Susan Smith: Capitol Square restaurant serves an Old Fashioned good time

Originally published July 27, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

MADISON – Doug Griffin can’t recall his first brandy old fashioned.

“No. No, I guess I can’t,’’ he said. “I have enjoyed them very much over the years.”

He won’t forget the 100,000th. Not his personal 100 grand of brandy, mind you. No this was the 100,000th served by the namesake restaurant, The Old Fashioned, which opened in 2005 on the East Side of Madison’s Capitol Square,

Griffin and Kevin Kiley, his pal from their days at Green Bay’s Notre Dame High School, and half the town, it seemed, crammed into the noisy bar on a hot July night, urged on by $1.50 Korbel brandy old fashioneds.

General manger Jen De Bolt and her staff glistened with perspiration as they muddled sugar and bitters, splashed in the brandy and soda, and speared cherries and oranges like they were on an assembly line. As the brandy went down the hatch, the noise level in the bar soared, a natural consequence of mixing Cheeseheads with brandy.

The bar wound up serving 761 old fashioneds during the three-hour special and another 145 afterward. Not so unusual, really.

“We sell the most Korbel brandy of any restaurant in the state,’’ said De Bolt. So much that the president of Korbel paid the bar a personal visit back in January. (There were $1 old fashioneds that night to celebrate, but since there was a blizzard raging, they only sold about 300.)

The Old Fashioned restaurant is a tribute to all things Wisconsin. From the old Blatz beer signs on the wall to the Green Bay Packers souvenir bourbon decanters behind the bar, to the menu, where you’ll find the wares of Wisconsin’s small food companies.

You can dine on natural casing hot dogs from Salmon’s Meat Market in Kewaunee, or on crusty hard rolls from Sheboygan’s Highway bakery. Appetizer choices range from smoked chubs from Charlie’s Smokehouse near the tip of Door County, to landjaeger sausage from New Glarus to cheese from the Fayette Creamery in Darlington. For color, add some Bea’s picked beets, and wash it down with the neon colored sodas from Seymour.

For co-owner Tami Lax, the menu is a way of preserving the foods she grew up eating in Green Bay. When she moved to Madison, she’d return from a visit home with a cooler packed with bacon, braunschweiger, and cheese. If she loved these things, she figured, so would others. And she’d be keeping the distinct flavors of Wisconsin alive.

“Some of these things are going extinct because our tastes are becoming more narrow,’’ she said. “You save them by eating them. We can keep Seymour Bottling in business by buying hundreds of cases of their sodas.”

And, thanks to dedicated customers such as Griffin, who says he “got here early and parked my keister on a stool” to wait for the special, they’re doing their part for brandy, too.

PHOTO INFORMATION: While people elsewhere might mix an old fashioned with whiskey, every good Wisconsinite knows it’s really made with brandy./PHOTO by Brent Nicastro