Café Hollander Hilldale

Hilldale is Madison's west-side shopping district, a mall that has been rebuilt over the years into something closer to a walkable town centre, and Café Hollander occupies a corner of it with a large terrace. The format is Belgian café by way of Milwaukee — the Lowlands Group has run several of these across Wisconsin — which means an extensive Belgian and craft beer list, mussels and frites, and an all-day service that runs from breakfast through to late.

The alcohol-free offer here is narrower than most entries in this guide, and it would be dishonest to inflate it: this is a beer café, the beer list is the point, and there is no long printed mocktail menu. What there is, and what Madison Eats Food Tours picked out, is non-alcoholic sparkling wine poured and built into a mimosa with orange juice. That deserves more credit than it sounds like. Brunch is the meal where not drinking is most conspicuous — the mimosa and the bloody mary are effectively the format — and a room that can hand you a flute with something real in it removes the whole awkwardness. It is also, in practice, one of the very few places on Madison's west side able to do that.

Set expectations accordingly. Strength three here reflects a genuine but limited programme: a de-alcoholised sparkling wine and the willingness to use it, rather than a constructed zero-proof list of the sort Nitro Beverage Lounge or Blind Shot Social Club run. The value is location and format — a large, family-friendly, all-day room on the west side, close to Gates & Brovi on Monroe Street and a short drive from Sober Social's bottle shop in Middleton, in a part of the metro where the alternatives are thin. Hours are not published in a form we can verify; check before a brunch trip.