'A spot for everybody'

“To be quite honest it will be like nothing you’ve seen in Wisconsin,” says Elizabeth Nicole Swain, owner and operator at Golden Roost Breakfast & Bakery. “It will be rich and simple, wild and wacky, and full of life and community.” 

“It really,” she adds as employees buzz around the new business at 213 and 215 East Main Street preparing to open, “is a spot for everybody.” 

Swain’s husband, Nathanael Michael Ignatius Lokai, is head chef and co-owner. As he worked to finalize the menu last week, he described a vast litany of locally-sourced foods: sage-sausage Scotch eggs, omelets starring local veggies, house-baked English muffins and more. Protein from the Meatsmith Cooperative, which is housed in the same building, will soon be available, too. 

“[W]e’ll be serving a variety of dishes that are some of my personal favorites, including shakshuka with poached eggs, whipped feta, and herbed flatbread; house-made sausage gravy and biscuits using an award-winning sausage from Wilson Family Farms in Cuba City that we’ve seasoned to our own recipe; Croque Madame served on slices of our house-made Pullman loaf; and a seasonal farmer’s omelet featuring whatever is coming out of the ground at the moment,” he said. “Tomorrow it’ll be a local mushroom and Swiss chard omelet using produce from Squashington Farm, but that’ll change based on what we can source from them, as well as Terra Growers and Kingfisher.”

The Roost will feature chalkboard specials based on what the Meatsmith Cooperative has available once they’re fully operational, including beef, lamb, pork and poultry. And they will have a Farm Stop, a bodega of sorts where people can buy veggies and more from local farms. (Think of it as a way to access the items sold at the Mount Horeb Farmers Market, which is held Thursdays at the nearby ELC church, all week long.)

As for coffee – “I could go off about coffee; I’m super passionate about coffee,” exclaims Swain with a level of energy apt for the topic – they are serving Mounds View Roasters. 

“It felt important to support a local roaster while also serving a truly exceptional cup of coffee,” said Lokai. 

Lokai added that he has several additional “real showstopper dishes” he plans to unveil when the time is right, too. 

In additional to a breakfast restaurant featuring seasonal menu items and baked goods, the Roost, taking advantage of the fact that they actually have multiple doors and multiple unique spaces all under one roof in the heart of downtown Mount Horeb, will also feature a cake shop. 

They already have 12 employees and embarked on a soft opening a week ago, following weeks of work to transform the space. 

Swain, who grew up in Arizona and has extensive experience opening and running restaurants, said the idea is to give Mount Horeb something the community wants and needs; a vibrant hub where people can connect with each other and with local food. 

“Our whole place is kind of farm-to-table,” she said. “That’s been our passion, both separately and together, since we were teenagers.” 

While Swain has plenty of restaurant experience, it’s only part of an eclectic life and career thus far. She’s worked in hospice care, serving as a death doula, – “It’s a part of life,” she says – and she has farmed the land and lived off the grid. 

In some ways, her newest venture is a culmination of all that and more. For the people behind the Golden Roost Breakfast & Bakery, the business isn’t just about ledgers and receipts. It’s an extension of their own lives, their own food ethics, and their own personal philosophies. Having moved to Mount Horeb from Madison six years ago, they found a fascinating mix of people and ideas; a place not yet fully paved, where unique local businesses hold out against cookie cutter chains, where the community still has its own flavor, where local farmers and other food producers still offer a palpable link to the rhythms of the local earth. 

“Farming has always been super close to me,” she said. “The physical part of living. These days it seems like there is so much façade, and I think people are yearning for something real.”