butchery; you can see the latest cuts on the menu under “butcher board.”
I order roasted heirloom tomato soup with cilantro cream, an appetizer of Thai red curry broth with pulled pork, grilled bok choy and shiitake mushrooms, and, for the main event, grilled bison strip loin and boudin blanc with summer squash, spring onions and black-eyed peas in marjoram-garlic broth.
We’re talking about a lot of ingredients here, so I ask the servers if they can tell me where my meal originates. We count 16 collaborating regional farms, fisheries, creameries and brewers represented on the table before me, and three of them just in my cocktail (made with Death’s Door gin from Door County, Wis.).
Cilantro from Springdale Farm in Plymouth, flour from Great River Organic Milling in Fountain City, shiitakes from River Valley Ranch. Everything is Wisconsin in origin, from the cuts of meat right down to the minutiae such as the marjoram, which hails from a place called Dave’s Garden. Hold on. That’s the chef!
With so many sources, one wonders how the kitchen manages to gather it all without a big distributor like Sysco.
The answer to that is the core of the restaurant’s philosophy: RSA, or restaurant supported agriculture. Think of it as something like the CSA model (community supported agriculture). Rather than individuals receiving their weekly supply of vegetables from one farm, RSA is 20 restaurants being stocked by 400 farmers each week. Farmers deliver to a holding center on Milwaukee’s south side, and food moves from there to restaurants in reusable bins.
But not everything comes from outside the city limits. Some of the cheese selections come from Clock Shadow, an urban creamery just five blocks away. Several of the bottles behind the bar, from Great Lakes Distillery, travel twice that far. I order one of Braise’s featured microbrews, Wisconsinite, the latest from Milwaukee’s Lakefront Brewery three miles north of my glass. All the ingredients in the beer are local: the malted barley, the wheat and the hops. That’s not entirely new to Lakefront; they’ve done that before with Local Acre. But Wisconsinite even goes local on the yeast strain.
Farm-to-table menus are all the rage, but the prices can keep the casual diner hesitant. Swanson wanted to create a restaurant where the neighbors could frequently just stroll on over rather than wait for a special occasion.
“Local has had the myth of being elitist. I don’t want to be preachy. That will turn (customers) off no matter how good the food is,” he says.
Braise Restaurant delivers on that promise of getting you as close to the producer as possible. Well, there is one step closer, but chef Dave delivers on that, too, when he hauls his traveling kitchen out into the country to serve meals to bicycling gourmands on his Tour de Farms each fall. Tickets sell out for the September event in a single day in February.
But if you’ve missed the tour, you can always make a reservation to enjoy a different sort of harvest in the heart of Milwaukee.
Braise, 1101 S. Second St., Milwaukee; open Tuesday-Saturday
5 p.m. to close. 414-212-8843; braiselocalfood.com
