I’m pretty sure that I’m the last person in Milwaukee to have finally eaten at AJ Bombers. I even have plenty of friends from out of town who have been there multiple times, yet my first visit wasn’t until a few weeks ago.
Why did I wait so long to finally stop in? There really isn’t one specific reason, but after seeing them mentioned non-stop on Twitter, hearing what seemed like everyone I know rave about them and watching them win the Milwaukee episode of Food Wars it seemed like there was so much hype surrounding the restaurant that I felt like no matter how good the food was it just wouldn’t live up to my expectations. It’s the same reason that to this day I’ve still never seen any of the Star Wars movies.
I finally stopped in with my buddy Allen on a Saturday night around 7pm and was sort of bummed to hear that there was a 45 minute wait for a table. We actually considered going somewhere else instead, but ended up scoring a couple seats at the bar after about five minutes or so. I’m definitely glad we decided to stay.
When it came time to order I decided to try the Barrie Burger, which is a 1/4 pound patty topped with bacon, American cheese and chunky peanut butter. I know that there are a lot of people who think that the peanut butter / bacon combination is crazy, but anyone who has ever had an Elvis sandwich should already know how perfectly these two foods go with one another.
I also ordered their Wisconsin Cheddar cheese curds, which were easily some of the best cheese curds I’ve ever had. How come no one ever told me how great their cheese curds are? It’s funny because they’re a lot lighter color-wise than most other cheese curds, so at first I just though they were undercooked, but that wasn’t the case at all. The chipotle ranch dipping sauce that came with them was a little too spicy for my liking, but when I swapped it our for some regular ranch dressing they were absolutely perfect.
Would I eat there again? Absolutely if the wait was short, but Milwaukee has way too many other awesome burger places to wait any longer than ten or fifteen minutes at any of them. Then again, I’m probably one of the most impatient people I know. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ve got six Star Wars movies to catch up on!
I’ve been pretty hooked on my waffle cone maker recently. First I made a chicken and waffle cone and ever since then I’ve been using it to make wafflecakes. This time I decided to try making a cone-shaped pizza.
For this little experiment I started off with some pizza dough and after flattening it out as much as I possibly could I cut out a circle using an upside down bowl, tossed it into my waffle cone maker and closed the lid.
Since pizza dough naturally starts rising when it heats up I had to apply a ton of pressure to the top of the waffle cone maker just to keep the dough flat, but it worked perfectly and a minute and a half later I took it out and rolled it into a cone.
Once my cone was ready I combined some Italian sausage, pepperoni, shredded mozzarella cheese and pizza sauce in a bowl, heated it up and scooped it into my pizza crust cone the same way you would with a regular ice cream cone.
You know how when you’re eating New York-style pizza and you take your giant slice and fold it in half to eat it? This pizza cone was sort of like that, but even simpler and just as delicious. Ideally I would have added some diced onions and peppers to my pizza cone as well, but seeing as how I had neither in my kitchen I had to do without them. There’s always next time though!
I’m getting pretty hooked on this eating food out of cones thing. Now I just need to think of more foods that would be better when transformed into circular-shaped objects with pointed ends. What about making a cone out of pie crust and filling it with apple pie filling? Or making a hard shell taco into a cone shape and then stuffing it with ground beef, lettuce, tomato, sour cream and guacamole? I could call it a Tacone!
I’ve discovered some of my favorite burgers around the Milwaukee area by just randomly stopping to eat at interesting looking places as I’m driving by. The perfect example of this happened one day recently as I got lost while trying to find a place to buy some landscaping rock for my backyard.
As I drove around aimlessly I passed a small, unassuming bar / restaurant named B-1 Burger. I still hadn’t eaten so I decided to put my fieldstone search on hold for a little bit and stopped in for lunch.
While everything on the menu sounded delicious, nothing really stood out to me until I noticed the Black Truffle Butter Burger — a 1/3 pound ground beef patty topped with black truffle butter, apple-wood bacon, Gruyère cheese, sautéed mushrooms, onions, lettuce and tomato.
As I took my first bite of the burger I suddenly began to praise my terrible sense of direction, because without it I never would have ended up in the tiny village of Thiensville eating this mouthwatering burger. On top of that, the pile of onion strings I added for an extra $1.50 was almost another meal in itself.
Normally when I’m eating a meal that I plan on blogging about I’ll take a total of ten or so pictures just in case some of them don’t turn out. With this burger I took a total of two pictures before I started eating it and before it occurred to me to take any more all that was left in front of me was an empty basket. If that’s not an indication of how good the burgers at B-1 are I’m really not sure what is.
One thing that annoys me about restaurants is that almost everywhere you go you’ll find a “California” version of something on the menu that’s simply a regular version of the same dish with avocado added to it. You can’t just throw a few slices of avocado on top of a burger and call it a “California Burger.” To me that’s just boring and unoriginal.
I know I’m not the first person to come up with the idea for a California-themed Eggs Benedict, but based on the ones I’ve seen around I am the first person to do more to it than simply adding some avocado and maybe a slice of tomato. Don’t get me wrong, avocado is still a must, but it isn’t very difficult to get a little more creative than that.
The first step I made was to swap out the traditional English muffin for a slice of sourdough bread. Two other foods that immediately come to mind when I think of California are sushi and the amazing carne asada street tacos that I had the last time I was in San Diego.
Rather than combine both of those things into one dish though I decided to make two different California Benedicts — one where the sourdough was topped with carne asada steak and one where I substituted some fresh sashimi grade tuna in place of the steak. Both Eggs Benedicts then had sliced avocado, a poached egg and Hollandaise sauce added to them.
I’m not really sure if I can pick a favorite between my two California Benedicts. They both turned out delicious, and even though the only difference was the two different types of meat (assuming you consider fish a meat) each one had a totally unique taste. Then again, why be forced to choose one when you can just eat them both!
Seeing as how I’ve eaten at Metlhouse Bistro a few times now I figured that it would probably be a good time to finally write a blog post about the restaurant and their “handcrafted, gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches.”
I just want to start off by saying that I absolutely love the sandwiches at Melthouse Bistro. They have some of my favorite sandwiches in the city of Milwaukee, but I wouldn’t really consider most of them to be grilled cheese sandwiches. Take their Biloxi sandwich for instance which features pulled pork, coleslaw, pickles and Fontina cheese. It’s a great sandwich, I’ve eaten it and I absolutely loved it (minus the pickles), but I’d consider it a pulled pork sandwich, not a grilled cheese.
On my most recent visit to the restaurant (which you can see pictures of down below) I had the Maliblue, which is a sandwich consisting of smoked turkey breast, bacon, avocado slices, tomato, romaine lettuce, hard broiled egg crumbles, blue cheese and roasted garlic mayonnaise served between two slices of French bread. Again, totally delicious, but not exactly what I’d consider a grilled cheese sandwich.
Long story short, the sandwiches at Melthouse Bistro are amazing, the beer cheese soup (which you can also see pictured below) is perfect, and I definitely appreciate that they use so many different varieties of Wisconsin cheese, but, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, I think that they’re selling themselves short by referring to themselves as a grilled cheese restaurant because to me they’re so much more than that.
I’m pretty sure that I’m the last person in Milwaukee to have finally eaten at AJ Bombers. I even have plenty of friends from out of town who have been there multiple times, yet my first visit wasn’t until a few weeks ago.
