Settle Down Tavern

Settle Down Tavern opened on South Pinckney Street a few doors from Merchant and became one of the Capitol Square's reliable rooms — a bar and restaurant working in the Wisconsin supper-club register, which means brandy old fashioneds, a relish tray sensibility and food that does not apologise for being comfort food. It sits in a city block that also holds Merchant, Lucille and the Great Dane's downtown brewpub, which between them make the Square the densest concentration of credible non-alcoholic drinking in Wisconsin.

Visit Madison, the official visitor bureau, names Settle Down alongside Lucille as the downtown restaurants to check for mocktail menus, and Isthmus has noted that the bar shakes its own in-house non-alcoholic creations rather than pouring from a bottle. We have not been able to source the current drink names — the menu is not published in a form we can verify, and it rotates — so no named builds are recorded here rather than listing something stale. Ask at the bar; the programme is real, the specifics change.

Two practical details make it more useful than its neighbours for a non-drinker. First, the bar stays open through the afternoon even though the kitchen closes for a reset between 2:30pm and 4pm, so there is somewhere on the Square to sit with a drink at three in the afternoon — a gap most of downtown leaves open. Second, happy hour runs every weekday from 2 to 6pm, which in a supper-club room means the food specials matter as much as the drink ones. It opens at 11:30am Tuesday through Saturday, 4pm on Monday, runs to midnight on Friday and Saturday, and is closed on Sundays.