The 38 Best Restaurants in Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Milwaukee’s resident culinary champion shares all the restaurants and bars that make the city stand out among the food scenes of the Midwest and Great Lakes
“Cliffie, quick. Breath test. What do you smell when I do this?” asks Norm.
“Milwaukee,” Cliff responds.
The punchline from season four of Cheers, which aired in 1985, made a joke of a town that smelled like its breweries and wasn’t known for much else. Today the midsize city’s cultural industries work to refute that sentiment, especially with food. For every sneer that Milwaukee lives in the shadow of its Lake Michigan neighbor, Chicago, someone is serving up quiet, casual defiance with a pastrami chop cheese bagel sandwich, or a pambazo, or Peruvian chicken, or an olive oil cake. For every dig that the city is a staid Rust Belt town of sausage and cheese, there’s Nashville hot chicken sausage and goat cheese curds in chorizo cream sauce. And, regardless of any commentary, there are James Beard nominees and winners turning the sleeper restaurant scene into a Midwestern culinary stronghold. As a beer-and-curd-filled Milwaukee apologist documenting the scene for some 15 years, let me tell you: Through it all, these restaurants keep pushing forward, finding new ways and reasons to celebrate a city that, yes, sometimes smells like beer — and there’s nothing wrong with that.
This spring, as downtown and Fiserv Forum prep to host March Madness and gear up for another Bucks playoff run, residents continue to bask in the Giannis Antetokounmpo era and the simple exhilaration of surviving another Great Lake winter. Beer gardens gently reawaken from hibernation all over town and the north end of Bay View continues to evolve as a new center of Asian cuisine (hello Ni Burmese!). Soon the East Side will begin to grumble with the throaty proclamations of Harley engines, which carry on the soft breezes of a promise-filled, make-it-all-count summer night.
New to the map in 2025: Club Garibaldi, an historic corner joint doing beer and wings the right way; new-school, old-world Polish grocer Wioletta’s; Camino, the epitome of thoughtful comfort fare; Third Space, the most satisfyingly “mouth-feely” brewery in town; Bryant’s, where Sinatra would have drank; a saucy Laotian noodle house Vientiane; Agency, the nation’s first fully hybrid bar; and EsterEv, the final form of Dan Jacobs and Dan Van Rite’s tasting menu vision.
