(rock music)
- [Bill] I'm Bill Addison,
eaters ever roving national critic.
My current destination, the Midwest, it's the nation center
and enduring hub of transportation and trade.
The nation's silk road lined with tracks of steel.
Immigrant cultures, both long standing and recent
nourish communities with traditional foods:
Tibetan momo's in Columbus,
pork cooked in banana leaves in Chicago,
fried fish fry in Milwaukee, and Dutch babies in Indiana.
My first stop through the Midwest is Madison, Wisconsin.
The State Capitol's a picture perfect college town.
That stretches out over a thin isthmus,
the breezes from Lake Mendota, and Lake Monono
can be felt year round.
(quick music)
Forequarter brings together so many of the best
elements of Midwestern food and whenever I'm
in Madison I look up my favorite dining partner there
Kyle Nabilcy, he's a local food writer
and this guy knows where to eat in Madison.
What Forequarter does is take that farm-to-table
concept that everyone kind of ran with for a while
and show what it really means when you're in an area
where everything isn't in season all the year round.
I was very excited when Forequarter
was first coming into being.
There's definitely an ambition at work in the kitchen
that goes beyond just sort of a corner bar kind of vibe.
(rock guitar music)
As Madison has become more of a market in the upper Midwest
that people pay attention to
both for food and other business.
The ability of Forequarter and Johnny Hunter and his team
to kind of capitalize on what people pay attention to
about Madison and about the upper Midwest
is really exceptional.
They have sort of brought in the DIY aesthetic of
a lot of hipper and bigger places around the country.
But they do it because it just makes sense
and it takes advantage of what people have been doing
in the upper Midwest for generations.
You know, putting aside things through fermentation
and preservation for the winter.
(upbeat guitar music)
- [Bill] Just a short drive from Forequarter
you can find Underground Meats.
A butchering facility where Johnny and his crew
create some of the finest charcuterie in all of the Midwest.
(upbeat guitar music)
- [Johnny] Me and my younger brother started
an anarchist coffee shop where we made
vegetarian lunches every day for people
and kind of had a group of like volunteers.
So that was the first professional cooking that I did.
Since then we have kind of moved on into pretty much
every aspect of the food business.
(upbeat guitar music)
When we started off cooking in the basement of a church
we weren't trying to turn it into a business
you know, it was more just a group of friends
who cared about food and cared about where it came from.
The first restaurant was called Underground Kitchen.
We opened that in 2010 and then we lost that
to a fire, actually, in 2011.
(upbeat guitar music)
After we had the fire in the restaurant, you know,
we kind of rebounded.
We started to focus on our meat processing
almost entirely and our catering business.
With the idea of looking towards another restaurant.
And that restaurant was
a lot different than the original one.
We really wanted something that was
focused, small, an in a neighborhood restaurant
so we went away from kind of the downtown square,
opened in a neighborhood, opened in an old house
and opened a restaurant called Forequarter in 2012.
I think opening your first restaurant you are always
executing things like, pretty poorly.
At Forequarter was really like a pleasure to open
because like we had a vision and we're executing it
and seeing the dishes that we wanted to come out happen.
(upbeat music)
When we opened, you know, the idea was to be
highlighting this amazing produce and product.
And all these things are just like an expression
of Wisconsin and we try to like put that on a plate
in ways we care about it.
So what we did then was try to like create items
that could both satisfy someone who's coming here
for a special meal or an experience
and at the same time trying to come here
because they just live around the block.
(upbeat music)
- [Bill] If you're driving through the Midwest
on a quest for great food Madison is a rewarding stop
that proves as delicious as it does beautiful.
(upbeat song ends)
(loud noise)