Pork loin with a tomato sauce on a plate.
Pork loin with its swipeable tomato butter.
The first time I dined at Fairchild, I didn’t even dine at Fairchild. It was takeout, a small celebratory dinner with my wife, in the heart of that very weird 2020 summer. Fairchild had been open for mere weeks before everything fell apart in the world.
In that year with relatively few restaurant highlights, I found Fairchild’s shrimp chips with rhubarb nước chấm one of the best dishes I ate, and swore if I got the chance I’d enjoy it at the bar under Fairchild’s very own roof, with a cocktail, some summer day down the road.
As luck and the seasons would have it, the shrimp chips weren’t on the menu during my review, no rhubarb either. In fact, I never even got to have a meal at the bar, thanks to just how busy Fairchild tends to be, even on a Wednesday night. But holy cow, was it a pleasure to eat Fairchild’s food on its own plates.
There’s a lot of L’Etoile’s influence at Fairchild — the resumes of chefs Itaru Nagano and Andy Kroeger and co-owner Patrick Sierra all list L’Etoile — but the vibe is more casual; service is purposeful and un-rushed.
This menu would absolutely accommodate a drink and a bite after work, as long as there’s a stool open. Reservations, via Resy, are the best way to go. Snacks, appetizers and sides are listed separately. From them alone, you can build whatever sort of meal you want.
Halibut rillettes won out over salmon, and a crisp mushroom arancini was no snack slouch, either. Early November’s freakishly warm weather allowed me to enjoy moonglow pears with honey and blue cheese under the actual glow of the moon at an outdoor table when the dining room demanded an hour wait.
Late fall and winter is the perfect time to enjoy hearty sides like rye dumplings with cabbage and apples or brussels sprouts with onions and no small amount of pork. I found myself musing on how at home the sour/funky/fatty flavors of those brussels sprouts would fit into southeast Asian cuisines.
Portions are generous, so unless you’re really blowing it out, you’re probably not going to hit every section of the menu in one meal. But you could try! You could order the respectable heap of blistered shishito peppers, topped with bonito flakes curling and waving as the heat rises off the plate, and then cool your palate with the Dreamfarm goat cheese and delicata squash from the snack section, before turning to an entree of gorgeously seared and sliced pork loin with its swipeable tomato butter and thin slice of cured pork for contrast. (Don’t get too used to any one dish; Fairchild changes the menu frequently.)
Each entree is liable to contain enough creativity and contrast that it can stand alone. The red snapper has more little dollops of that goat cheese — an unusual pairing, but one that marries the crisped skin of the fish and the smooth romesco sauce in a really fun way.
I haven’t even mentioned the pastas yet, which are made in-house. Smooth pappardelle with a spicy lamb ragu and cauliflower? Sounds great, is great. Squiggly campanelle grabbing on to snap peas, mascarpone, and pine nuts like it was a cookout macaroni salad? Wonderfully nostalgic but not hokey. And when I followed my order of the tagliatelle with Manila clams and chorizo with a fresh pint of Dos Equis, our host and server seemed primed to reply with not only “Yes,” but “Hell yes!”
Fairchild is having fun, both its patrons and its staff. When our server delivered our diminutive cube of carrot cake with blue cheese frosting and beef fat ice cream, she joked that it was a tiny dessert on a huge plate, “like they love to do,” with a grinning nod back to the kitchen.
The cake was unique and intense, a dessert leaning into savory territory the way salted caramel does, but way more funky. The beef fat in the ice cream mostly lends richness, not a steaky flavor, and it is sufficient in a small quantity. Another visit’s ethereal blueberry cobbler special, on the other hand, filled a small cast iron skillet and I could have eaten three if they hadn’t been in short supply and required advance notice to prepare to-order.
Some day, I hope soon, we’ll be able to talk about restaurants and marvel over the product on those plates, huge or small, and not couch it all with a statement of wonder at its mere existence on the tail end of a global pandemic and an ongoing staffing crisis. There are restaurants in Madison that truly deserve to rise above the tough circumstances of their inception, and the exceptional Fairchild is most certainly one.
Fairchild
2611 Monroe Street
608-819-6361; fairchildrestaurant.com
4-9 p.m. Wed.-Sun.
$5-$38
