– This week, on Wisconsin Foodie:
[gentle guitar music]

– Chef Joe Muench, how are you, buddy?

– How you doing there, Kyle?

– Good to see you.

– What’s goin’ on?

– So, this is a big honor because I have sat at this counter of Blue’s Egg many a time. But to sit with you. This is kind of top tier. I’ll do the Eggs Benedict.

– Peter: The Eggs Benedict?

– And Peter, please don’t leave, unless you promise to come back with monkey bread.

– Peter: Can’t stop by Blues and not have monkey–

– Kyle: Exactly!

– Peter: Perfect!

– Joe: Maybe he’ll krunk it for us, too.

– Kyle: Joe, I’m gonna take one more bite, but there’s two more spots. Where should we go next?

– We’re going to hit Story Hill.

– Kyle: Story Hill?

– Joe: Story Hill is a unique restaurant in the city. And we’ll finish up with Maxie’s, ’cause the oysters, the happy hour, and that kind of thing is great. Oysters are an important part of who we are.

– Kyle: And we’re also going to have fried chicken.

– Joe: We’re going to have fried chicken. It’s essential.

– Kyle: I agree. I think it’s one of the four food groups.

– Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters for their support:

The Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin are proud to underwrite Wisconsin Foodie and remind you that in Wisconsin we dream in cheese.
[crowd cheering]

Just look for our badge. It’s on everything we make.

Employee-owned New Glarus Brewing Company has been brewing and bottling beer for their friends only in Wisconsin since 1993. Just a short drive from Madison, come visit Swissconsin, and see where your beer is made.

Milwaukee’s landmark art deco hotel offers luxury accommodations, legendary hospitality, and world-class dining. Paired with the hotels roaring ’20s vibe makes The Ambassador a must-experience destination.

From production to processing, right down to our plates, there are over 15,000 employers in Wisconsin with career opportunities to fulfill your dreams and feed the world. Hungry for more? Shape your career with these companies and others at FabWisconsin dot com. Society Insurance. Small details. Big difference.

Edible Milwaukee magazine.

Also, with support of the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

[light jazz music]

[car passes]

[chickens cackling]

[drink filling]

[chopping vegetables]

[fruit popping]

[meat sizzling]

[light jazz music]
[lively music]

– Chef Joe Muench, how are ‘ya buddy?

– How are you doing there, Kyle?

– Good to see you.

– What’s going on?

– Well, I’m coming to get a bite with you, or maybe three.

– Can I offer you a cup of coffee?

– Yeah, yeah, look at you here sitting at the counter.

– Doesn’t happen too often, but we’re meeting, we’ll have some food and just hang out.

– Kyle: So, this is a big honor because I have sat at this counter of Blue’s Egg many times. But to sit with you, this is kind of top tier.

– Well, thank you, I’m flattered.
[laughs]

– Kyle: You’re a local guy, right? This could have been your place.

– Back this was the Heinemann’s restaurant

– Kyle: This was a Heinemann’s?

– Joe: This was Heinemann’s.

– Kyle: A storied old, Scandinavian bakery that used to have locations all over the city of Milwaukee.

– Joe: Nine locations at their peak. But as a kid, I used to come here a lot. I grew up two blocks away.

– Kyle: So is that a little daunting, like you want to change it, but you don’t want to…?

– Joe: The first six months was kind of a nightmare

– Oh, lot of finger shaking, the pancakes were not like this.

– Exactly, we didn’t have the baked oatmeal.
[Kyle laughs]

But we pressed forward and here we are eight years later. I think one of our DNA statements is, Food through the eyes of Lady Liberty, so it’s just this idea of inspirations from immigrants and stuff.

– Kyle: That’s really cool.

– Joe: And then, since breakfast is supposed to be your most important meal of the day, why don’t we make it the best meal of the day? So, we really do a lot of our own house meat processing, to sausage making, to baking, all the sauces are made from scratch.

– Kyle: So this is a little bit like going on one of those European tours with the tour guide, where I know where you want to take me, but I also know what I want to see.

What I want to see is Eggs Benedict just because I love that.

– Joe: And here we make our own English muffins. Every morning we’re making about 150 English muffins. It takes about a two-day process. We make the dough the first day and let it ferment two days in the cooler, and then they roll ’em out, and the next day, they’re ready to go on the griddle in the morning.

– Good morning, gentlemen. Are we ready to jump on in?

– I’ll do the Benedict, Eggs Benedict.

– A thick Benedict?

– I want to have one of our newer items on the menu, the Beef Cheek Benedict.

– Beef Cheeks, alright.

– And, Peter, please don’t leave unless you promise to come back with monkey bread.

– Peter: Of course, can’t stop by Blue’s and not have monkey–

– Kyle: Exactly!

– Joe: Maybe he’ll krunk it for us, too.

– Peter: Absolutely.
[gentle guitar music]

– So, the question that’s been burning in my soul, is the restaurant called Blue’s, possessive s, Egg?

– Joe: Mm-hmm.

– Who’s Blue?

– Joe: The name really is an acronym, it’s Breakfast, Lunch, in an Urban Environment, Everyone’s Good Graces. If you’re not in everyone’s good graces in a community, you don’t have a business.

– Kyle: Oh, this is so much more poetic.

– Joe: You don’t contribute to the community. So, Blue’s Egg has what we call the Egg plate. On top of the special menu, we put omelet, scrambled, whatever it might be, and a dollar of that plate goes to charity.

– Kyle: Oh, cool.

– Joe: Lot of people thought it was ‘cuz we’re on Blue Mound Road. It really didn’t play into it that much.

– Kyle: Oh, I never ever thought about it. That makes sense.

– Joe: But Dan just really liked that name, the word blue, and he’s like, “We got to use some blue”, so I always thought it’s just nice to have some ownership, like Maxie’s and Blue’s and…

– Kyle: So, there’s this, there’s Blue’s Egg, there’s Maxie’s, which is the original, and then there’s BKC. And you have a business partner, Dan,

– Joe: Dan Sidner, yeah.

– Kyle: Who does not cook at all.

– Joe: He cooks.

– Kyle: He cooks?

– Joe: He cooks. We found we have a really good business rapport with each other and we really respect. And that turned into a friendship.
[gentle guitar]

– Monkey bread to get you started.

– Oh, man.

– Whiskey caramel cream on the side for dipping.

– Kyle: Peter, is this heart healthy?

– Absolutely, yes. Depends upon your heart, but it is.

– Nice. Joe, break this down, tell me all the components and then explain krunk to me ‘cuz that is not a culinary term I’m familiar with.

– So, the dough is pulled into little balls and then we pack them into a mold with caramel sauce, sit them in sugar, dipped in, first, a little butter. We always like to dope things up around here [Kyle laughs] so this is a classic couture sauce with a good amount of bourbon in it.

– Kyle: Just eat it with your fingers, right?

– Joe: Just eat it with the fingers. That’s where monkey bread comes from, it’s pinch bread, it’s just this idea of pinching.

– And I dip?

– Yeah.

– Okay, and I am older than 21. You can check my ID. So here goes, heaven, basically.

I mean it’s crazy-good. It doesn’t really need that krunk, but I’m glad it has it.

– It’s for the ones that just like to over-indulge a little bit.

– Joe: I don’t even know what to say, ‘cuz I’m verklempt from the caramel and the krunk. I’m overwhelmed. Just going to shut up and eat.

– Glass of Floradora juice, sir

– Beautiful.

– And Beef Cheeks, side of fruit.

– Alright, excellent.

– Anything else I can grab for you guys? Ketchup or hot sauce?

– Hot sauce!

– Hot sauce?

– Yeah, definitely.

– These are beautiful.

– Joe: Classic Benedict, Webster City pulled ham, homemade English muffin. Of course, homemade hollandaise sauce. Make it every morning, gallons of it every day. This one here is our Beef Cheek Benedict. Our buttermilk biscuit, Wisconsin beef cheeks, and then a Choron sauce over the top, which has roasted tomato and tarragon in it.

– Everything’s from scratch here?

– Yes. We even make our own hot sauce here.

– Kyle: Seriously?

– Joe: Yes.

– Kyle: South by North?

– Joe: South by North.

– So, Joe, there’s the moment of truth, and then there’s the moment of ooze.

– Joe: The moment of ooze?

– Kyle: Cuz it isn’t just the hollandaise. You need the yolk to mix with the hollandaise.

– It’s the whole combination.

– Kyle: Oh, yeah! That’s a good egg at Blue’s Egg! This is really bringing me to a happy place.

The crisp on that muffin is perfect.

Tell me about the ham.

– Joe: Comes in cured and then we slow-cook it. We wanted to do something a little different with pulled ham versus a typical Canadian bacon and how to make it ours.

– Kyle: I mean, it’s so simple, but not everybody does every one of these steps.

– Joe: I got to love our hot sauce.

You should try a little.

– Kyle: I am not a hot sauce guy. So there’s that red dot. That has been my downfall in the past.

Oh, yeah.

– They have that rich egg, you have the rich hollandaise, and just a little pop of heat.

– Kyle: Joe, I’m going to take one more bite, but there’s two more spots. Where should we go next?

– Joe: I think we’re going to hit Story Hill.

– Kyle: Story Hill?

– Yeah, Story Hill is a unique restaurant in the city, I think. And its something that we can spend some lunchtime there.

– Kyle: I was just about to say we’re just about to tip into lunch, and now that we’ve got this good base.

– And we’ll finish up at Maxie’s ‘cuz the oysters, and the happy hour, and that kind of thing is great.
[lively violin]

– Joe: Got it? Let’s go.

– Here we are, Story Hill BKC.

– All right. Let’s grab these guys at the bar.

– Oh, perfect. So, this is the BKC, which is: Bottle…

– Kitchen, Cocktail.

– I heard it was Cup?

– Story Hill

– It started out as Cup. We used to have more of a breakfast approach, and we moved it more to lunch and dinner.

– Kyle: Luckily, you have that initial and you can just transition from cup to cocktail. What is this spirit of this place, because it’s totally different than Blue’s, which is classic American sophisticated breakfast?

– Joe: This is the neighborhood place that

we want you to come at all different parts of the day, have different experiences, have breakfast, lunch, dinner, and stop by after work and grab a bottle of wine or bourbon to take home and enjoy it at home. We kind of designed it after a general store. We have a good line of very unique and hard-to-find spirits, so we feature those. The wine is very affordable. In fact, probably the best place to have wine in the state of Wisconsin as far as price point. And then just the nighttime, the meal experience is very different during the day. It’s more of a family-style, shareable meal at night where during the day it’s more of the cafe, kind of Euro-cafe style food.

– Kyle: So, tell me about the food cuz I know you put a lot, probably more research than anything into these menus.

– Joe: This is all upper Midwest kind of inspired ingredients.

– Kyle: So, I know what upper Midwest cuisine means to me, but how do you take that and translate it into a restaurant and then take global cuisine and layer that on top.

– Joe: Well, you’re buying pork from down the road, we make all our own bakery, we have local farmers here bringing in produce and stuff, so you’re using those ingredients. And then we’ll put a little Japanese flare onto it, or we’ll throw a little Spanish, with saffron and garlic and sofrito into a dish, but you’re serving whitefish, Lake Superior whitefish or you’re serving pork from western Wisconsin.

– So, I want to ask you about your specials cuz they’re such a center point of your menu, and they’re a really big part of the real estate, right?

– Joe: Lot of restaurants you go to there’s one special a day, some of the servers have a hard time even reading it off their little notecards. Where we have, we may have to come and have nine specials to memorize. But it really allows us to be diverse and change with the seasons and create a new dining experience for people that, when they frequent, we have a lot of guests that just say, “I don’t want the regular menu, I just want to eat off the special sheet.”

– Kyle: Just that’s what they come for.

– Can I get anything started for you two?

– Joe: How are you doing, Laura?

– I’m well, thank you. How are you?

– I think we’re going to have– Kyle’s going to have the heirloom BLT. And I’m going to have the Macau pork chop bun.

– Kyle: And if you cut a little piece off of that and serve it to me, as well, ‘cuz I got to try this.

– Absolutely.

– Joe: I think I can take care of that.

– Kyle: Thank you!

– Of course, thank you.

– Kyle: So, what drove you and Dan, your partner, to open this place?

– Joe: We saw an opportunity to change the neighborhood, this neighborhood here near Miller Park has got a lot of burger-beer bars and stuff like that, which they’re great and they do a good job. We wanted to do something a little bit elevated, but yet very accessible to the masses.

– Kyle: So, tell me about the sandwiches we’re getting. My BLT is heirloom tomatoes. And you guys make the bread?

– Joe: We make the buns in our bakery.

– Kyle: And the bacon is from?

– Joe: Jones Dairy Farm.

– Kyle: Jones Dairy Farm? Oh, a great dairy farm. Wait, pork from a dairy farm?

– Yeah
[both laugh]

– Make sure I’m paying attention here.

– Joe: I think they make some of the best bacon and they have this Cherrywood bacon that is fantastic.

– Kyle: And then, your Macaw bun?

– Joe: It’s a pork cutlet that we get nice pork loins in from Kettle Range.

– Kyle: Kettle Range? Nearby purveyor?

– Joe: Slice and pile them on nice and thin. They’re kind of pan deep-fried really quick in very hot butter. And then, just on a bun with some nice pickled mushrooms on it, shiitake mushrooms. And we have a slaw made with crooked neck squash. I think that’s what we do here, is take upper Midwest, very familiar pork sandwiches but we’ll throw a lot of little twists on it.

– Kyle: And being Midwestern is if you just cover it with a gooey, slightly sweet sauce we’re going to like it.

– Joe: And sandwiches still are king at lunchtime. I mean, sandwiches and salads, that’s what we do here, a lot of that.

– Heirloom tomato BLT with a cauliflower salad.

– Kyle: I know, it’s beautiful!

– And pork chop special with the marinated beans.

– Awesome!

– Kyle: Got a little rainbow of tomatoes here, my friend?

– Joe: They look beautiful.

– Kyle: They’re heirloom.

– Joe: You got to toasted bun with a little jalapeno mayo on there. Well, we should share. I’ll cut mine, you’ll cut yours, and we’ll flip them on the bed here. Something like that.

– Kyle: Just like baseball cards since we’re near Miller Park. So, this is the big reveal of the BLT. That looks darn good.

– Alright, so I’ll put that one over there

– That’s a good hunk of pork. Oh, I’m so torn here! The skinny, crispy pork or the thick, unctuous pork?

– Joe: I like ’em both.

– I don’t even usually like fancy BLTs.

– Yeah, I get it.

– With the jalapeno mayo and all that, but I like this fancy BLT.

– Joe: Thank you.

– Mm-hmm.

I just want this crispy little– So, this is good pork from a dairy farm.
[laughs]

This is fantastic and the sandwiches, I mean, lunch, the best. One of the four food groups for me, however, is fried chicken, which I hear you do pretty well at Maxie’s. And then paired with oysters.

– Joe: Yeah, we’ll have to have a little bourbon when we get there too.

– Kyle: Alright, let’s hit it! You lead the way, and I’m not moving as fast after two full meals, I don’t know why!

– Joe: That’s okay.
[gentle guitar]

– Kyle: I want everything up there.

– Joe: Yeah?

– Kyle: Yeah.

– Kyle: All of it. Barbecue, fresh fish. Wow, so this is the original?

– So, this is Maxie’s. Original place, 11 years strong.

– I feel welcome, I feel Southern [inaudible]. So, what was your background in this food, ‘cuz you grew up not far from here?

– Joe: We did a lot of traveling, to Carolinas, to Louisiana, through the South and stuff like that. So, I kind of like had a exposure, I didn’t know I was going to be a chef back then, but I had exposure to it. Once you start finding your way, you start thinking back to those memories and just kind of building off of them.

– Kyle: I want to dig into that Southern cuisine and while we do, I’d love for you to answer how that played out in a nice Midwestern town like Milwaukee? ‘Cause, not everybody here knows what great Southern cuisine should taste like. They’ve heard about it, but they didn’t grow up with it. So, was it hard in the early days and that kind of thing?

– Joe: No, I think it was something that people were starting to hear about. So, we were kind of on a trend.

– So, if we’re going to start out with a good Southern restaurant, you’ve got oysters on ice over there. I’ve let you pick everything up to this point, but I’m hoping, in a very open way, okay.

– Joe: We’re doing oysters.

– Well, hello, gentlemen.

– Oh, hey, how ‘ya doing, Kelly?

– Fantastic. Just wanted to check in and see what we’ll be enjoying this evening. I heard oysters maybe…

– We heard oysters.

– We have three different kinds of oysters today. So, we have Copps Islands, that’s going to be out of Connecticut. We have our Black Points, Prince Edward Island. Then also, Pleasant Bay, Massachusetts.

– We’re gonna do a mix of all three.

– Kelly: That sounds fantastic.

– Joe: Sounds good.

– Kelly: I’ll get that working for you gentlemen, thank you.

– Kyle: Thank you. All the years I’ve been coming here, it was, it wasn’t just, well, we’ve got one or two types. It was a server that would tell me about the four special oysters that they had that week, that were part of that harvest, whether they were Connecticut, all the way up to Nova Scotia, all the way down south of the Carolinas. And, well, in Wisconsin, actually, I’d never really had that experience before. ‘Cause like you people really know what you’re talking about, and now, I can taste the difference.

– Yeah, we estimate, you know, we do, we serve about 2,500 to 3,000 oysters a week. And I think that’s something that has really, you know, solidified who we are, and it’s something that’s on our tag line outside. You know, we’re BBQ, oysters, and fresh fish. I mean, oysters are an important part of who we are.

– Kyle: But we’re also going to have fried chicken.

– Joe: We’re going to have fried chicken. It’s essential.

– Kyle: I agree. I think it’s one of the four food groups.
[energetic guitar music]

– So, these are Sazerac, made Maxie’s-style.

You’ve got sugar, you’ve got bitters, you’ve got a little bit of bourbon?

– A little rye.

– Oh, rye, of course it’s a Sazerac. So, Sazerac is a lovely thing, but your bourbon, rye, and whiskey selection is a thing of great magnitude. How many do you have up there, do you think?

– Joe: We have roughly about 140, 150 whiskeys together. Between the ryes, straight whiskeys, and bourbons, and that doesn’t even bring in scotches or any of the other, you know, imported whiskeys.

– Kyle: Right. Cheers to 11 years!

– Cheers to you!

– And your Maxie’s and Blues and BKC’s. Oh, that warm’s the cold places of my heart.
[laughing]

– Here we are, gentlemen, fresh oysters.

– Yeah, look at that.

– Yes, so here we are. We’re going to start out at our fresh grated horse radish, we’re going to go clockwise. We have our Copps Island, our Black Point, we’re ending with our Pleasant Bay, enjoy.

– Yes, these are gnarly-looking like West Coast oysters which I tend to love, but these are all East Coast.

– These are all East Coast oysters yeah, and you can just see the different look of ’em all, and these ones here you can really see, are going to be meaty. They’re just plump. Here they’re probably going to be really delicate and, in flavor, probably have a little more brininess to ’em. They’re going to appear kind of a little more meaty oyster, but it has a lot of liquor in these over here, and so the liquor really is what holds, also sea water. And the difference between East Coast and West Coast, West Coast having more of that melon flavor to ’em, tend to be more of that milky oyster. East Coast have more of a briny saltiness to them, more minerality.

– Alright, I’m going in.

Just loosen that and…

– Sometimes you need the fork, depends, but we usually loosen em up, and we just take em.

– Bottoms up.

I love oysters.

– Really good texture on that one, little bit of acid from the lemon. But again, not too briny.

– No, no. That had like a sweet grass kind of flavor, yeah. Alright these are going to be a little bit more briny, right?

– I think these are going to have a little delicate flavor to ’em. There’s probably going to be some brininess to it, but…

– Oh, mine had brine. Oh, yeah! That’s sea water right there, my friend. No, I’m not complaining, I’m just saying this is a big transition.

– You can see the differences, yes?

– Alright. This is my, that’s right.

– This is the resistance?

– That, this is what I’ve been waiting for. Been eyeing it up across the plate.

– Joe: You can just see the deep cup on these.

– I know.

– Which again you think it’s a West Coast, but these are
East Coast.

– Come to Papa.

– That tastes like the ocean, that one for sure.

– That with a crisp beer is like cake and ice cream.

– This one here, without the brininess, typically put a little cocktail, I love horse radish.

– Oh yeah, I’m going to try your way. Here’s something. Mm-hmm.

– I think the one that doesn’t have the brininess I think that really kind of enhances that a little bit more.

– Kyle: Okay, let’s move on to fried chicken.

– Joe: We’re going to do some fried chicken, some shrimp and grits. Here with the chicken, Midwest chicken, buttermilk-brined for several days, and then fried to order. Shrimp and grits, creamy yellow corn grits, and it’s something that, there’s yellow corn and white corn. white corn’s typically daytime. Yellow corn’s at night. We have the mix of a Tasso gravy, little bit of Creole in there, sauce to give a little body. And the shrimp are all Gulf shrimp.

– Shrimp grits.

– Alright, yeah, we do.

– And four-piece chicken dinner.

– So, I call the drumstick.

– Go for it.

– My question is how do we divvy up the grits?

– I think we can just grab a fork, kind of pile some on your plate there.

– I got this, look at that it’s like a pie wedge. Before we do any comparisons, I’m just chomping into this. That’s amazingly good. Tender, that crisp, your batter.

– It has some size to it, plenty to take home. Nothing like a little cold chicken at two o’clock in the morning.

– This is full restraint. I’m going to hold back from the chicken, and I’m going in to try grits. That’s super light and fluffy.

– And then, the shrimp compliment on there, that iodine flavor really comes through. And the collard greens, we cook them vegetarian style, so there’s no bacon or any pork products in it. But we use Little Man maple syrup from up in the mid-state, just north of Appleton area. The thing about collard greens is that they take on so many of the flavors that you add to em.

– They’re like the greens that get along with everybody. I’m going to get back to the chicken, you can do whatever you want.

– I’m going to drive on mine too.

– Man, this is great chicken.
[opens tab, carbonation escapes]

I mean, its been, well, three of your restaurants, all in Milwaukee, we’ve finished on a Southern note, but we’re still in Milwaukee. Some Pabst Blue Ribbon.

– We are still in Milwaukee. Yep, and tall boys.

– Cheers to that.

– So, Joe, there’s one piece of monkey bread left, and this is the classic Midwest dilemma, of whos going to out-nice the other guy, right?

– I’m going to let you have it.

– I mean, but it’s ridiculous because you’ll be like, there’ll be one little slice of pizza, there’ll be one whatever morsel, and it’s like, “You should have it.”

– No I think you should have it.

– No, you should.

– No.

– Like, I don’t feel right ’cause it’s your place, it’s your monkey bread.

– Yeah, but you’re the guest.

– I know but still,

– C’mon.

– My Midwest nice is…

– I was out with a bunch of chef friends and we were having lunch, and there was one dumpling left on the plate, we had all this food, and one dumpling, and everyone sat there and looked at it, and everyone started going, you have it, no you have it, and literally we got in this discussion, and, finally, we gave it to the older guy in the group, as like, yeah, yeah.

– Homage, yeah.

– Respect.

– It’s like, it’s “Midwest nice” to this stupid ridiculous fault. Alright, you know, I’m just going to go for it.

– Joe: Okay, all yours.

– Wisconsin Foodie would like to thank the following underwriters for their support: The Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin are proud to underwrite Wisconsin Foodie, and remind you that in Wisconsin we dream in cheese.
[crowd cheering]

Just look for our badge, it’s on everything we make.

Employee-owned New Glarus Brewing Company has been brewing and bottling beer for their friends, only in Wisconsin, since 1993. Just a short drive from Madison, come visit Swissconsin and see where your beer is made. Milwaukee’s landmark art deco hotel offers luxury accommodations, legendary hospitality, and world-class dining. Paired with the hotel’s roaring ’20s vibe makes The Ambassador a must-experience destination.
[light jazz music]

From production to processing right down to our plates, there are over 15,000 employers in Wisconsin with career opportunities to fulfill your dreams and feed the world. Hungry for more? Shape your career with these companies, and others at FabWisconsin dot com.

Society Insurance, Small details. Big difference. The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

The Central Wisconsin Craft Collective.

Something Special from Wisconsin. Illing Company.

Edible Milwaukee magazine.

Also, with support of the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.

For more information about upcoming Wisconsin Foodie special events, dinners, and tours, please go to WisconsinFoodie dot com. There you can sign up for our mailing list to be the first to know about our events and offerings. Also, get connected with us through Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
[light jazz music]