If you have lived in Tomah for more than a couple of winters, you know the pattern: someone from out of town asks where to eat, and the answer used to default to whatever was easy to find off McCoy Boulevard. That answer is changing. Between the Best of Tomah 2026 results, the city's Operation Phoenix downtown effort, and a facade grant cycle running through the summer, the center of gravity for eating in this town has quietly walked back downtown. This post is a resident's map of that shift, not a tourist listicle.
The takeaway in one line: the highway exit still feeds you, but the interesting week of eating in Tomah now happens between Superior Avenue and Gillett Park.
The awards told on themselves this year
The Tomah Chamber and Visitors Center runs the Best of Tomah survey each cycle, and the 2026 winners were announced this year. Two things stood out.
First, JAC's Steakhouse kept sweeping. In the last cycle it took Best Dining Experience, Best New Restaurant, Best Seafood, Best Restaurant Overall, and Best Steakhouse. That kind of five-category hold usually shows up right before a concept expands, and it did: JAC's Signature Steakhouse opened a La Crosse location in late April 2026. For residents, the read is simple. The Tomah original is now the flagship of a small group, which tends to sharpen a kitchen rather than dilute it, at least in the first year.
Second, BP Smokehouse held onto Best Barbeque. The menu is straight down the middle for what a smokehouse should be: ribs, brisket, pulled pork, pulled chicken, brats. If you have not made the drive lately, the point of interest is that they are still winning against newer entrants, not coasting on being the only smoker in town.
A downtown that is actually filling in
Downtown Tomah has spent the last decade with a handful of anchor spots and a lot of "for lease" signs on the second floors. The 2026 TID 8 Downtown Façade Grant is open now through the city, and the Monroe County Herald reported in April 2026 that Operation Phoenix is a resident-driven planning push rather than a top-down redesign. What that means at the sidewalk level is that the storefronts you walk past on Superior are worth checking every couple of months, because the turnover is real.
Here is the current downtown lineup worth knowing by name:
| Spot | What it is | Why residents go |
|---|---|---|
| Murray's on Main | Bar and kitchen with a large open-air patio | Gluten-free menu is unusually deep for a small-town kitchen |
| The Break Room | Sports bar and grill | All-day menu, breakfast through dinner |
| Crow Bar | Burger-forward bar | Casual, quick, walkable from the market |
| Peking Chinese | Sit-down Chinese, reopening | Long-running local favorite returning to the block |
| Natural Connection | Coffee, smoothies, daily lunch | Vitamins and gifts on the retail side, lunch on the counter side |
| Flatiron Cafe & Bar | Newer full-service spot | Recent addition to the downtown mix |
Murray's is the one worth planning around if you are hosting. The kitchen runs Tuesday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., with pizza until 9 p.m., and weekday happy hour from 4 to 6 p.m. The gluten-free depth matters if you have relatives with celiac coming through, because the fallback used to be driving to La Crosse or Wisconsin Dells.
The weekly rhythm most residents underuse
The single biggest change in how to eat well in Tomah is not a new restaurant. It is treating the Tomah Farmers Market at Gillett Park as the anchor of your week rather than a Saturday errand. The market runs from the first week of May through the last week of October, on the following schedule:
- Wednesdays, 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
- Saturdays, 6:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.
Wednesday evenings are the underused half. Select Wednesdays feature Americana Music in the Park after the market wraps, which folds a food-and-music evening into a weekday without a ticket. Pair it with a walk over to Murray's patio or the Crow Bar and you have a real night out for the cost of a plate.
Thursdays add the Chamber's Downtown Thursday Nights series. The Chamber's own description is six weeks of live music, food, and free admission in the summer. If you are the kind of household that keeps meaning to "get out more," these two evenings do most of the work.
The under-the-radar spots
Categories are useless here because the good ones each do one thing well:
- Laughing Larry's Lunch Room for a straight lunch counter without ceremony.
- Mandy's Cafe & Deli when you want a sit-down breakfast that is not a chain.
- Fathead Steve's for the from-scratch soups and dressings that people quietly recommend without ever ranking it.
- BP Smokehouse already covered, but worth naming again because it does not sit downtown and people forget it exists until someone brings a tray to a party.
None of these are novelty. They are the reason the town eats well on a Tuesday, which is a different question than the reason it eats well on a Saturday night.
The economic backdrop, briefly
There is a temptation to treat a small-town dining scene as immune to broader tourism cycles. It is not. Monroe County generated $170.4 million in tourism economic impact in 2025, according to figures cited by Visit Tomah. That number matters to residents in a specific way. It tells you which kitchens have the summer volume to reinvest in the off-season, and which are living paycheck to paycheck through February. The places on this list that are expanding, remodeling, or reopening are the ones with the summer months behind them. The ones that quietly disappear tend to be the ones that never converted a July into a January hire.
What this means if you are hosting
A practical resident's playbook for the next few months:
- Saturday morning: Farmers Market at Gillett Park by 8 a.m. for the produce that will not last past 10.
- Wednesday evening in season: Market until 6, then Americana Music in the Park on the featured dates, then a short walk to a downtown patio.
- Thursday evening: Downtown Thursday Nights while the series is running.
- Friday night, out-of-town guests: JAC's if you want to impress, Murray's if you want conversation to be possible at the table.
- Sunday afternoon reset: BP Smokehouse takeout, eaten at home.
That is a full week of eating that never touches a franchise and never requires a highway on-ramp. Five years ago that itinerary was not really available in Tomah. It is now, and it is worth defending by showing up.
A note for anyone weighing a move here
We write mostly for people who already live in Central Wisconsin, but the dining shift matters for anyone thinking about buying in Tomah too. A downtown that is filling in tends to hold home values on the surrounding blocks more steadily than one that is emptying out. The facade grant cycle and the Operation Phoenix planning process are the kind of quiet signals that show up in a neighborhood before they show up on any listing sheet.
If you want to talk through what any of that means for a specific block, or you are simply trying to figure out whether the house you like is a ten-minute walk to Gillett Park or a fifteen-minute drive to a gas station sandwich, that is exactly the conversation Pfaff Properties WI is built for. Reach out and let's find your place in Wisconsin.
