What Openhand means

An open hand is how you offer something. A plate, a chair, a drink, a place to sit down for an hour and not be hurried.

That is the whole idea, and the name is meant to hold us to it.

The full name is Openhand — Kitchen • Tavern • Social, and the three words are three promises.

Kitchen

Food you recognize, cooked properly, at a price that does not require an occasion.

We are keeping the kitchen menu short on purpose. A short menu means ingredients turn over, the prep is done, and the thing you order on a Tuesday tastes the way it did on Saturday. Keeping it short leaves nowhere for uneven prep to hide.

Panzerotti is our signature. It is a southern Italian dough pocket, filled and fried — closer to a small sealed pizza than to anything else on a Wisconsin menu. Classic cheese, Italian beef with giardiniera, meatball and ricotta. You can also build your own.

Alongside it: a short line of burgers, an Italian beef, a loaded BLT, a turkey club, the shareable things a tavern owes its bar — mozzarella sticks, garlic knots, cheese bread, fries and tots, loaded — a few salads for people who want one, and a small dessert list.

A Wisconsin Friday fish fry is the first thing we want to add once the kitchen has its feet under it. It is not on the opening menu. We would rather put it on late and have it right than put it on in week one and have it be the thing people judge us by.

Wisconsin, where it is actually Wisconsin

Wisconsin-raised beef and Wisconsin cheese are what we intend to build the menu on, and we will keep pushing on eggs, dairy, produce and bread as we find producers who can supply a restaurant our size reliably and at a price that works.

Nothing on the opening menu is described as local yet, and that is deliberate. Here is the part most menus leave out: we will not call something local unless it is. We are not a farm-to-table restaurant and we are not going to pretend to be one. We are a neighborhood tavern that would rather buy from a Wisconsin producer than a national distributor when the quality and the math both work — and we will say so plainly when they do not.

When a farm or a dairy or a processor is behind something on the plate, we will name them.

Tavern

A proper bar. Draft beer with Wisconsin on the handles, bottles and cans, seltzers, a straightforward wine list, and cocktails made the way they are supposed to be made.

The Wisconsin standards are not an afterthought here. A brandy old fashioned — sweet, sour or press — gets muddled fruit, a real pour and a brandied cherry, every time.

There is a full list of mocktails too, priced fairly, because the person driving everyone home should get something better than a soda.

Social

The part that decides whether a place like this lasts.

The building has a stage and a room that holds a crowd, and we intend to use both — karaoke, live music, open mic, trivia, cribbage, sheepshead, and whatever else Portage turns out to want. One or two nights a week to start, added to as we learn what people actually show up for.

Openhand is a restaurant and a neighborhood tavern that hosts things. We are not trying to be the last place open. We would rather be the place you come back to on a Wednesday.

The building

About 4,100 square feet at 125 Wauona Trail — a dining room, a bar, a stage, a kitchen and a patio, in a building that has been a restaurant and tavern for a long time. The bones are good. Most of what this place needed was attention.

So that is what it is getting: a deep clean end to end, properly refreshed restrooms, a kitchen and bar brought back into shape, the patio and the lot tidied up, and our name on the sign.

Who we are

Openhand is operated by NorthPath LLC. We are taking over an existing restaurant and tavern rather than building from scratch, which lets us put our attention where guests will feel it: the food, the staff and the room.

We are hiring.

About Openhand