Reopening Sardine, Part 1: Sardine’s pandemic year

When quarantine kicked in last spring, we refocused The Corner Table to examine and document effects the pandemic was having across so many facets of food service, cocktails, grocery stores, and local farmers markets.

Now as we emerge, we’re getting ready to close the book on that dismal chapter. 

We decided to take a deep dive into what it means to reopen a restaurant that’s been closed for over a year, and to illustrate that process we decided to focus on one of our shared favorite places in town: Sardine.

For this first episode, we interviewed Sardine's co-owners John Gadau and Phillip Hurley about what it was like to shut down for over a year, their discussions with employees and the factors they weighed during the summer and fall. How were they feeling? What was the financial impact? Where are they now?

In future episodes we’ll sit in on staff meetings and check in with kitchen staff and servers to find out what their COVID year was like. We’ll take you to Sardine on opening day, and we’ll be looking forward to what dining could look like as we emerge, slowly and as safely as we can, from this dining drought.

We are extremely excited about this, so make sure you’re subscribed for all the future installments that will be coming out over the next several weeks.

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Hear from guest judges, chefs and competitors on 'Top Chef Wisconsin.' A limited series from The Corner Table, a podcast about food and drink in Madison, Wisconsin, produced by The Capital Times.