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publisher & editorial director
Amy S. Johnson
lead designer
Jennifer Denman
copy editor & lead writer Kyle Jacobson
sales & marketing director
Amy S. Johnson
designers
Linda Walker, Barbara Wilson
administration
Lisa Abler, Olivia Seehafer
contributing writers
Chris Brockel, Jeanne Engle, Dr. Lori Scarlett, DVM photographer Eric Tadsen
additional photographs
FEED Kitchens, Nicholas Knight, Ron Larson, McFarland Historical Society
Watch for the next issue MAR-APR 2025
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Happy 2025! Here we are again in the thick of winter and start of a new year. It’s true, the older you get, the faster time passes. It’s also time for our Eats & Drinks issue, which is perhaps our most popular issue. We all love to eat!
Inside, we’re happy to highlight long-time Madison favorite Buraka. As a friend of mine would say, home of mouthwatering dorowot. I remember their early food cart days on Library Mall and their lower-level State Street space. Their current Willy Street space, the former Jolly Bob’s Jerk Joint, is obviously a location meant to be filled with deliciousness.
Speaking of deliciousness, restauranteurs Phillip Hurley and John Gadau’s Gates + Brovi is a Monroe Street gem. Phillip and John’s talents were first experienced by Madisonians when they opened Marigold Kitchen, then later Sardine.
Discussed in a previous issue, FEED Kitchen’s Director of Food Systems, Chris Brockel, shares the thoughtful and helpful mission of Healthy Food for All in greater detail.
Garden To Be began as a 5-acre vegetable farm, and owner Scott Williams made the extraordinary decision to change his business to food distribution for farmers. Now, he brings many, many more acres of fresh, healthy food to restaurants, food programs, stores, and more.
The McFarland House’s impact on the community is historically significant, and it’s also currently home to one of McFarland’s favorite cafés.
cover photograph
Mango Cheesecake from Buraka taken by Eric Tadsen photographs on page 3 (top left to right): Gates + Brovi Burger from Gates + Brovi taken by Eric Tadsen Bar at Gates + Brovi taken by Eric Tadsen (bottom left to right):
Garden To Be produce taken by Eric Tadsen
A close up of Pranav Sood’s mural I Am More Than Who I Am taken by Nicholas Knight
We also start a special arts series revisiting artists we previously introduced to you to learn where their careers have taken them. First is Pranav Sood, graduate from University of Wisconsin–Madison who moved to New York to fully immerse himself in his work. With this and each artist update, we’ll include the previous interview online alongside the new article.
Finally, Dr. Lori Scarlett, DVM, provides animal parents information regarding a common question: why are they peeing on the floor?
We look forward to spending another year with you. Thank you for supporting us and our advertising sponsors. As always, we can’t be here without all of you!
Gates + Brovi
by Kyle Jacobson
When we’re thinking about the good times, we’re often thinking about the people who were there to share them with us. So what’s the point of eating out if you’re not planning on having a good time? You might bump into a familiar face, share a few laughs with some new ones, or simply enjoy the company of friends and family at the table. Phillip Hurley and John Gadau have opened a handful of successful restaurants in the Madison area, but their third undertaking, Gates + Brovi, stands out as a love letter to the good times.
In the ’90s, the two lived in the same apartment building in Chicago. Their paths rarely intersected, until one snow day “the city just got pummeled,” says
Phillip. “We found ourselves having a couple beers with John’s then girlfriend [now wife] and my wife down in his apartment. We just started talking about how we were both cooking out in California basically at the same time in different cities [John in L.A. and Phillip in San Francisco]. We had a lot in common for how we approached food and the whole dining experience. We were like what are you going to do? What are you doing? Are you going to get your own place one day? It sort of started there.”
John says, “It was just so random. ... We cultivated a relationship about let’s go into business together type of thing. We were jonesing to do something on our
own—together, once we met. We went to places in Southport on the north side of Chicago, and that spawned the idea of doing something together. Then when Madison came up...hmm...interesting.”
There were many aspects of Madison that appealed to John, recently engaged, and Phillip and his wife, who had a five-year-old. Not only would a smaller city be a great place to raise a family, but a slower pace of life would provide the types of opportunity they sought professionally. “Chicago is a great food city, but it’s hard,” says John. “It’s kind of a rat race. ... I think people in Madison appreciate what restaurant owners have to offer, and I just think it’s an easier place to live.” After living in Madison for
Beet, Apple, and Endive Salad
only one year, the pair opened Marigold Kitchen in 2001.
Five years later, the success of Marigold as a casual breakfast and lunch place with high-level cooking led to Phillip and John wanting to open Sardine, which would be more in line with what they were doing in California. “It was a big jump, putting a full-service restaurant with waitstaff and a full bar,” says Phillip. “A big jump and intense leap of faith.” As with Marigold, Sardine focused on using local ingredients to develop their menu, but the scale of everything was much larger.
Sardine’s success came quick, and only two years in, Phillip and John were chewing on the next idea, a casual, community-based neighborhood restaurant. Whatever the food, whatever the décor, what would become Gates + Brovi needed to have a strong sense of place—an ode to Wisconsin supper clubs and watering holes.
That said, they never planned on becoming a prime rib and fish fry joint. They had conceptualized an east-coast-
inspired Italian fish house, so off to Boston they went to drive up to Portland and work their way down the coast hitting “every rinky-dink place,” says Phillip. “Fun fish house clam places.”
Inspiration from the journey would come together in white shiplap walls and aged boards for their own restaurant.
“The wood is out of Wausau,” says John. “An old box factory that packed ammunition for the old Badger Army Ammunition Plant.”
Phillip adds, “85 percent of all the wood in here, the tables, the floor, the ceiling, all the booths, were made of these over100-year-old boards.”
Fisherman’s Stew
To top it all off, customers would be sitting at the site of the old Parman Place, a landmark for many locals. Phillip and John have fond memories of the building. “We’d take our bikes and put air in our tires when our kids were little,” says Phillip. “It was a beloved little corner here with Parman.” When they heard someone was developing the corner, they didn’t have to think too hard about making this the home of Gates + Brovi. Six years since they had the concept, it was finally happening in 2012.
So what does an east-coast-inspired Italian fish house serve? Whatever is in season. Specials change weekly, and “the menu is riddled with everything local,” says John. “Our Chicken Piccata is the most well-known dish we have here as far as an entrée. We’re using local potatoes and local green beans for as long as we can. The chicken is coming from the Midwest.”
“We’re tapping into the warm and fuzzy Wisconsin family place.”
Oysters, cheese curds, calamari, chicken wings, bluegill BLT, burgers, ricotta gnocchi, and don’t sleep on the pizzas. Gates + Brovi is a modern marriage between the panache of upscale dining, the comfort of authentic Italian food, and the relaxed atmosphere of a hometown bar. Much of what people love about Sardine is here. The chef is from Sardine. The general manager is from Sardine. Even the bar manager from Sardine has developed the bar program for Gates + Brovi.
“It may look slightly different from Sardine,” says Phillip. “But the quality, the ingredients, the construction of the cocktails we make are at a high level. It elevates everything when you come in here. ... This is a neighborhood spot that punches over its weight a little bit.”
Phillip and John have a way of doing things that has worked for 24 years. They think local first, going out of their way to support local farms through Garden To Be and like-minded wholesalers. They adore Madison and show their appreciation for the city in most everything they do. As John says, “We’re in Wisconsin—this is what people grew
Chicken Picatta
Guanajuato! Pizza
Cheese Curds
Photograph by Barbara Wilson
Kyle Jacobson
Buraka
by Kyle Jacobson
Markos Regassa didn’t come to Madison to cook, and he has no formal training as a chef. But he spoke the language of food in the same way most of us do—to say thank you or I appreciate you; my partner would argue it’s the best way to say I love you. In a way, Markos learning to cook was Markos learning his favorite way to speak to his community.
The year was 1992, and Markos “was a recent graduate from the UW–Madison School of Business.” He says, “Buraka started at the Library Mall as a food cart. I thought I could do this for a couple years then move on to something else. ... I didn’t know I had the passion to cook.”
That first year, Markos learned the food cart didn’t provide enough space for him to prep and keep the cart open for the entire lunch rush, let alone all day. If he was going to last past the first hour of opening, he needed a kitchen to serve as a sort of base of operations. This eventually came in the form of a second Buraka food truck on Butler Street, which struggled as a takeout operation.
Beef Tibs with Rice
Lentil Salad
Markos would be one of the first to say that the first years of opening a business are some of the most difficult, but for himself, he trusted his strong work ethic and business education would pay off. “It wasn’t easy because I didn’t have the experience. Those days, you couldn’t get information on opening a restaurant or where to buy things. I had no clue. ... This was the era of the yellow page.” He knew that if he could just get his food in front of people, they would try it and love it, so along with his Library Mall location, Markos also chased festivals.
What’s grown to become Buraka’s most popular dish is the dorowot: a stew with chicken and carrots slowly cooked in berbere-spiked red sauce. Berbere is a key spice mix in Ethiopian cooking—a mix of red chili peppers, coriander, garlic, ginger, peppercorns, and other like ingredients. As with every Ethiopian household, Markos’ blend of berbere is his own.
After eight years of running his first food cart, Markos opened a brick-and-mortar space on State Street and Francis. Being downtown meant many of his university customers didn’t have to travel far to his new location, and the uniqueness of being a basement restaurant had
its own appeal for 13 years; however, when the landowner decided to develop the building, it was time for Markos to move on.
Which brings us to Buraka’s current location, 1210 Williamson Street—the old Jolly Bob’s. “It used to be much darker in here,” says Markos. “We opened up the front. We opened up the
path to the outside. ... I had a very good architect—a very good friend. He helped me with the restaurant on State Street, as well.”
At each Buraka location, Markos has always had a strong sense of community, which is why some of the evolutions of his dishes have incorporated customer feedback. With food that’s traditionally spicy came an obvious alteration, putting punchy sauces on the side, but serving dishes with rice was an idea that wouldn’t have otherwise crossed his mind. The funny thing is, according to Markos, rice is now part of an Ethiopian diet, but when he was growing up, it just wasn’t common.
Instead of rice, dishes are traditionally served with injera: a texturally spongy sour flatbread made from teff flour. The bread works as a sort of spoon; diners tear off pieces of the injera and use it to scoop up their entrées. On that note, another accommodation Markos incorporated into his restaurant is forks.
After over 32 years in the food business, Markos’ understanding of how interconnected Buraka’s success is to the surrounding neighborhoods is stronger than most. “The community has supported me all the way from the street to the restaurant. I am very, very thankful for my community. ... I love
Combination: Alicha and Misirwot with Injera
my customers. I love what I’m doing. I love my good employees. I can’t run this business by myself.”
It’s come to the point where Markos’ customers include the next generation of students from families he’d serve
so many years ago. It’s also common for customers who have moved to other cities for life and work to stop by when they’re in the area. On just how important these lifelong connections are to Markos, he succinctly says, “It warms my heart.”
And those feelings have proven to go both ways. Even the décor itself reflects the community’s appreciation for Buraka. The walls are covered with pieces people have given to Markos or that he has bought himself from all over Africa, including Kenya, Nigeria, and Mozambique. From the tree of life tapestry to the hand-carved mask, each piece adds a touch of authenticity to the experience as well as a breath of culture.
There’s also the rich aroma from a French-pressed cup of Ethiopian coffee that’s strong enough to transport someone across the Atlantic. Pair that with a few lentil samosas marinated in Ethiopian spices, and you’ll start to feel like you’re not in Madison anymore.
It’s been a long and ongoing journey. Through the ups and downs, Markos says, “There’s no textbook that prepares you for day-to-day life.” When he started Buraka, there was an aspect of winging it, but the lure of opportunity and a youthful enthusiasm were enough to hold his attention for decades. He’s come to an understanding that people have a misconception when they start
Lamb Tibs with Injera
Coconut Curry Chicken with Rice
a business that they’ll be their own boss; he, instead, feels beholden to everyone who comes through his doors: his employees and his customers. This mindset has allowed him to take a step back, see his place in the community, and determine if what he’s doing is paying off. “I measure my success by how many people I make happy on a daily basis—how many people come and eat and sit around and laugh. That’s what makes me happy. ... Thank you, Greater Madison community, for your continued support.”
Kyle Jacobson is a writer who believes that if you don’t live to learn, you won’t learn to live.
Photograph by Barbara Wilson
Kyle Jacobson
Photographs by Eric Tadsen
Healthy Food
FOR ALL
by Chris Brockel
Every year, 40 percent of the food grown in the United States is never eaten. Locally, 38 percent of Madison’s input to the Dane County Landfill is organic matter, and a whopping 30 percent of that, or 5.3 tons, is considered edible food. The numbers are staggering, and in some ways, difficult to believe. It’s not just the food that’s wasted, but all the inputs that it took to get that food from the farm to the landfill: farm inputs, fuel, transportation, warehousing, processing, packing, and people’s time.
While this is occurring, families in our community are struggling to put food on their tables. Just this past summer, a coalition of Dane County food pantries and local leaders came together for a press conference to plead with our community for more support because
they were continuing to be overwhelmed with need despite the waning of the COVID pandemic. Our community, along with numerous others across the country, is struggling to keep food-pantry shelves stocked.
Putting two and two together, Healthy Food for All Dane County is a food recovery initiative with the mission of capturing as much locally available excess food as possible and getting it to emergency food providers and directly into families’ hands quickly and safely. An initiative of Madison Northside Planning Council and operating out of FEED Kitchens, Healthy Food for All is a backbone resource to our local emergency food system, supplying food resources garnered through their food-recovery efforts.
Healthy Food for All specializes in connecting with local farms and farmers’ markets to recover excess harvest and unsold market produce. These healthy options are a welcome sight at food distribution events, oftentimes supplying culturally appropriate foods to families who may otherwise struggle to find foods familiar to their palette.
A second area of specialization for Healthy Food for All is working with event spaces and caterers to collect edible leftover food from events and cafeterias. As an example, Healthy Food for All has an ongoing relationship with the
American Family PGA Championship Tournament in Madison to collect excess food over the tournament weekend to help the organizers make it a zero-waste event. Special care is taken to ensure food is properly handled, stored, and packaged before it’s picked up. Finally, Healthy Food for All coordinates a large cadre of volunteers who drive daily assigned routes to local food retailers to pick up items for donation and drop them off at designated community sites.
Many food pantries and community meal sites have relationships with food establishments near their places of service, and some larger ones even cast their nets geographically wider. These efforts are encouraged and supported by Healthy Food for All, which also coordinates efforts with Second Harvest Foodbank to ensure that any retailers they have relationships with are in the fold to donate excess or short-dated foods. Without Healthy Food for All’s service, much available food simply wouldn’t get collected, putting more pressure on food pantries and families in need. The efforts of Healthy Food for All also evens the playing field for smaller food pantries and meal initiatives that may not have
Without Healthy Food for All’s service, much available food simply wouldn’t get collected, putting more pressure on food pantries and families in need.
the capacity for food recovery efforts themselves and are at a disadvantage in procuring other needed resources.
The hundreds of thousands of pounds of food that Healthy Food for All recovers and distributes every year not only feeds our community with locally available
resources, it keeps that food from the landfill, where it causes problems by taking up space and creating climatechanging gases as it decomposes. As a society, we need to get better at using our food resources wisely. Until then, Healthy Food for All will be on the streets collecting and distributing our excess.
There are simple ways to support Healthy Food for All. Monetary donations are the most useful, as it takes dollars to keep vehicles on the road and to pay staff to drive them. Another great way to support the program and your neighbors in need is to purchase quarts of soup for yourself through Soup’s On! and then purchase a few more to donate to Healthy Food for All. Donated soups through Soup’s On! are immediately transferred to Healthy Food for All at FEED Kitchens and distributed within days to the
community. Since November 2020, hundreds of quarts of soup have been donated through Soup’s On! to Healthy Food for All, providing warm hearty meals of quality soups to hungry tables around Dane County.
Chris Brockel is director of food systems at FEED Kitchens. feedkitchens.org.
Photographs provided by FEED Kitchens.
To donate to Healthy Food for All, visit hffadane.org/donate. To purchase soup through Soup’s On!, visit madisonlocallysourced.com/soups-on annually November through March.
Chris Brockel
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TO BE Garden
by Kyle Jacobson
Do you grow your own tomatoes? What about your own basil? Carrots? Corn? The rewarding experience of morphing a seed into food also grows an appreciation for the people who do it professionally: farmers. Farms in Wisconsin range in size from thousands of acres to less than five, and those small farms are becoming more common. Though it’s incredibly difficult to make a living running a small farm, thanks to Scott Williams, farmer and owner of Garden To Be, more farmers are able to exclusively do what they love and what they know.
Garden To Be has come a long way since it started as a fiveacre vegetable farm in 2000. In fact, 2024 marks the first year Scott didn’t do any farming and was able to focus solely on wholesale distribution for all the farmers who joined. “I think it’s come together where enough farms are interested in finding a wholesale distributor who recognizes their need to make a living,” says Scott.
Scott recalls working with some of the farms at the Farley Center, a farm incubation program providing infrastructure and land for new farmers. “Los Abuelos is one of the farms I worked out there. There were a lot of farms that struggled with marketing and sales either due to language or, in the case of Crossroads Community Farm, just time and labor. They’re already busy enough and then trying to send trucks around to make deliveries to restaurants is too much. So I started buying crops of theirs and adding to our list. Then I could take away from growing those things [onions, potatoes, carrots, etc.] on my farm and focus more on little gem
Rachel Lichtman
lettuce and varieties that they weren’t necessarily growing that we could do on a small scale and meet the demand.”
Growing specialty crops plays a large role in the farm-to-table movement.
Chef Odessa Piper, founder and former owner of L’Etoile, rightly receives a lot of recognition for starting the trend in Madison of connecting diners to local food producers. “I just think it’s super cool,” says Scott. “Now we’ve got this localized regional cuisine mentality.”
After working with some local organic vegetable farms in the mid ’90s, Scott started Garden To Be as a small diverse vegetable farm focused on herbs and microgreens. “We ran a Community Support Agriculture (CSA) program for the first four years, worked with restaurants, tried to get into co-op grocery stores. I really narrowed in on restaurants. I enjoyed working with chefs, liked growing some of the interesting heirloom specialty varieties that it doesn’t make sense to grow and ship all over the country.”
Before his farm was 10 years old, Scott was struggling to keep up with the demand. With the increasing popularity of the farm-to-table movement, it just
the success of Garden to Be is in part thanks to dane county’s food-invested culture.
wasn’t feasible for a farm of his size to meet the numbers. The result was more farms growing intentionally for chefs all around Dane County. Before supply could outweigh demand, Scott saw the coming opportunity to distribute highquality foods beyond just restaurants.
“We do this year-round, and our customer base has grown significantly,” says Scott. “We do some stores—the Outpost stores in the Milwaukee area as well as caterers. We work with companies that have food programs for employees, like Epic, Promega, Exact Sciences. We do some school districts. We work with Second Harvest Food Bank of Southern Wisconsin. We work with a lot of agencies directly, like The River Food Pantry in Madison and Badger Prairie Needs Network in Verona. It’s been really very exciting and cool to make those connections.”
Which leads to the new facility. Garden To Be is now located in Fitchburg, a few blocks up from Sub-Zero, the old Tipi Produce location where Scott used to work with Steve Pincus. Up until early
2023, everything for Garden To Be was done on the farm itself, where there was no concrete to easily move things around on and a pallet jack couldn’t fit through the door.
Being in a more fitting space simply helps Scott and his staff better manage the amount of food coming in. “We’re shipping more than a million pounds of combined produce annually,” says Scott. “We’ll definitely be close to two million pounds this year. We have the infrastructure and the farms that can provide enough produce to hit really large purchasers. We have four refrigerated trucks, and some days all four trucks are on the road at the same time. We can ship tens of thousands of pounds daily to customers.”
The success of Garden To Be is in part thanks to Dane County’s food-invested culture. People understand the value of local produce logistically, and they appreciate the flavor it brings to the table. But that doesn’t mean everyone is starting from the same point, which is why the education component is so important. “I
Drumlin Ridge, located just outside Madison, offers a private rental space for small gatherings. Guests can relax with a glass or a custom flight of locally produced wine while overlooking the hillside vineyard. Enjoy small plates or browse the gift shop.
remember going around with this group of elementary kids with a fork I’d use to loosen the soil and pull up a carrot. I pulled up what garlic looks like from under the ground and other produce. We get over to where the watermelon patch was, and it was all just green because it hadn’t fruited yet. I say, ‘This is where we’re growing our watermelon,’ and this kid goes, ‘Pull me up a watermelon! I love those.’”
Garden To Be isn’t just the name of the business, it’s the mission. Garden to be healthy, garden to be independent, garden to be knowledgeable, garden to be sustainable. Building relationships with communities, promoting businesses with shared values, these are the ideas Scott wants to prop up and celebrate. “We need to make sure that there’s a new generation that has the means to farm sustainably with an infrastructure that helps them succeed.”
Scott is hoping to soon implement an online system that updates product availability and tells people what
products are available where—what restaurants are using locally grown vegetables, eggs, herbs, and flowers. In addition, the website would work as a portal for new farms to get involved with Garden To Be.
Kyle Jacobson is a writer who gets excited about the big things, lives for the small things, and worries about everything.
Photographs by Eric Tadsen
Photograph by Barbara Wilson
Kyle Jacobson
HOUSE Meet Me at theMcFarland
For 168 years, the McFarland House has been a place where people passing through the village, as well as its residents, gathered. The vernacular Greek Revival house at 5923 Exchange Street is in the original town center of McFarland, a few miles southeast of Madison. The House commands recognition as a visual landmark in the village due to its large size.
“It was the first home seen while traveling by train into the village and is still the focal point when arriving by auto [and now by bicycle on the Lower Yahara River Trail] into the original town center,” according to the National Register of Historic Places nomination. Built in 1857 by the village’s founder, William McFarland, the McFarland House was listed on the Register in 1988.
Including the attic, the McFarland House is two-and-a-half stories tall. A
large rectangular wood-framed building, it has two brick chimneys on either end. Its appearance is quite symmetrical with a centered front entrance. Trapdoors (now turned into skylights) that opened through the roof from the attic were included as a safety precaution when the house was originally constructed due to its proximity to the railroad, where flying sparks from trains could start a house fire. Trapdoors in the attic allowed firefighters to vent smoke and gases accumulating on the lower floors in the event of a fire.
William began working for the Milwaukee & Mississippi Railroad Co. as a carpenter in the early 1850s and was soon promoted to construction superintendent. He had been convinced to build a depot at a new railroad stop being established between Stoughton and Madison. William built the depot (no longer extant) in 1856, became the
by Jeanne Engle
Photograph provided by McFarland Historical Society
Photograph by Ron Larson
William and Sela McFarland and family sitting in front of the house.
depot agent, and built the McFarland House the next year.
William played a pivotal role in the development of the village named after him. Agriculture was expanding in Wisconsin during the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. If a community like McFarland, which provided services for area farmers, was to sustain growth, the railroad was necessary. “[William] McFarland’s efforts toward directing the construction of the depot and his management of the station as local agent were the base upon which much of the later commercial activity developed,” as stated in the National Register nomination. He was a mover and shaker in the community, donating property for the Methodist church, deeding land for a school, and serving as postmaster. Throughout the years, the House’s interior has been remodeled by its owners.
William’s family occupied the first floor from the start. While he died in 1908, descendants lived there until 1969, when the building was purchased by Harold and Martha Fager. In 1986, village resident Fern Allen opened Earth Designs Floral Shoppe on the first floor. Steve and Donna Washa purchased the House in 2001. The Washas opened McFarland House Café where Earth Designs had been and developed an English garden in the yard. The current owners, Shaun and Jessica O’Hearn, took over the café in 2015 then purchased the property in 2018.
In addition to the House, there’s also a small one-story gable-roofed building on the premises that was built by the Fagers. An underground hallway connects the basements of the two structures. The former greenhouse is now an ice cream shop run by high school senior Lily O’Hearn as well as an arcade, Liam’s Rec Room—the brainchild of her brother, Liam. This past summer, the O’Hearns added an event tent in the backyard that can seat up to 200.
“The past owners always wanted to make use of this open space, and now we do,” says Shaun. “In addition, we featured live music on Thursday and
Friday nights and during Sunday brunch. We will start up again in the spring.”
Shaun grew up less than a mile from the McFarland House, and his first job in the food service business was at the Green Lantern Restaurant on Lake Waubesa, where he bussed tables, bartended, and learned how to cook. Always wanting to be his own boss in his own space, purchasing McFarland House on its more-than-half-acre plot was the perfect opportunity.
The McFarland House served as an unofficial boarding house and community event center during its early years. Celebrations, services, socials, dances, and meetings were held in the spacious third-floor attic. Shaun remodeled that space into two short-term Airbnb rentals. His role as innkeeper is one Shaun relishes. He enjoys meeting guests looking to move to the area and then seeing them after they’ve found a permanent home. Shaun plans to convert two apartments on the second floor into four more Airbnb units. “McFarland has no hotels, so I’d like to be able to generate room tax to fund the Chamber of Commerce’s promotion of the village.”
For anyone looking to open a business in a historic building, Shaun says, “There are hoops to jump through, so familiarize yourself with the municipal code in your community. Sit down with the folks on the local landmarks
commission to make sure your vision is aligned with theirs. You’re working together to do what’s best to keep the historical value of the building. ... Taking things that are old and making them new is so much more efficient than building new. I would like to update the siding and exterior doors. I’m always looking for new materials and products for historic homes that don’t destroy the integrity of the original. I want to make sure the House is standing 100 years from now.”
Jeanne Engle is a freelance writer.
by
by
McFarland House Café is open daily for breakfast and lunch as well as Thursday and Friday evenings. Orders can also be placed online at mcfarlandhousecafe.com. Lily’s Ice Cream Parlour, which serves Chocolate Shoppe Ice Cream, and Liam’s Rec Room have winter seasonal hours and are open daily starting in mid-March.
Jeanne Engle
Photograph
MOD Media Productions
Photograph provided
McFarland Historical Society
My cat Moby recently started peeing on a bathroom rug, much to the dismay of the humans who use that bathroom. I took the alleged perpetrator to the clinic and ran tests on him. Later that same week, we found urine in front of a litter box, and one of our dogs had urinated in the living room. It was a urine hell, and I had to figure out what was going on before my husband tossed us all out the door.
There are many causes for a pet urinating on the floor. Most common is a bladder infection, especially in dogs. Female dogs are also more likely to have issues if they have an immature or tucked vulva; this is where the vulva is more covered by skin folds, leading to entrapment of urine (or fecal material) that can ascend into the urethra and the bladder. Dogs with bladder infections feel the urge to pee frequently, often just small amounts at a time. Bladder stones and sometimes a urinary bladder tumor are other underlying causes of infections.
A urinalysis is your veterinarian’s first test. It tells a lot about the bladder and kidneys. If there’s an infection, bacteria, protein, white blood cells, and red blood cells are present. Crystals can be due to infection, diet, or genetics and can clump together to form bladder stones. The specific gravity (spec grav), or
PU/PD or Why is My Pet Peeing on the Floor?
by Dr. Lori Scarlett, DVM
concentration, is important too. If the spec grav is low, the urine will look pale, which indicates the pet is drinking a lot. This can change throughout the day, so your vet may ask you to collect the firstmorning urine sample, which is when the urine should be most concentrated.
If there isn’t a urinary bladder infection and the spec grav is low, then we start on our list of causes for PU/PD. Polyuria (PU) is the production of abnormally large amounts of dilute urine, and polydipsia (PD) is excessive water consumption. At least 23 diseases or conditions can cause PU/PD in pets, so it can take time to figure out the specific cause.
Sometimes, a little detective work is all that’s needed to figure out why a pet might be drinking more. A change in diet or new treats that are high in sodium can be the culprit. Did your dog steal pizza off the counter? He will likely be drinking more water for a day or so. When a pet drinks more, the bladder fills up more quickly, and they may not be able to wait for their regular walk. Removing the salty food should stop the excessive drinking quickly.
More often, there’s an underlying disease causing the pet to drink more water. Cushing’s disease, or
hyperadrenocorticism, is fairly common, particularly in middle-aged and older small-breed dogs. This disease is caused by an overproduction of steroids in the body due to either a tumor on the pituitary, which tells the body to produce more steroids, or by a tumor on the adrenal gland, which makes the steroids. Steroids, including those taken orally, given by injection, or used topically, also have the side effect of PU/PD. A urinalysis on a dog with Cushing’s (or treatment with steroids) will show a low spec grav and protein. Bloodwork will show high liver enzymes, and diagnosis is through additional blood testing. Interestingly, the opposite condition, Addison’s disease (hypoadrenocorticism) can also cause PU/PD.
Another endocrine disease that causes PU/PD is diabetes. Pets with diabetes aren’t producing enough insulin or their cells aren’t properly responding to insulin, so glucose (sugar) doesn’t get into the cells. Because the cells aren’t getting enough glucose, the liver makes more glucose, which ends up in the bloodstream. The kidneys can’t reabsorb all of it, so glucose ends up in the urine. This sugar pulls water with it into the bladder, leading to a lot of urine being produced. The loss of water then causes an increase in thirst, leading to PU/PD.
Don’t assume all urine messes in the house are bad behavior.
Diabetic animals may have a high spec grav, but the urine will test positive for glucose. Diabetics will also be losing weight and are hungry all the time.
Some severe infections will cause PU/ PD. Pyelonephritis, a kidney infection, or a pyometra, an infection in the uterus in an intact female, leads to the release of bacterial endotoxins, which can alter hormones responsible for water regulation. In addition to drinking and urinating a lot, these pets typically feel very sick.
In older cats and some dogs, their kidneys will stop working well, and they’ll be diagnosed with chronic kidney failure. There are four stages to kidney failure, with most people noticing a change in their pet by stage two. Most people first notice their cat drinking more or having larger urine clumps in the litter. A urinalysis will show a low spec grav, as the kidneys are no longer working to retain water in the body. While kidney failure can’t be reversed, it can be slowed down with special diets and other supportive care, so doing regular bloodwork and urinalyses as your pet ages is very important.
Psychogenic polydipsia is a neurologic disorder that causes dogs to compulsively drink water. Some liver diseases lead to high ammonia levels, which affects the brain. Psychogenic PD can be seen in puppies experiencing stress; behavioral
treatment can be helpful. Hungry or malnourished puppies may also drink a lot if there isn’t food available.
Diabetes insipidus is a rare disease where either too little antidiuretic hormone (ADH) is produced or the kidneys aren’t responding to the hormone. ADH tells the kidneys to reabsorb water. In animals without this hormone, all the water that passes through the kidneys goes to the bladder, leading to PU. Diagnosis is often by giving the pet nose drops containing an ADH analog to see if they stop being PU/PD.
The tests I ran on Moby were all normal. It turned out that Moby peeing on the bath mat was his way of telling us he didn’t like the new litter. He stopped once we switched back to the previous brand. When urine started showing up in front of a litter box, I suspected another cat was involved. It turned out that Eddie did have a bladder infection; antibiotics stopped that urine issue. As for the dog
urine, not being let out late enough in the evening and being startled by a loud noise in the morning—owner errors— were primary factors.
Don’t assume all urine messes in the house are bad behavior. Dogs and cats don’t pee in the house because they’re angry; there’s an underlying reason, and your vet is in the best position to help figure out the cause and how to treat it.
Dr. Lori Scarlett, DVM, is the owner and veterinarian at Four Lakes Veterinary Clinic. fourlakesvet.com.
Dr. Lori Scarlett
Pranav Sood
Life in the Big Apple
by Kyle Jacobson
Pranav Sood is recognized in art circles for his compelling use of color and dreamlike storytelling. His pieces stand out in a gallery, much like those of Keith Haring and Andy Warhol, and demand attention. I was fortunate enough to share my interview with Pranav four years ago, before he moved to New York. At the time, he was brimming with excitement, confident he’d shake the art world with his perspective and vision—a tall order, but a familiar one for any young artist in their 20s eager to leave their mark.
Those last four years proved to be inspiring and humbling for Pranav: each bringing its own set of challenges and chances. The first year was “the pandemic, so it was difficult to make connections,” says Pranav. “I thought that though New York is big, at the same time, the art world is small, so I would meet people and make friends. I saw it as an opportunity—New York as a stopped subway train that I could hop on easily. Everyone was open to scheduling a Zoom call when I reached out to them on Instagram. I rented a private studio, where I immediately
started painting and building inventory so when everything was back to normal, I could invite people to show my work.”
Thrilled with his first year living his dream in the city, there were still a few transitions in culture he wasn’t prepared for. In Madison and much of Wisconsin, people want to celebrate events on the day of and enjoy the company of one another in the moment. In Queens and New York City, your special moment has to fit into everyone’s schedule, or it might not happen. So even on days that were months or years in the making, like an art exhibition, Pranav would return to an empty home or studio and just try to occupy himself.
Being alone afforded him more studio time to focus on work and contemplate his experiences, opening more doors of perception to better see who he is in the world. New Yorkers, to him, are tough and decisive. Is this who he wanted to be? Who he aspired to be? Or was his “Indian, rosy-colored positivity” one of those parts of himself he’d carry through each new present?
These thoughts are sometimes just too much for him to simply think through, and when they start to carry a theme, the end result is often a painting. Much like murals in the Indian temples he grew up with, there are recurring characters and ideas in his paintings, providing opportunity for the viewer to make sense of the order and create a story.
“Though my paintings are very open ended, joyful, and full of positivity, they aren’t just characters. I want people to see the agitation behind them. Sometimes when people feel hurt or low, they can see a painting and actually connect with some meaning. I don’t want to give my audience preplanned answers.”
His approach was further validated in 2022, when Pranav was selected to create a site-specific public mural, commissioned by the New York City Department of Education, New York City Construction Authority’s Public Art for Public Schools program, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs Percent for Art program. From concept to installation,
the whole thing took three years, fulfilling his long-standing dream to have a public mural in the “City of Murals.”
“The project was created for the Oscar de la Renta Education Campus, specifically the elementary and middle school students. Each panel represents different aspects of life— moments and emotions we experience every day, every month, and throughout our entire journey. It reflects the steps we take toward achieving our dreams. I hope that anyone who views it will understand that dreams begin with inspiration and that the process is filled with positivity and possibility. Along the way, we meet unique individuals, but there will also be times when we feel lost or discouraged—when the answers aren’t
clear. In those moments, it’s important to pause, take a deep breath, and find stillness. Eventually, the clarity you need will come, and in time, everything will fall into place. The next day, you’ll begin again, renewed with fresh inspiration.”
The mural, porcelain enamel on steel for the entry façade of the school, is entitled I Am More Than Who I Am . The panels are presented next to the building’s wheelchair access, so a person experiencing them up close is ascending to the final piece. Though the order of the pieces is intentional,
viewers won’t necessarily connect with them chronologically—something Pranav believes is part of appreciating his paintings. Whatever is going on in a person’s life, on any given day, a painting might start having a lot more to say.
While conceptualizing the mural, Pranav also got married. The experience of a strong and intimate friendship lends itself to many of his pieces and provides him welcome day-to-day interactions. “I find marriage is the best. Now she’s living with me, so no more video calls or time differences. I have someone to talk
to anytime and party with. I can share what I’m thinking, what I want to do, and how I’m going to do it. In return, I receive valuable insights and, sometimes, better approaches.”
With a style that has defined the early part of Pranav’s art career, he shares with me that the future might start to show a transition in medium. “I want to explore sculptures,” he says. “3-D objects, relief things, freestanding sculptures.” It would provide a fantastic complement to the stories he’s already developed as a visual artist.
Pranav is defined by his need to continually discover himself. Each endeavor is a new voyage, but through his journey, he’s learned that he isn’t at peace manning the ship. His role isn’t that of a fighter or a decider. He’s an astute observer. The poet with a brush trying to capture the feeling of what comes before him, trusting the moment to place him where he needs to be.
“When I started, I was full of youthful energy—fresh out of grad school. The first three years in New York taught me the survival skills I needed to navigate a city like New York. I felt like a small piece of wood drifting on the tide, observing and learning from every challenge. Now,
Photographs by Nicholas Knight.
Photograph by Barbara Wilson
Kyle Jacobson
Image: Kate Marotz
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contest
Win a Bergamot Massage Signature 60-Minute Massage ($95 value)
question:
“What is the name of another restaurant created by the owners of Gates + Brovi?”
Enter by submitting your answer to the above question online at madisonlocallysourced.com or by email or mail. With your answer, include your name, mailing address, phone number, and email to mls@madisonlocallysourced.com or Madison Locally Sourced c/o ASJ Publishing LLC PO Box 559 McFarland, WI 53558
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Thank you to everyone who entered our previous contest. The answer to the question “Where did the Air Force send Ben Jackson after basic training?” is Japan. A Bergamot Massage & Bodywork gift card was sent to our winner, Mary Braskamp of Madison, WI.
