Special specials

Working your way through the week, in food

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In Wisconsin, the most famous of the “daily special” dishes is without question the Friday fish fry. This cultural tradition is so ubiquitous that even some Mexican and Indian eateries have Wisco-style fish fries on their menus on Friday.

There’s also the familiar Saturday night given over to prime rib, and the more recent hegemony of Taco Tuesdays.

No round-up of daily specials could exclude our favorite Friday fish haunts. But there are other days of the week and other dishes that deserve a taste. Here are some of the special specials — the ones that might be secret, or that only come out late at night. The ones that don’t have broad cachet or appeal — yet.

THE WEEKEND: BAGELS

People have their favorite Madison bagels, and when a new shop opens or an old one closes, there’s always hubbub. The bagel I love the most comes from a shop that isn’t even primarily a bakery, and serves them only on weekends: Underground Butcher, and in particular its everything bagel.

“When it comes to our bagels,” says Jonny Hunter of Underground Food Collective, which runs Underground Butcher, “I think that we are trying to pull the best parts of Montreal style and New York.” Montreal style is thinner, sweeter, and truly shellacked with seeds. New York style is thicker around, doughier, and better if you like to liberally apply cream cheese without having to aim around the hole in the middle.

Underground Butcher makes sesame, salt, and everything bagels regularly, plus occasional pumpernickel or cheddar varieties. You’ll find them looking all bronzy and beautiful in the shop’s front window, and you should eat them as soon as possible to take advantage of the difference in texture between the outer layer and inner bread.

“When we bake it’s all about the blistering, so we use a really hot oven with a custom installed stone,” Hunter says. Bakery, not a bakery? Does it matter if the bagel is made with passion and skill? Pass me an everything.

MONDAY: SCALLOPED POTATOES AND HAM

Middleton’s Mid Town Pub boasts a whole menu full of pubby favorites. But it’s certainly out-of-the-ordinary to look at the nightly dinner specials and see “Grandma Drury’s Scalloped Potatoes and Ham.” Who says, Let’s go to the bar for scalloped potatoes?

“Yes, it is my Grandma Drury’s recipe,” says Lacey Drury, general manager at the pub. Drury grew up on a dairy farm, and she says her family made the recipe with cream that they drew straight from the bulk tank. That’s a little hard to replicate, of course, so the Mid Town kitchen works with slightly less rustic ingredients.

“The guys do a great job recreating it, not skimping on any of the good stuff,” says Drury. Bulk tank or no, that’s a good start to any week.

And it is really good indeed. A big handful of shredded cheese and green onions are scattered over a big pile of creamy ham and potatoes, and it comes with two pieces of buttery toasted baguette.

TUESDAY: MEATLOAF AND TURKEY

Tuesday has been taken over by tacos, it seems, from coast to coast. But in our neck of the woods, it’s the day to investigate the specials at traditional spots. Nick’s Restaurant on State Street sticks out its sidewalk sandwich board advertising its homemade meatloaf special, which comes either as a sandwich or as a full dinner. Either way there’s a fluffy mountain of mashed potatoes topped with an oniony gravy. The meatloaf is dense, with diced carrot and green pepper, sweetened with a ketchupy glaze. Immensely satisfying.

McFarland’s Green Lantern makes every Tuesday Thanksgiving: They roast bone-in fresh turkeys overnight and shred the meat, serving each plate half white meat, half dark meat, along with dressing, mashed potatoes, gravy and either green beans or corn. Are you going to make this at home on a Tuesday? No. That’s special.

WEDNESDAY: CHEESEBURGERS AND LOOSEMEATS

Hump Day. Time to start looking forward to better days to come. So loosen your tie. Put on comfortable shoes. Take a calming breath, and get messy with a couple of beefy midweek specials at two very different restaurants: Longtable Beer Cafe in Middleton, and the Bar at Estrellón just off State Street.

Never let it be said that Tory Miller isn’t savvy about food trends. Shortly after he opened Estrellón, his Spanish-influenced restaurant, he started quietly serving up what he called his “secret hamburguesa.” He describes it as a mix of In-N-Out’s “animal-style” cheeseburgers and the classic Big Mac, “pretty hard to put down,” and advertised only on Instagram.

“Most of the secret ingredients in our secret sauce will remain secret,” Miller says, “but I can tell you there are Thai chilies in there.” Alongside some very messily dressed papas fritas, this is a 100 percent brisket burger that’s definitely hard to put down, even harder than it is to pick up. Neatly, anyway.

But it isn’t served with its own clean-up spoon. That honor falls on Longtable’s Wednesday-only loose meat sandwich (last seen in Madison at the greatly missed Nifty 50’s on Odana). Loose meat is basically a sloppy Joe without the sauce, a heap of minimally seasoned steamed ground beef on a hamburger bun with optional ketchup, mustard, pickles, onions, and cheese. It’s the province of the state of Iowa, from which Longtable owner Matt Van Nest hails.

Van Nest grew up in Ottumwa, Iowa, and developed his love of loose meat not at Maid-Rite, the statewide loose meat franchise of renown, but at Ottumwa’s Canteen Lunch in the Alley. “Their menu,” Van Nest recalls, “consisted of three items: a ‘Canteen’ (the loose meat burger), hot dog, or egg salad sandwich.” With Longtable’s broader menu, Van Nest was concerned that a loose meat sandwich would be lost among all the other options. Thus, its status as a one-day special.

Longtable’s loose meat sandwich is perfectly simple and satisfying. Van Nest says the tradition at Canteen Lunch was to put in an order for a second after finishing the first, and I have to say, that’s a tempting proposition at the end of a long Wednesday.

THURSDAY: FISH TACOS AND FRIED CHICKEN BISCUITS

Until just recently, my absolute favorite Thursday special would have been the PBR-battered fish tacos at the Tipsy Cow. I rave about them all the time, with minimal prompting. The filets still come with a light, tempura-esque crunch; the slaw is spicy — they’re still worth making plans for.

But there’s a new Thursday contender: the fried chicken biscuit at Mint Mark. Chef Sean Pharr toasts the cut surfaces of the inside of the housemade biscuit and inserts a steaming hot piece of fried chicken. With the addition of bread and butter pickles and a dollop of sweet sauce, you think it’s not going to hold together and, in fact, this is a sandwich you will eat in pieces. I plucked every crumb and nubbin and loose coin of pickle from my plate until it looked like it was licked clean.

FRIDAY: FISH FRY

We exit the week with fish fry destinations. Toby’s Supper Club, for instance — I’ll always carry a torch for the fish there, but also the Roquefort dressing. You can hardly go wrong with Dexter’s, which takes the jitters out of a midweek fried fish craving with a Wednesday fry in addition to the usual Friday one. And the Dorf Haus in Roxbury does supper club fish fry like few others.

For a truly pretense-less fish fry, the Wilson’s Bar version is a stripped-down, jukeboxin’, wobbly-stool classic. And if you check out the Wilson’s website, you’ll see a month’s worth of daily specials updated 12 times a year — 52 weeks of daily deals. That’s a whole other level of special.