Fairchild's Identity Crisis
Fairchild has awards, accolades, and acclaim. They also don't have a clear identity.
When I saw Chefs Itaru Nagano and Andrew Kroeger from Fairchild won Best Chef Midwest in 2023, I immediately booked a reservation and a few weeks later got into my car to go eat there.
I went there on purpose, with intention, to go visit them and only them.
I watched the menu online as it tracked the hyper seasonal changes of Midwest summer. It highlighted specific farms and on the webpage they shouted out their entire staff in the “team.” section.
That’s my favorite kind of menu. It’s my favorite kind of restaurant.
I love a restaurant that lifts up their staff. I love restaurants that shout out where the food comes from because they’re proud of local farms. I love restaurants that lift up local farmers like they want to help the farms that make their food great bring in more customers. I look at menus like this, snap photographs of them, and look up those farms online. When you name your purveyors, it endears you to me—and I go out and find them.
Because for me, farms come first. Restaurants come second.
I couldn’t wait to eat at Fairchild. It felt like they care about the things I care about, too.
At that time, Madison wasn’t really on my map for that kind of dining, which isn’t Madison’s fault.
I could get you in and out of Madison on damn good food, but we’re talking burgers, giant spring rolls, bread, diners, and donuts. I had just moved back home to Minneapolis from the Hudson Valley in New York. I hadn’t been to Madison in about six years. When I had last gone, I felt like the best places for dinner were the restaurants that had been around a long time. And they weren’t doing my kind of food. But this? This was my kind of food.
Completely under researched on anywhere else to go, I packed my car and went for dinner on what was supposed to be one night to give me a break from driving to Chicago.
I checked into my hotel, dropped my bags, and headed out into the night with so much excitement and hope. I was trying to find the voice of Midwestern cooking again after years out east. I felt like I was rediscovering my roots. Whenever I told people on the coast where I was from (Minneapolis) when I lived in Kingston or Philly, they would almost always be surprised when I said that Midwestern restaurants are good.
Everyone around me seemed to think this was flyover country as opposed to seeing that flyover country means farm country. And farm country means farm to table.
I have always loved eating in Omaha, Des Moines, Fargo, Minneapolis–I just hadn’t really found places I loved for this kind of food in Madison. So upon standing in front of the restaurant door and the blue awning, I walked in feeling like I was here doing more than just eating a good meal. I was trying to map this type of food of Madison in my head for myself.
It’s something I’m pretty good at: give me a few weeks in a city and I can tell you who they are beyond the stereotypes. Give me a few meals in your restaurant and I can tell you what needs to tighten up, what your strengths are, how it feels to be there, who you are as a chef not in your head but in a guest’s.
When I walked into Fairchild, the idea of doing this blog wasn’t even on my radar. I was newly into writing a book that I thought was going to be more memoir less food writing–it turns out that book is the opposite. I didn’t know at the time that the meal I had there would turn into, well, this piece.
A little over a year ago, I went in for myself. I went in because I felt like this place mattered to my self discovery.
The first dish to hit my bar seat was a tomato dish. If you have one on your menu, I’m getting it.
It’s not the prettiest plate in the world. It’s busy and if you look closely on the top left, you can see water on the plate. None of that matters if it eats well, though.
Heirloom tomatoes with gazpacho cubes, Dreamfarm goat cheese (a common purveyor on Fairchild menus), a small salad of tomato and cucumber, twirled cucumbers, and salt on the plate. It’s a busy plate, they could have cut an element, but I felt like it would probably eat really well.
The first bite I took, I felt a feeling that I chase. I felt like everything was locked in. I felt like the dish was perfect.
These gazpacho cubes are an element I think about all the time. I will be in a restaurant and say to myself, “You know what this needs? Chilled soup cubes.” And I am not thinking that as a joke or ironically. It changed a part of my brain.
It was a fun take on a cold sauce. You got all the things you want from a sauce except the wetness, because let’s be honest, tomatoes don’t need more wetness. In looking back at my notes from that dinner, I wrote down, “Somehow they pull off a one texture dish well.” It’s a thing that I think Fairchild attempts and achieves with differing levels of success, but I stand by it on this dish. I don’t think it needed crunch. I think it was fun to eat a dish that leaned into softness. It felt intentional.
I was jazzed. I was so, so happy to be there. Then the second plate hit my bar seat.
This was the mezzaluna. You have two photos. On the left, zoom in on the edges of the sauce and you can see that it’s either oily or broken (it’s oily). I put my entire pasta on a share plate and dumped ¼ of a cup of oil into a cup next to me.
I’m going to repeat that: I dumped ¼ of a cup of oil into the glass next to me.
Most of that was at the bottom of the dish—something I’ll get into as I talk about Fairchild is how they build most of their dishes with the sauce on the bottom. I love a secret sauce, I do! But sometimes, their execution of that means you wind up with dishes like this one.
The second photograph on the right is after I dumped 1/4 cup of oil off of it into a cup. There’s still so much oil.
A cup full of oil sat on the bar next to me for thirty minutes before the bartender asked me, “What’s that?”
And my response was simply, “Oil.”
Nothing happened after that. No one followed up. My glass was cleared and that was the end of that conversation.
The dish needed salt in a bad way, from the filling to the sauce to the eggplant, but it was also so oily even after I dumped the oil off it.
Just dreadfully slick. It left oil on my lips and I felt like I must look like I was wearing lipgloss. I ended up brushing my teeth twice to get the oil off them and Googling how to get oil out of your mouth after this dinner. This sent me to a search for how to motor oil out of your mouth if you accidentally swallowed it, which is not what I needed but was interesting nonetheless.
I’m not kidding when I say that my mouth tasted so strongly of (not very good) olive oil that I needed a solution. “Acid,” an ex-boyfriend of mine said. I went to the grocery store and bought a lemon, cut it open with my pocket knife, and bit into it. Mind you, this is after dinner.
I thought it had to be an error. It had to be.
With my dinner, I got two sides: bok choy and kale. The kale had spelt in it in a way that made it taste, well, grainy, but not like grain, like grainy texture, aiming to be a sofrito, a standard at Fairchild with their greens that it might be time to retire. The bok choy was drenched in a vinaigrette that also had too much oil in it, leaving a tiny pool on the plate. I thought it must be a fluke. A bad night.
They just won Best Chef Midwest and while I know that sometimes awards are not always given to the best restaurant in any given year, they are normally not given to restaurants putting ¼ cup of extra oil on their dishes.
Then came dessert, which is the kind of dessert my ex-boyfriend called “chef dessert” and is now a phrase I’ve stolen (chef dessert is things like ice cream, cake, cookies, panna cotta, and other less technical desserts that are often combinations of these elements of desserts stacked vertically—this is a good example of that). I didn’t snap a photo of the dessert menu and I don't remember what it was, but I did write down, “This is like oatmeal.” I believe this was panna cotta with a crumble on top and blueberries. Classic chef dessert.
Recently, someone asked me about my origin story. When did I start thinking about doing food writing?
The obvious answer to that is that I made the decision to start food writing during a bad dinner at Alinea. But the moment in which I became a person who eats like a food writer is here, at Fairchild. I got curious. I was sure (very sure) that this was not what Fairchild was.
I called the hotel I was supposed to stay at in Chicago. I canceled it. I called the places I was going for dinner in Chicago the following night. I canceled them, too. And then I started Googling. I read review after review after review after review. I read all the press releases. I used Way Back Machine and found menus. I went on Yelp and found more menus. I went to the one star reviews, the two star reviews. I was looking for if this was a common occurrence. It was. I didn’t know it at the time, but it would be common for me, too. Here’s a video of a dish from my last time at Fairchild.
Not only is there a lot of oil on this plate, but it is obvious that this dish was dumped from the pan into the plate instead of scooped. Look at the edges—you can have residue from the pan in the dish that should have never made it into the bowl or at the very least should have been wiped.
But I didn’t know this at the time. This was my first time at Fairchild. So I did what I do when I’m eating at a restaurant that is very acclaimed that I think is not firing on all cylinders.
I called all the chefs who were my friends, who I had been on dates with, or who I had ghosted (not kidding) in Madison and I said, “Tell me about Fairchild.” With one of them asking me, “Are you really going to ask that after you ghosted me?”
Yes.
Then I did the thing I always do when this happens. Most people don’t go back. I do. The next day I went back and ordered the exact same things.
I didn’t know this yet, either, but I was doing something that I do now as a writer, something I feel is my responsibility. If I think you’re probably pretty good, I give you another chance on the exact same dishes in case you had a bad day.
They were all fired the same except the gazpacho cubes. This time, they burst when you bit into them, which was something I thought was so cool and something I knew was an error. My heart sank. They didn’t mean to make Gushers, they just weren’t set.
I sat at the bar and looked at the ceiling and thought, “Are they choking?” After big wins and big awards, chefs choke. I’ve seen it happen more than once. They either step up, choke, or coast. I didn’t know the restaurant well enough yet to know it was something else entirely.
I don’t think anyone has told the chefs at Fairchild what the rest of us see: you can tell the restaurant is run by two separate chefs, the dishes they advertise aren’t what most of the menu is, and you can tell they have execution problems in the kitchen.
And that’s not their fault no one has told them–but it might partially be yours.
When you look at the dishes that Fairchild posts on their Instagram, it is a distinct look of their best dishes. It is not that these dishes do not exist at Fairchild, they do. It’s that these are not the dishes that make up the majority of Fairchild’s menu.
Here’s a screengrab of their Instagram feed from 2023 above this and below are photos other people (not me) took of their food and tagged on Instagram. There are a few things I want you to notice here.
First, this feels, to me, like two different restaurants.
Second, I think in order to get the photos of their hidden sauces, they over sauce the plates for Instagram.
Third, none of the dishes in the screengrab are making it to the table looking like that in reality. The sauces move. The oils shift. The elements fall off. I’ve had dishes I think were probably plated like that arrive to me looking completely different, which brings me to:
Four, I want you to look at who Fairchild thinks they are. Those plates on Instagram are how they define themselves (and who I think they could be) and the plates below are how we see them.
This is what I see when I go to Fairchild. Incomplete cuts. Over sauced dishes. Messy plates that aren’t wiped, often with water on them. Busy and underexecuted platings. Sometimes dishes that feel like they were dumped straight from the pan into the dish. Other times, dishes that feel like they were designed to be plated for a camera and cannot be executed during service (i.e. the top left, which we’re going to talk about that dish in a minute, would probably be shot beautifully if it was plated with intention). Lots of dishes topped with greens (just because it’s not microgreens doesn’t mean it’s not the same thing). And dishes with inconsistent saucing where some pieces are totally coated and some are naked.
They see themselves as defined and tight, but we get plates that look messy. I don’t think they know how we see them. I think they think that their plates come out to us looking like their Instagram.
Recently, Pink Ivy, a restaurant in my home state posted a reel about how their food looks exactly like it does on Instagram in the restaurant. It’s a funny reel and I’ve linked it above, but it’s actually something that happens a lot. The photographs of a restaurant’s best dishes are what gets the restaurant promoted online and in reality, their dishes are not 100% like that. They’re staged.
I think the challenge with Fairchild is that when their dishes do look like that, they often have something askew in order to look like that (too much sauce or oil, say), and then secondly, of course, most dishes don’t look like that. So either you get a plate that is sacrificing on flavor to look pretty or a plate that looks like it wasn’t considered at all.
It feels like two different restaurants. Point blank: it is two different chefs and it feels like two different chefs.
I’ve had enough dishes from Fairchild (over 40) to know that having two chefs has caused consistency and cohesion problems for them, even if people in the back of house at the restaurant don’t know that. I normally know when I have a dish plated by Chef Itaru Nagano and I know when I have a dish conceptualized by Chef Andrew Kroeger. I know because I’ve asked. But I’m not here to tell you in detail about that.
I’m here to tell you it doesn’t matter if I walk you through who made what. I can tell these are two plates come from different chefs. I can tell these are two different ideas.
Honestly? These are two entirely different restaurants.
The dish on the right is gorgeous. It’s what you see on their Instagram. It’s busy but it’s precise. Someone plated that with tweezers. The dish on the left is not that. It’s not close. It looks like someone dumped something out of a quart container directly onto the dish and needs to work on their knife skills.
But here’s the thing, the dish on the right? Zoom in on the ends of the duck. That’s going to be your first bite. Full of fat. I tested it, not my first bite, but my fifth, to see how most people’s first bite would have been: incredibly chewy. I was chewing for five minutes before I went to the bathroom to spit it out. The rest of the dish? Gorgeous. No notes.
Even a dish that looks gorgeous is missing on execution in order to look that way. Cut the ends of the duck and it doesn’t look as pretty. Leave them and I have to eat that.
Sometimes, I wonder if Fairchild is asking, “How do our dishes eat?” Because it doesn’t feel like they have asked that question when you’re eating them.
Chefs are so sensitive, though they act tough. They want you to love the food. If you don’t, it hurts them.
When you leave Yelp reviews that call the food bad in creative ways, they remember those reviews forever. Sous chefs get bruised by the chefs above them for being told their salt is almost perfect. Once I hurt a chef’s feelings when he asked me for feedback and I said, “It could use some dill, but you can take or leave that advice.”
Chefs are tender little beans who are hard on each other and the people they love because they push for greatness. And it is obvious to me that Fairchild is pushing for greatness.
When I went in May with a man I loved, dragging him from Minneapolis to go to Madison when we were supposed to meet up in Milwaukee (again, I moved my hotel reservation), I did that because I wanted someone else’s opinion on the food. I did that because I believe in them and wanted to be wrong.
The night before, I had gone alone and ordered this dish. It’s whey braised radishes with cottage cheese, green bean, olives, and an olive gel. The dish on the left is from May 26. The one on the right is from May 25. The center is a close up on the olive gel on May 25th.
The olive gel isn’t listed as a gel on the menu. It’s just listed as olives. This is common as Fairchild. So many elements are missing from their menu in a way that it makes it confusing when dishes arrive to you but also scares me because I’m worried one day someone is going to eat something they are allergic to (I’ve been to Fairchild 9 times and was only asked 4 times for allergies).
If you look at the center photograph, that was how the gel came out to me the first night. It wasn’t fully set. It was a weird, gummy texture. And it tasted like nothing. I had to ask what it was. I sent it to my ex-boyfriend, so he might be able to help me understand it, and then when he came to the restaurant, we got it again.
The next day, we got the same dish and they had fixed it.
The gel tasted like olive. It was set. It was an entirely different color. And in that moment, I felt a deep sense that this team wanted to be deserving of their crown. That they wore it with responsibility.
But it doesn’t matter if you fixed the dish on May 26th if on May 25th, the dish wasn’t ready to fly and it was on the menu.
Chefs at restaurants like Fairchild are trying to do more than just cook for a living. They’re trying to leave a legacy. Some days, they’re trying to make the best food you’ve ever had. Other days, they’re trying to prove to themselves that they can.
They’re trying to blow your mind and then stick there as a memory. Some days, they might say that is not what they are doing, but it is. And if they don’t blow your mind? If you say the food is good but not great? It hurts their feelings. If you forget the meal? It makes them sad. If you tell other people it’s not one of your favorite places to go? They get a little bruised. I know, because I have experienced all of these things with men sitting across from me in my living room and out in the world, when chefs ask me what I think about their food. Chefs are sensitive. They just are.
When I write this, I know it will hurt. So… why write this? Because I believe in them.
I went to Sardine and I’m not writing about Sardine because it’s fine. I went to L'Etoile Restaurant and I think you can skip and you’ll figure that out on your own so I don’t need to write about it. I think Osteria Papavero is done good enough for your date night–you can go eat there, it’s good, but is it worth writing about? Not to me.
But I think Fairchild has what it takes to send you perfect plates every single night and they’re not.
I think they have a few clear things to tighten up and I don’t think anyone has told them.
I don’t think anyone has told them, because I’ve asked chef after chef after chef what they think about the food at Fairchild and they all tell me how much they love the team. They also all tell me the errors they see. And when I ask them, “Do you think it’s because it’s two chefs,” they mostly all answer, “Yes.” And then when I ask them, “Have you told them,” the answer is, “No.”
This is not unique to them. I ask this in every city I go to about a restaurant that is underperforming against the talent in the kitchen—and chefs don’t talk to each other when they think they could be better.
I think no one has told them that
1) we don’t know who they are anymore
2) they need to edit
3) sometimes their dishes don’t eat how they want them to
4) sometimes their team doesn’t execute the dishes the way they want them to
5) almost every dish is over sauced and every single pasta has too much oil (watch the plates when they come back, Chefs, you’ll see it)
and 6) who they think they are isn’t how they show up on the plate except rarely but it can be all the time if they tighten the ship.
I will say this over and over to chefs: if one of you had told them this in July of 2023, this piece might not exist.
And if you’re not telling each other where you could tighten it up, someone else has to, and it’s going to be a food writer who publishes a piece for everyone to see, not you gently telling them, “Hey your plates are a little messy, Chef,” in their kitchen. And look, most of you hate food writers when we write pieces like this, but someone has to do it if you’re not brave enough to do it yourself.
Enough about what they need to tighten. I want to tell you who I think they are, I want to tell you what I think is their genius.
When I sat down at Fairchild last week, I ordered the bleu cheese and squash appetizer first thing. I thought I was getting normal bleu cheese and squash. It wasn’t.
When the bleu cheese appetizer hit my seat at the bar, I broke into tears almost instantly.
The man I was talking to via text told me later, “You have a lot of feelings.” I do. I began to cry. I said to the woman who brings it to me, “Is that bleu cheese ice cream?” It was.
The plate is too busy, there’s water on the plate again, the husks need to come off the ground cherry, but I don’t care.
To me, this is Fairchild on a plate. This is big, bold, a little messy, sauced underneath, with an herb oil, and beautiful. This type of plating feels signature to them.
I want Fairchild to know that this is magic unique to them, and I want them to dial the fuck in. This is what they do best. This is who they are, to me. To me, their best is not the below dishes.
To me, who they are when they are at their best is bleu cheese ice cream, pork trotter stacked high and tight in the middle of the plate, and a duck with a teeny tiny forest.
Forgive me, you’ve seen two of these photos before, but I’m trying to make a point. This to me is Fairchild. It’s their signature sauce work at the bottom of the plate, unique flavor combinations, local farms highlighted, slightly chaotic architectural plates, an appropriate amount herb oil (something most of their plates have and which feels really true to them), and flavor combinations you might not normally see.
This is what I want to see from them every plate every time.
I started crying when I got the bleu cheese ice cream because I’m a bit of a cryer.
But I also started crying because I knew what I was going to write. This is what food writers don’t talk about when they write clinical reviews. I think it’s partly why they don’t give harsh reviews. How am I going to write a hard piece about you when you make magic like that? But my answer is that I want to eat dishes like this from you all the time and I think you can make dishes like that all of the time.
This dish is on the appetizer menu but, to me, it is clearly a dessert.
Many chefs who haven’t eaten this dish disagreed with me on this, but this dish is sweet. I sent a chef I went on a couple dates in to try this dish. “Appetizer or dessert,” I asked. “Dessert,” he said, when previously he was in the appetizer camp upon hearing the flavors.
The ice cream is soft on the bleu cheese. There is an apple cider reduction. The squash has obviously been sweetened. To me, this is a brilliant savory dessert. And I say this as someone who has never liked a dessert I’ve had at Fairchild. They always feel phoned in. This doesn’t, though. This is brilliant.
Chefs Itaru Nagano and Andrew Kroeger, this is your genius.
Bleu cheese ice cream is bold. It’s not a goat cheese or ricotta ice cream that people know, it’s daring. The cider with herb oil at the bottom is a beautiful take on the sauced dishes you do best.
It’s a squash I’ve never seen on a dessert plate: delicata. It belongs on a dessert menu. The fried sage is perfect with it. It tastes like Thanksgiving. It is the first bite of the year that tells me fall is coming. It makes me feel something. When I got this dish the second day as dessert instead of an appetizer, whoever plated it cut the amount of sage in half. You should have left it.
At the end of eating this dish, I took the ground cherries, and I swirled them in what is left like little chips and ate them off the paperlike handle.
Then I took my spoon and I ate the rest. And then I licked the plate.
This is what you do best. You give me 5 dishes like this? I don’t care about the execution errors or how busy the plate is.
When I think of you two, I think of dishes like this. Not standard NY strip, not pork loin, not salmon, definitely not monkfish, not ragu, and not salads. I think of this dish. To me your genius is weird gels (though you gotta set them), funky flavor combinations, something I affectionately call “platescapes” like little landscapes on the plate, sauces mixed with oil, and sometimes, honestly, one texture dishes pulled off damn well.
That plate up there is your unique brilliance.
I was crying at the bar, because it eats like magic and if you can give me that, why the hell are you giving me a blueberry panna cotta (which tastes like nothing) underneath popcorn ice cream (which melts into the panna cotta and dilutes it) as a dessert?
Fairchild is like this dish: you think it is one thing, but at its heart, when you eat there enough times, you see it is something entirely different.
When they hit dishes like this, they deserve the crown they hold. But over nine meals and 40+ dishes, I’ve only seen dishes like this three times, two on my last visit. They were strokes of brilliance against a restaurant that feels like it’s in the middle of an identity crisis.
I believe they’ll find their way. I just think they’ve lost the map.
The last night I went to Fairchild, I told the bartender I was going to order a dessert from the savory menu. He knew which one I meant, I didn’t have to say. The second person to ask me if I wanted dessert knew which dish I meant, too.
I sat there in golden hour at the bar. My reservation was at 4:00pm on a Sunday and now at 5:30pm, the restaurant was starting to fill up for dinner service. I bookended my experience at Fairchild with my favorite tomato dish of 2023 and my favorite savory dessert of 2024.
In writing this, I’m not saying, “Don’t go.” I’m saying, “Go and look at which plates come out looking like that and order them.” I’m saying, “Most of the time they don’t hit the mark. But when they do hit it, it’s a bit of magic.” I’m saying directly to the chefs, “We know who you are—we just want more of it.”
Writer’s note: my last time at Fairchild, maitake mushrooms and a N/A sparkling were gifted. Neither is featured in this piece. I always disclose my comps, they do not change how I write, and I give my comped dishes back directly as tips.
I really came here looking for this, because I was SO disappointed. I legitimately thought this was it, this was the one to put Madison on the map. I’m from Milwaukee and urge you to check out Odd Duck. THAT is how it’s done.