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Sharon Vanorny
MACN Week: Nostrano at Madison
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Sharon Vanorny
MACN Week: Nostrano at Marigold
It was a food-a-palooza this past seven days during MACN Week, March 9-15. It was the first year for MACN Week and just the second event put on by the Madison Area Chefs Network.
The collaborative-minded dine-athon involved over 30 chefs, and marked a coming-of-age for Madison's culinary scene.
The chef-driven series of happenings was unique, offered by chefs as a way for them to commingle, get creative and have fun. Diners benefited, certainly.
"It was a great experience to work with everyone else and their staffs," says chef Daniel Bonanno of A Pig in a Fur Coat. "It's crazy to hand your restaurant over to another team, but everyone embraced it and got along."
Bonanno thinks that the week wasn't good just for chefs but "great for the whole restaurant, for cooks, servers, dishwashers. Everyone got to experience something different, serve something different, see different techniques."
Specific events ran the gamut from formal wine dinners to late-night popups, full kitchen takeovers and even a dance party on Thursday night. It might have been overload for some Madison diners and their pocketbooks (many dinners were in the $70-$100 range) to take in all at once. While a few events were canceled and a few were poorly attended, the response from the dining public was overwhelmingly positive. So successful, in fact, that food tended to run out fast.
The Chicken Wing Smackdown at the Great Dane on Wednesday sold out of 80 pounds of bird in a little over an hour. Likewise Thursday's taco collaborations at Salvatore's Tomato Pies were gone in a drop of a fork.
Because there was so much happening, social media became the place to share. Pictures on Instagram (hashtag #macnweek) showed the elegant dinner Tory Miller presented at Forequarter, the dishes from Monday evening's so-called "BFF dinner" at L'Etoile, A Pig in a Fur Coat's Dan Bonnano's dinner at Grampa's Pizzeria on Tuesday, Merchant chef Anna Dickson's dinner at Natt Spil on Wednesday, Underground Food Collective's dessert takeover at Sujeo on Friday, and much more.
A highlight of the week -- with both a collaborative and nostalgic bent -- was the re-creation of the greatest hits of the Restaurant Magnus menu, circa the mid-1990s. For a night, dinners could once again taste the famous chimichurri and batidas. Held at Nostrano, the initial two nights sold out, and a third evening was added.
The thrill -- and pure joy -- in chefs collaborating with each other over food was demonstrated in dessert-maestro Elizabeth Dahl's pie and quiche takeover at Marigold Kitchen on Pi Day, March 14. Also in on the brunch were Marigold's Phillip Hurley and John Gadau and Dahl's chef husband, Tim.
Five kinds of fruit pies (rhubarb, cherry, peach-blueberry, apple, bourbon pecan) were on offer, and the fruit had all been sourced locally and then frozen. "It's so cool that we could get all this local stuff this early in spring," Dahl says. "And this gave us an opportunity to do something that we love but don't normally get to do."
MACN Week's culminating get-together, a "potluck" featuring dishes from many of the participating chefs (and there was plenty of food to go around). The ticketed event, a fundraiser for the Second Harvest Food Bank of Southern Wisconsin, was held at a packed Sardine, with diners making the rounds to stations from Layla's Persian Food, Forequarter, L'Etoile, Johnny Delmonico's, Heritage Tavern, Restaurant Muramoto, and Salvatore's Tomato Pies among others. The format was "small plate," though servings were generous. Favorites included playful high-end versions of middle-American casserole favorites like the Frito Pie from Tory Miller and an organic Tater Tot casserole from Anna Dickson.
And now that the week is over, the votes have been tallied in the bagel sandwich contest dreamed up by Gotham Bagels owner Joseph Gaglio. Twelve chefs contributed sandwiches; diners voted with their purchases. The sandwich that got the most sales won for its chef-creator a weekend trip to New York City.
"For most of the week it was a heated race between Shinji Muramoto and Dan Fox," Gaglio reports, with Tory Miller's "In Love With the Ko-Ko" also very competitive. Despite a strong weekend run for chef Dave Heide's "Fix Bourbon Street Hangover Bagel," it was Fox's ham-and-gouda "Old Fashioned" bagel sandwich that bested Muramoto's Tibetan-inflected "Chomolunga" sandwich.
Expect some of the MACN Week sandwiches to find their way to the regular Gotham menu.
Gaglio reports that lines out the door, noontimes, were a little hard on his staff -- but that several of the participating chefs actually volunteered to pitch in to help. "That kind of love is really about the cameraderie, not competition," says Gaglio.
Such food moments, born of creativity and collaboration rather than competition, were at the heart of the extraordinary inaugural MACN Week. It has underscored better than any other event yet that Madison is an increasingly sophisticated dining destination.
