Your Daily Guide

🍺 Great Dane Closing Hilldale Location; Stella’s Cafe Coming Soon

• After 19 years, the Great Dane Pub & Brewing Company restaurant at Hilldale will close on Nov. 8. The company, which will keep its other three locations in Madison and Fitchburg operational, said the “changing retail and restaurant landscape and falling revenues” led to the decision to close.
• Another long-time Madison favorite, Stella’s Bakery, will open a cafe and bakery on Regent Street in mid-October next to Indie Coffee. Stella’s sells up to 2,500 loaves of its signature Hot & Spicy Cheese Bread at the Dane County Farmers’ Market every Saturday. The owners say they will have to close its retail location on Syene Road in order to open the cafe, because farmers’ market rules require vendors to have no more than one brick-and-mortar location.
• The cafe will sell Stella’s baked goods along with beer, wine, and coffee. The new space will have a small outdoor beer garden. [Great Dane, Channel 3000, 🔒 WSJ]

🗳️ State Sen. Kelda Roys To Run For Governor

• The field of candidates running to succeed Democratic Gov. Tony Evers continues to grow, as State Sen. Kelda Roys of Madison threw her hat into the ring Monday.
• Roys was elected to the state Legislature in 2008 and served until 2013, after losing a Democratic primary against Rep. Mark Pocan for Congress. She first ran for governor in 2018, coming in third in the Democratic primary to Evers. She was elected to the state Senate in 2020.
• She joins three other Democratic candidates already in the running, Lt. Gov. Sara Rodriguez, Milwaukee County Executive David Crowley, and American Family Field vendor Ryan Strnad. [WKOW]

🍚 Is Imperial Garden the Next Longtime Restaurant At Risk?

• After news that a downtown apartment building proposal would spell the end of Porta Bella, another longtime local favorite might also be nearing its end. A proposal to raze Imperial Garden on Allen Boulevard in Middleton to make way for a proposed 195-unit mixed unit development has been submitted to the Middleton Plan Commission.
• The development, named “Imperial,” would replace the 41-year-old Chinese restaurant and adjacent Asian grocery story, with a 10-story condominium and a five-story apartment building. [ 🔒 WSJ, Isthmus]

📗 Madison ‘Green Book’ Documents Life of Black Residents

• What’s it like to be Black in Madison? Where are the spaces that are welcoming to Black residents, and how can they be nurtured and expanded? A new UW-Madison project by a research lab called the SoulFolk Collective aims to map out Madison in the same way that “Green Books” showed Black travelers which parts of the South were safe for them to go.
• 🎧 Dig deeper: On the City Cast Madison podcast today, host Bianca Martin talks to Dr. Jessica Lee Stovall and Angela Fitzgerald of the collective about the lab and its project. [Cap Times, 🎧 City Cast Madison]

Are you a writer who needs some quiet time, away from the distractions of the world, to allow your imagination to roam?

Hop in the pool.

That’s something Madison author David McGlynn has learned. A lifelong swimmer, the author of the new novel “Everything We Could Do” values his time in the water. (It’s also literally given him inspiration – he’s finished another nonfiction book on the history of people swimming the English Channel.)

“You can't have your phone, you can't have your computer, you can't have anything but your own thoughts,” McGlynn said in a recent phone interview. “And that meditative place is where I feel like my imagination is in some ways the most active. You remember things people said. You think about things. And then ultimately it gives way to storytelling.”

Drawing From Real Life

“Everything,” which went on sale Monday from Northwestern University Press, is a work of fiction, but was inspired in part by McGlynn’s memories of the few days he spent in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) after his second son was born premature. His son ended up being fine, but “Everything” is about the bond developments between a veteran nurse and a mother who has delivered premature quadruplets.

“I knew I wanted to tell this story as fiction, because I didn’t want it to be autobiographical,” he said. “I wanted it to be about people that I could amplify. I could take them down dark roads. I could test, in the way that a novel often can, how people will respond to things that I wouldn’t be able to respond to myself.”

Meet King! True to his name, this handsome adult cat has something of a regal bearing. He’s not a lap cat, but prefers sitting near people. In fact, he has his own office chair, where he sits and silently judges his officemate while they work. When he’s off duty, King likes sunny windowsills, soft blankets, calm company, and pets – on his terms. Do I even need to say that King prefers a home with no other cats?