Carolyn Fath Ashby
Chicken empanadas (left), street corn fritters and pork posole are all good reasons to brave the crowds at Bartaco.
Bartaco had been open for two months by the time the Wisconsin Film Festival started drawing the city’s movie buffs to the neighboring AMC 6 theater in early April. Throngs have been packing Bartaco since it opened in early February, and no bloom had come off the rose. There’s no shortage of restaurants at Hilldale area, so with Friday dinner waits still hovering in the 90-minute range, it’s safe to say this SoCal/Baja Mexican small plate concept is working for the west side.
Madison’s Bartaco is the 20th location for the mostly Eastern Seaboard-focused chain, and the first in Wisconsin. Its menu is right in line with street taco-focused restaurants downtown like Canteen and BelAir Cantina.
The menu is quite expansive in terms of the ingredients you can put in your tacos — though the tacos themselves are teeny-tiny. I enjoyed the crisply fried Baja fish, the luxurious shredded duck, and especially the crisp-yet-creamy cubes of glazed pork belly. Chicken chorizo, a California Thing if ever there was one, wasn’t pretty, but tasted fine. My portion of carnitas was a little skimpy, though, compared to the generous portion of duck.
I had overheard servers raving about the swordfish; it was cooked to a very pleasant tenderness, but bland. The vegetarian cauliflower taco would have been enjoyable, if not for the overpoweringly bitter romesco that was dousing it.
Most taco fillings are also available as rice bowls, somewhere between a dryly virtuous grain bowl and Japanese donburi. Donburi is best when each grain of rice feels slicked with soy sauce or fat. Here, the rice bowl is mostly unseasoned, leaving each diner to dose it with the three traffic light-colored salsas found at each table.
Neither tacos nor rice bowls are very shareable dishes, which makes Bartaco’s family-style presentation a little problematic. But the non-taco menu is built to pass around. I would brave a crowd for the chicken empanadas, and arm-wrestle an odd-numbered party of friends for the last of six gooey street corn fritters. Spicy cucumber salad is an excellent warm-weather companion to rich flavors, though on one visit it was barely spicy and mostly just cilantro-topped cuke spears.
The pork posole would be dramatically improved with a lime wedge and some crunchy tortilla pieces, but the pork portion is ample, which makes it a decent value. (Nothing is very expensive at Bartaco, but portions can be diminutive.) Dishes like simple caramelized plantains or a sturdy and well-dressed beet salad deliver good value too, as does the (massive) jarred key lime pie.
The same cannot be said of the onion-heavy guacamole. The small order, $6, is truly tiny yet dwarfed by six whole rounds of fried tortilla. And the cocktail menu is spendy, even if the citrus fruits are juiced to order at one of four juicing stations around the cramped bar.
A note concerning the churros. I’m a churro guy. I tried to order them on the first two visits, learning that the machine was down on the first, while they were sold out on the second. I’m told this is a regular occurrence, the selling out of churros. When I finally tried them on the third attempt, they were tasty but underdone. The kitchen may have sensed an impending panic attack by my ordering them at the beginning of the meal, and rushed the order. Bartaco does not, at least, skimp on the rich chocolate dipping sauce.
Bartaco calls itself “bartaco,” and the lowercasing is a little cutesy, but apt. There are a lot of small things about Bartaco — the tortillas, the guacamole portion, the amount of space in which the bartenders have to work. Your bill might not be, but again, neither are the crowds — which makes Bartaco hard to overlook.
Bartaco
464 N. Midvale Blvd., Hilldale; 608-620-8226;
bartaco.com/location/madison;
11 am-11 pm Sun.-Thurs., 11 am-midnight Fri.-Sat.; $3-$11
