Our favorite snacks from Natt Spil
Adam Powell
When sleek and sophisticated visitors from New York or San Francisco drop in, where do you take them? Madison’s coolest eatery, Natt Spil, gets points for having no sign and no phone, drawing a hip clientele, and serving offbeat small plates to sate the risible Coastie. Watch the outlander’s reactions after stepping into the red-tinted galley-shaped restaurant—a strong recurring Chinese design element is embedded in the ceiling and set off by a wood-fired oven for pizza. A quirky and clever wine list, a DJ pumping beats, and a dim, romantic back chamber is all reminiscent of Brooklyn basement lounges and Mission hotspots, and the menu is inventive and wild. The A.V. Club checked in recently to confirm it’s still the hippest place in town for small plates.
Pickled vegetables
Food here is relaxed, suitable for pecking and nibbling rather than all fine dining up in your grill. Spicy tomato rice and cucumber salad has a heavy hint of weird and is quite hot. The freaky pickled vegetable salad, with huge chunks of carrots and long green beans, is addictive, enormous, and too spicy to very quickly snarf down; the giant cloves of whole pickled garlic can be tossed into a take-out container for quick redeployment to homemade soup à la maison.
Dumplings
Shumai—steamed dumplings with shrimp, sausage, and water chestnuts—are strange as well, over-sized and unwieldy, but fostering an intense taste experience on the tongue. Like most of the dishes on the “dim sum” menu, which can be consumed like tapas, shumai are cheap: four bucks.
Soups, sandwich, tofu
Tea-smoked duck breast, oily and intense, floats in ginger chili broth to make “Duck Duck Soup,” a challenging and provocative bowl. Slightly bigger plates are worth looking at, too: “Dave O’s Sammie” with roast pork on a baguette daubed with cherry wood smoked tomato mayonnaise is a terrific taste collision of hot sharp jalapeño peppers and sultry meat, and their calling card is the three-cup rice-wine glazed tofu with Tamari and ginger. It’s the dish that made Natt Spil famous in certain circles, and it still rocks.
