There are times when the calendar decides it wants to be your friend — like your birthday falling on a Saturday or St. Patrick’s Day coinciding with the first day of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament (that one really only applies to bar owners and Notre Dame fans). Today, the calendar has smiled on your humble This Bites hosts, because our regularly scheduled episode release day just so happens to be Pi Day. And we get a layup of a lead item. While acknowledging that math is important, we can all agree that the superior homonym for this particular date is Pie Day. Ah, pie. It’s a versatil ..read more

This episode finds us hitting the home stretch of Black History Month, which means it's time to get moving and support Milwaukee's Black-owned restaurants (something we should do year-round). Ann gave us all a helping hand by putting together a sizable list for Milwaukee Magazine that includes everything from soul food to barbecue and Ethiopian to Jamaican. Toward the end of the podcast, we also highlight a pair of cookbooks from Black women that literally span more than a century: a new edition of Malinda Russell's A Domestic Cookbook (first published in 1866) and a compilation of ..read more

Sometimes, the universe just doesn’t want you to make a dish. You hand-pick all your ingredients, do your chopping and dicing and mixing, pull out your go-to cookware and … the stove won’t light. This food metaphor is meant to soften the blow of there not being a full podcast this week. Ann and Tarik were in the studio with their rundown of food news all set to go, and then our fancy audio equipment did the equivalent of the stove not lighting. So we did what any great chef does in this situation: Scrap the five-course meal you had planned and make a decent salad. Most of what you’ll he ..read more

We love “the new.” Especially when it comes to the restaurant scene, we get excited about the spot that just opened its doors or discovering a place the rest of the community hasn’t caught on to yet. While the rookies get everyone worked up, it’s the veterans who create the foundation of a city’s food identity. And we’ve got two of them leading the lineup for this episode of the podcast. First up is Bacchus, the venerable Bartolotta-owned restaurant that announced a couple different developments around its 20th anniversary. For starters, executive chef Nick Wirth and chef de cuisine Brent Da ..read more

We’re a day away from February, which is not important. We’re also a day away from Phobruary, which is very important — so important, in fact, that we slapped it at the top of this episode. If you’ve somehow not partaken of Phobruary in its previous 11 years of existence, the gist is that it’s an annual celebration of the Vietnamese noodle soup at a handful of restaurants in Milwaukee’s Silver City neighborhood. The 12th installment includes the following three eateries and their respective specials: Vientiane Noodle Shop — $7 small beef/meatball pho bowl Thai-Barbq Restaurant — $7 small ste ..read more

The James Beard Awards are kind of like the NBA season: They crown the champs, and it seems like training camps start two days later. Making the cyclical process all the more tolerable is how well Milwaukee does — a trend that continued when the James Beard Foundation named its semifinalists earlier this week. Since we’re in the back-patting business, that’s where we start this episode of the podcast.The nominees fell into two camps, the first of which is the expected announcements. The “Best Chef: Midwest” category is a prime example, with plenty of familiar names on the list: Dan Jacobs an ..read more

For the first episode of 2025 — our 11th(!) year bringing This Bites to your ears — we started in a very familiar (and familial) place: the recently closed Ardent, which is welcoming the first of hopefully many more things to come from its former chef, Vanessa Rose. Rose will bring some playful flavors to the space when she hosts an extended pop-up called Mother’s that hosts its first diners today. You can expect small plates from an a la carte menu that gets a little out there. One example she provided to the Journal Sentinel’s Rachel Bernhard is “a scallion crepe cake with crab Rangoon, gri ..read more

Just a few days before Christmas, Chef Ray and his business partner Cherry Phetleung gave our city a gift by welcoming their first guests to 1033 Omakase as part of its soft opening. The non-numerical part of the restaurant’s name means “I leave it up to you,” reflecting the control that diners turn over to the chef as part of their experience. For this initial phase, 1033 Omakase will offer just three seatings per night Wednesday through Saturday, with a maximum of six guests per seating. The experience is $119 per person, and you can book your spot via Resy. Moving from a new spot to ..read more

This episode has a seasonal feel, with Agency cooking up a menu inspired by holiday movies and an ode to a classic cold-weather beverage. But we lead things off with big news about James Beard-recognized chef Kyle Knall's plans for a new French bistro in Milwaukee's Third Ward, then dip into the sweet with desserts around the world and pie charts (not the boring kind ..read more

Milwaukee food lovers and restaurant-goers got a big helping of tough news over Thanksgiving weekend, as Justin Carlisle announced that Ardent will close at the end of December. As our hosts are both lovers of food and goers of restaurants, they couldn’t really start this episode anywhere else. Ann connected with Carlisle for a Milwaukee Magazine article that sounded a few somewhat-hopeful notes. For one, Ardent’s chef/owner exceeded his own expectations for the business, saying that it was “never expected to last that long” but also that “[it] doesn’t mean it’s over. This chapter’s over.” I ..read more