Tipsy Cow 

The lights of the night glowed out from each capital pub front in warming neon.  It was unusual, he thought, to be walking in among these streets that all fed into the center at the capital as if

Tipsy Cow located in old Suhr Building

blowing it up with air somehow, the white building gaining energy and more light until the spot of the dome beamed up into the sky like a ballooned cathedral. He had worked down in this very quarter for many years as a manager at the celebrated Fess Hotel...before the city had become quite so gleaming and polished.  Stories still hung in the alley ways of previous owners of the old Suhr Building, institutions such Cleveland's, the Cardinal

Suhr Building now the Tipsy Cow Bar and Eatery

Hotel, St. Julien's and the changing of the guard, over and over again.  Walking along the sidewalk where Wilson Street forks into King Street, he looked up to the old Fess Hotel, a mainstay for over a century, and could remember the story of Goerge E. Fess himself, originally a shoemaker from Gloucester, England, who came to Madison in 1842 after some years as a steward on a Lake Michigan steamer.  So many immigrants, he thought, had spent time in transit from the upper reaches of the Great Lakes and steamed down into the lower midwest to find settlement in a land that looked and felt something like home.  This was the area of the first settlement in Madison; before that the city was what was called a "paper

King Street, the first paved road in the city

city," that is a city whose property had been bought, platted out on a map, and put up for sale by speculators before anybody had moved in. As the Wisconsin capital was being built so too was the first eating establishment on

Map of Madison, before built

record, as Eben and Rosaline Peck opened Peck's Tavern Stand right there at center of the isthmus, a sort of boardinghouse for construction workers way back in 1837.  As the day crowd had evacuated downtown, the old buildings told their stories in window sills and bricks.


The Fess was long gone now, replaced by the Great Dane Brewpub.  He stepped into the Tipsy Cow as he passed to see how the space had changed.  As he sat at a stool a young mother and two of her small children sat at the bar giggling. It was before the night crowd and they seemed well in place, a baseball game playing above and behind them.  Beer selections had changed so much over the years he could hardly keep track of all the designed taps.  The bartender, young, maybe 24, described the Oberon as something new out of Michigan.  At the end of the first sip, the flavors came over him as if one by one,

first as citrus, then depth of malt, and then, as it ran down the throat, like an afterthought, a sharp twist of hot pepper floated over his tongue like golden mist.