Madison, WISteakhouse

Henry Doane opened Tornado Room Steak House six years after the Blue Marlin, and Madison Magazine calls it one of the city’s stalwart restaurants. Doane tells the magazine he considers himself more a maker of environments than a chef, and that a distinctive room matters more than following food fads. The Cap Times counts it among the Madison rooms that qualify as supper clubs. Steaks go on with a spice rub that sears a crust rather than letting the meat burn.

The Cap Times places Delaney’s on the steakhouse end of the supper club spectrum, a west side room specializing in upper Midwestern comfort food, with several intimate interior rooms suited to small celebrations. The bar still looks like the one Dan Delaney’s father Jim opened more than forty years ago, though it now pours hard seltzer and a long list of bourbon. Order an Old Fashioned or a Manhattan first; the paper vouches for both.

Madison Magazine's steakhouse spotlight says this Capitol Square room has long been lauded for its steaks, cut from Certified Angus, Midwestern corn fed beef and delivered by a tenured staff, and it reports a kitchen change that brought in a chef after eight years at Fresco with a steak and potatoes background. The dining room keeps a 1930s club feel off the Square. Order a Certified Angus cut and let the staff pace the courses, which is what the magazine praises.

Jack Sosnowski, who founded Rare Steakhouse and the Ivory Room Piano Bar, took the old Blue Marlin building on the Capitol Square down to its bare bones and built it back up over about a year, keeping the original sandstone walls. The Wisconsin State Journal’s review calls the result gorgeous, with the upper level serving as the main dining room. The name comes from the butcher shop the Draper family ran on the Square for 74 years from 1887.

Toby’s sits near McFarland on South Dutch Mill Road and is one of the supper clubs Mary Bergin collected in her Wisconsin Supper Club Cookbook, as the Cap Times reports. Its reviewer calls it a personal favorite for both the food and the ambience, singling out the fried perch and the hashbrowns with American cheese on top. Friday brings a fish fry crowd dense enough that the paper marvels at how servers still find first-timers in it.