Water House Foods

In a word: Bard to beat in Lake Mills.

The specs: #0734  
Address, hours & details via Isthmus; reviews at Yelp, CeliaOnline (video), Isthmus; Facebook, official web site,

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Anne ate the beef & blue with pickles and a Steaz raspberry tea.
JM ate the ham & swiss with pickles and a Point vanilla cream soda.
John ate the man's man with turkey salad, potato leek soup, and a Point root beer.
Nichole ate the BLsdT with melon and a raspberry Klarbrunn.
We also picked up a loaf of asiago bread ($6).
The bill was about $10/person (before bread) plus tip.
Anne, JM and Nichole gave Water House Foods an A-; John gave Water House Foods a B+ (see our grading rubric).

Water House Foods resides in a row of original downtown buildings across from the eerily-triangular Commons Park in Lake Mills (fun game: try to find bizarro symbolism in everything in the park to suggest a secret society). Water House bakes their breads, sources their stuff locally, and doubles as a community center and is third place of the first order. We found ourselves making a mental note of Thursday game nights, just in case we're ever in that neck of the woods again.

We went for a light lunch and covered about half the sandwich menu. Each 'wich has a Shakespearean nickname and a distinct personality. Clockwise from upper left:

BLsdT (aka Jacques) is a BLT with loads of thin bacon and a sun-dried tomato/lemon pepper mayo in place of the fresh tomato, which, while tasty, did reduce the overall heft and satisfaction quotient. Compensating for that, the thin yet hearty slices of multi-grain bread were chock full of nuts.

The man's man (aka Petruchio) is a five-meat, two-cheese behemoth on buttered white bread. Ain't nothing wrong with that. The cup of potato leek soup was served in a cute coffee mug with toasted croutons, and just in case there wasn't enough meat inside the sandwich, one of the sides on offer was a finely-diced, nicely-mayoed turkey salad.

The ham & swiss (aka Ophelia and aka #65) was anything but melancholic. Rosemary mayo and gruyere with plenty of juicy slices of cool ham on a delicate rye sourdough would lure all but the saddest sacks back to the riverbank. Nicely balanced between meat, veg and bread.

The beef & blue (aka Desdemona) is the only sandwich with an obvious mate (the Othello: beef & onion, hummus and "surprise vegetable"). Pepper roast beef done deliciously rare came through after a strong hit of buttermilk blue cheese. The outstanding strawberry glaze added spice, sweetness and salt at once.

All these literary references had us asking ourselves what, after all, makes a sandwich "Shakespeare-style."

The answer is, of course, that mustard sonnet.