RESTAURANT NEWS | WISCONSIN
A Chef, His Mother-in-Law, and 36 Seats
Chef Christopher Lund and his mother-in-law, Sara Anderson, run Begonia, a Latin restaurant where the tortillas are pressed by hand and the menu follows the Midwest seasons.
BEGONIA | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Jamie Dutton
6:19 a.m. CT, Oct. 21, 2026
Scallop tiradito
AUTHOR BIO: Jamie Dutton's job has her in airports regularly, as does a family spread out across the Midwest. She’s partial to BPTs and Bell’s.
The first thing to know about Begonia in Madison is the tortillas.
They’re pressed by hand every day from La Cosecha masa, and they set the terms for everything that follows. This is modern Latin cooking, made from scratch, served in a 36-seat dining room that’s small enough that the kitchen can see every table.
The restaurant is a family business in the literal sense. Chef Christopher Lund runs the kitchen; his mother-in-law, Sara Anderson, a Madison native, is the general manager and co-owner. Lund spent years cooking in California and Arizona before coming to Madison to build something of his own. The pair have worked this address before, as the team behind Kettle Black Kitchen; Begonia is a new direction for the space, not a relaunch.
Biscuits with smoked chili compound butter
Lund draws on the flavors of Latin America and the Southwest, builds them with French and Italian technique, and bends them toward whatever the Midwest season is doing. The guacamole is prepared to order in a molcajete. The street corn comes with aji rocoto, cotija, and a dusting of Savory Accents chili.
A scallop tiradito sits in gooseberry leche de tigre, the citrus marinade Peru serves with raw fish, with coconut milk and toasted pepitas, and the anticucho is grilled venison with a jalapeño gastrique and yuzu coconut aioli. The arroz chaufa, Peru’s fried-rice tradition by way of China, carries confit duck and salsa macha.
The sourcing stays largely close to home: Peterson ribeye and pork, Door County cherry salsa, Dream Farm goat cheese, Gentle Breeze honey. Most of the menu is small plates built for the middle of the table, and there’s a standing offer at the bottom of it, in the restaurant’s own words: “Let us order for you, we will take it from there.”
Farmers salad
The format changes with the night. Some guests stop in for a drink and a few plates; others hand the evening over entirely. On Badger home game days, there’s a separate game-day menu, a concession to the rhythm of a college town.
Venison anticucho
Begonia cocktails
There’s a full bar, and the cocktails arrive on bright paper coasters that suit the room—colorful, a little loud, and not taking itself too seriously. Thirty-six seats isn’t many. Lund and Anderson have built the kind of place that depends on a neighborhood deciding it’s theirs, one pressed tortilla at a time.
