Carolyn Fath
Three Count Beverage Co. serves from its rolling "Barmadillo," a 1956 Airstream trailer.
The portions were generous, the crowd was happy, and the weather was sublime at Sunday’s Yum Yum Fest, which in its second year became arguably the hottest ticket on the summer entertainment calendar.
The Madison Area Chefs Network knows what its consumer base is hungry for, and it knows that there’s room on Madison’s plate for multiple citywide food festivals. The chefs and restaurateurs who make Yum Yum Fest happen are many of the city’s finest: Tory Miller of L’Etoile (and more), Elizabeth and Tim Dahl of Nostrano, Dan Bonanno of A Pig in a Fur Coat, Jonny Hunter of Underground Food Collective, Dan Fox of Heritage Tavern, Patrick De Pula of Salvatore’s Tomato Pies, and more. If my calorie-logged and sun-baked math is correct, a total of 29 restaurants were represented at the event, and the food and drink testified to the culinary acumen on display.
Lines were longest (and this is a festival with a lot of lines, but more on that later) for the duck legs tossed in plum chili sauce from the Coopers Tavern and Sujeo’s beef bulgogi and kimchi rice bowl, and they were long right off the bat. Those duck legs were two to a serving, and not unsubstantial.
Carolyn Fath
Banzo's kubba (left) and Sujeo's bulgogi.
Crowds at Yum Yum Fest are always curious about what food is walking past them, and they find the big plates quickly. I never had the Coopers’ dish (a friend reported that the plum sauce was great), but the Sujeo bulgogi was rich and stanky in all the ways you want kimchi and ssamjang to be. The yolk of my “soft egg” wasn’t exactly soft anymore, but that’s a tough standard to meet when you’re cooking outside and almost to-order. It was still tasty.
One of last year’s runaway hits were the tacos from Salvatore’s Tomato Pies, at that time not quite yet open in its Madison location on East Johnson Street. This year, Sal’s brought game once again, serving a killer fennel-laden hunk of Italian sausage with shishito peppers and peperonata on a little foldable flatbread. It was almost like a sausage and peppers...taco? Great stuff, and a perfect portion size for the event.
Carolyn Fath
Pig in a Fur Coat
Grampa’s Pizzeria served a very full paper boat’s worth of creamy risotto with duck confit and leeks, leafy green flags of popcorn shoots sticking out of the risotto — dare I say insouciantly? Yes, I dare. Banzo’s kubba (Israel’s take on what’s often known as kibbeh) was a slightly oily lamb fritter heavily spiced with cumin. It wasn’t the crazy-go-nuts success of Banzo’s falafel and hummus, but I liked it fine.
Carolyn Fath
Chef Tory Miller serving Sujeo's bulgogi.
A better fried food experience was found at the Osteria Papavero booth, with a paper cone of fritto misto — shrimp, calamari, rockfish, potato and zucchini all delicately fried and tossed in with a wedge of lime. The platonic ideal of summertime walking-around food.
It wasn’t all the fruits of the sea (a crispy chicken roulade hoagie from Oliver’s tasted great) — but there was definitely an abundance. Sitka Salmon was a sponsor and provided some really excellent fish for a handful of restaurants. Driftless Cafe poached its salmon perfectly; an odd deployment of the modernist cuisine technique of spherification, however, turned tomato puree into tomato “caviar” but didn’t serve its flavor level at all. Sardine successfully juked its regular (and delicious) crab-bacon-rock shrimp cakes into a generous chorizo-shrimp-sweet corn cake, seared crisply and topped with a citrus aioli and that kitchen’s trademark pickled onion garnish. Forequarter’s fried whitefish with apple-kohlrabi slaw and sweet and sour sauce delivered potent mental images of eating at a waterfront fish shack — very fresh.
Carolyn Fath
Undergound's Yum Yum Cup from 2015.
There were drinks, too; Underground’s Yum Yum Cup cocktail riffed on the traditional Pimm’s Cup with grapefruit juice, ginger, white wine and an adorable tiny Mexican cucumber on the edge of the cup. Ruby Coffee Roasters, from parts just east of Stevens Point, served its Maple Cherry Slammer, made with cold-process coffee, whole milk and Wisconsin’s own maple syrup and cherry juice. I wanted a stronger coffee base, but the concoction was sweet without overdoing it.
Other than the cookies that musical headliner Lizzo tossed to the crowd during her set, the dessert that drew most of my attention was the maple gelato from Nostrano. Tim and Elizabeth Dahl worked their booth in tandem, one scooping smooth, sweet gelato and the other garnishing it with raspberries, cocoa nib granola and a shard of toasty cinnamon pizzelle. Nostrano never fails to prove its dessert chops.
Kyle Nabilcy
Lizzo’s set was a blast at the end of a glorious afternoon; she had to charm her way through technical difficulties on the DJ kit, and customized a few of her bawdier lyrics for all the kids in the audience. At the end of the party, she thanked the crowd for letting her be herself; “I’m screaming and rolling around on the floor and y’all brought your kids!”
The long, long lines for food and drink tickets at the opening of the event were a greater risk to keeping the kids patient and well-behaved. It seems to me there could be an advance window of time for purchasing sets of these tickets to cut down on the logjam during the festival. It’s not like anyone there was waiting to find out the specific dishes on offer before shelling out for them, anyway.
But this is a quibble. By 7 p.m., only four booths had hung the SOLD OUT sign, and people were still grabbing bites during the beginning of Lizzo’s performance. For food this good, in a setting so ideally summery, people were willing to hang out and wait for the good stuff.
