Grumpy Troll Pub & Brewery

Review created for a mild to hot summer day.
Beer: took me a while to acclimate, but when I did… I can drink 2 – 3 beers. Good variety: wheat, ambers, lagers (blonde, red, brown, Scottish), and now a bunch of IPAs. Their Sunflower and Trailside Wheat are tasty on a hot day. The rest are hit-​or-​miss.
Food: get SWEET POTATO TOTS and FRIED GREEN BEANS! OMG! these are fabulous. Their main entrees are just decent (reuben with turkey). But these bea-​u-​tees are great! I’ve driven the 25 min just to get these to bring them back home, as sides for my cookout.
Service: they need help. I usually go on a weekday (after a bike ride), and they still have enough patrons to make the servers «slow.» They are friendly, but when you’re starving, you’re STARVIN’! (or fiening for a beer!)
Bonus: they are just off the military ridge trail (about a block — like most restaurants in Mt Horeb)!

Downstairs is a little busy and usually has a lot of families in the dining area.
The best part about this brewery is the pizza parlor upstairs. Has a second bar too. The pizza is itself 5 Star. They have awesome toppings and specials too plus you can do half and half. Thinner crust pie. They have other apps too and a good beer list on draught.

As one other person mentioned, mostly hype. I didn’t even finish my burger cause it was dry and tasted lousy. The Grumpy chips were supposed to be thick cut fried potatoes with melted cheese. We got paper thin, rock hard, gravel tasting things with what looked like burnt artificial cheese substitute. If you’re looking for mediocre food, served in a fairly nice place with a cool name, this is for you. There are too many pubs out there with actual good food to waste your time on hype.

Great food. Great beer. And fabulous service! The burgers and grump chips are some of the best around.

My fiancé and I were in Mt Horeb for a short visit and discovered this place after seeing ads off the highway. Grumpy Troll Pub and Brewery is… a pub and brewery. I actually don’t happen to like pub food all that much, since it seems that most pub eateries think you can throw garbage in a fryer and serve it and call yourself a restaurant. That doesn’t seem to be the case at Grumpy Troll. We got fried mac n gouda cheese bites, beer cheese soup, a Reuben, and fish and chips. The mac n gouda cheese bites were quite good — if you’ve had mac n cheese bites elsewhere, then you can imagine what they taste like here. The beer cheese soup was not very good, unfortunately, as it was way too salty — it served better as a dip for fries than it did a proper soup. The reuben was good quality for a pub (not as good as what you’d find at a quality deli, understandably) and the fried beer battered cod was delicious. The beer battered fries were incredibly. Absolutely incredible, and I’m pretty neutral toward fries, but these were really great, even after hours later when I was eating leftovers.
I give the food that I had a 3.5÷5. But I had some of the best beer in recent memory here. We got a couple pints of the Trailside Wheat Hefeweizen and immediately fell in love. We actually got 3 more growlers of the stuff while we were in town. We were so fond of this beer, my rating gets boosted from a 3.5 to 4.5÷5 stars.
Downsides are that the pizzeria is not open on Monday. However, notably, a lot of places are closed on Mondays in Mount Horeb, so it’s not specific to Grumpy Troll.

Loved the Salmon Salad. Very nice with the Hoppa Loppa IPA. Cheese curds were good. Fried cod was good. Service was good. Wish I could stick around and try more of the beer selection. Will be back when in area again.

This place is really great. Had a couple of brews and really enjoyed them. The food is nothing special so that’s why I knocked off a star, but you are going there for the beer not the food. Bartender was really friendly and everyone at the bar was really friendly. I really wanted to give this place 5 stars but the mediocre food had to impact something!

Great selection of beers and the curds were solid too. Bit pricey but overall a solid all around experience.

I think this place is mostly hype. The bar is really small. There is some strange rule about ordering pizza upstairs but not downstairs. Full menu downstairs and not upstairs? I don’t get it. Separate owners? No clue but get it together. Give customers what they want. We would have spent a lot more money here!
The food we were allowed to order was only decent. I had the vegetarian chili which only had 1 type of bean. It wasn’t even chili really. More like a cup of black beans. My salad was pretty crappy.
Other people were not overly thrilled with the sandwiches either. Maybe we should have walked upstairs and did pizza. The service is friendly. The beer is just ok. The bloody mary is SPICY! Even if you love spice! Just be warned.

Great microbrew beers and food. The fried Mac and cheese appetizer was so cheesy and delicious. Had the fish and chips while my friend had the burger. The Grumpy Troll potato side was cheesy and yummy as well.

Many of the food choices are exceptional. We love the walnut burger and macaroni bites! This review would be five stars based on location and food, however, their system for seating diners in the main dining room/​pub is ridiculous. When you arrive there are several signs asking you to go through the pub and check in with the hostess-​no problem there. What annoys me EVERY TIME we go is we are asked to wait 5 – 25 minutes while we stare at open tables and booths in the pub which have a «reserved» sign placed on each one. These are meant to be reserved for people waiting but either the hostess can’t keep up or could there be a backup in the kitchen they are worried about? Either way – SEAT YOUR GUESTS IF YOU HAVE SPACE! They may even spend more on drinks and appetizers if you do! We will return when this operational annoyance is fixed. I’ll carry out until they do.

If I could give Grumpy Troll a 10 star rating I would, this place is for sure worth trucking out to mount horeb for!
We got there at 5:20 on a Saturday and there was a 30 minute wait. They had the badger game on and the bartender was very attentive, so the wait was no problem! The beer is absolutely delicious. My favorite was the sunflower and my husbands favorite was the dunken-​weizen. Beers are reasonably priced which was a pleasant surprise given how many awards they have won.
The wait time was as quoted, and service was EXCELLENT once we were seated. We both had burgers which were great, and the sweet potato tot appetizer was awesome. We are going back this weekend with friends and can’t wait to try the 1.5 pound pretzel!

My wife and I went here last night for a going-​away party for one of her coworkers and the experience was largely positive but the food was mixed, but the service was very good. On this visit I can only speak to the pizzeria as we did not go into the main dining area.
I had a Pizza Roll-​Up done in the style of BBQ chicken. The crust was flavorful and crisp, I loved it. They don’t skimp on the ingredients, either. The cheese that leaked out got a little seared which some folks might not enjoy but I actually like. All in all that was great. I’d get it again in a heart beat.
My wife, however, obtained the penne pasta bake. Again — they did not skimp on the ingredients and the meatballs were good, especially with the cheese, but ultimately the sauce was bland — it needed several notches more *something* to get it to where it needed to be. The pasta was also overcooked and I think this is in large part because they weren’t subtle with the sauce so when it baked the pasta cooked even more. It wasn’t a «one star» dish but that’s only because the meatballs and garlic bread saved it from the abyss.
The Pizza Roll-​Up, however, has me inclined not to write them off. If we come back to the area a repeat visit will definitely be in the realm of possibility.

Absolutely love the grumpy troll. A little hard to find in downtown mt horeb as its off a side street. But worth a slow down while driving through town to find. They brew their own beers and root beer here and you can see the large tanks when you enter the greeters area. The resteraunt is clean and staff friendly. The food is excellent. I ordered a grumpy troll burger and beer battered fries. My husband a rueben. We had the root beer since we don’t like beer. Very good. A must go destination if you are traveling towards or away from Mt horeb/​Madison area.

I’ve been here twice now. The first time, we ate downstairs. The beer is good the food is ‘meh’. I ordered chicken wings that were not good. The salads looked great, though!
The second time was tonight. We veered upstairs to the pizzeria. Holy smokes was it good! Crust was thin and perfectly cooked. Toppings were plentiful with lots of veggies!
I will definitely be back upstairs to the pizzeria.
The menu was well priced and the service was good:).

LOVED the cheese curds! I’m not a Wisconsin native, so perhaps I’m not the best to judge, but I absolutely loved them! Gooey goodness!
The burger was pretty good– threw some extra cheese on there and the veggies were fresh! The side of chips was delicious– also perfectly seasoned and with toasted cheese!
The enchilada soup and side salad were pretty good as well; however, the raspberry vinaigrette was far too sweet (I actually think they might have forgotten to add the vinegar because it was sweet enough for a pastry).
The service was great and the outside patio was wonderful as well.
Wish I would’ve had more room in my belly for the deep fried Snickers bar, but the portions were huge and I left very satisfied.

We stopped here on our way towards the Mississippi River for a camping trip. Bryan and I are always looking for breweries whilst road-​tripping, so when we saw signs for The Grumpy Troll it was time to pull over for a couple of beers and some dinner. Our waitress was great, and brought us beer samples to try as we perused the menu. She was even patient when I asked what was up with all of the trolls in town.
To be honest, I was about to google their menu because I completely forgot which beers we had. I guess that kind of speaks to their memorability… I wasn’t blown away, but it was cold beer so I drank it. Dinner was great though. I enjoyed the best fried walleye sandwich I’ve ever tasted, served on a deliciously soft hoagie roll with tartar sauce and LTO. Alongside the sandwich I ordered the beer battered fries, which were perfectly crispy and satisfying. Bryan had a reuben which ended up being average when stacked up against others we’ve had.
The hostess stand is located in the back of the restaurant, which I could see being an issue when the restaurant gets busy. Due to this, the dining room had so many signs explaining where to go that I was waiting for someone to tell me to grab a rope and hold on tight as I walked to my table. It took away from the ambiance a little bit, but I just decided to focus on the troll dolls staring at me from above the bar. Overall, Grumpy Troll is probably one of the best places to stop if you’re in the area and looking for something that isn’t a chain. I enjoyed my experience and the town of Mt. Horeb looks like it’s worth a walkthrough too.

Every time we tell someone that we are going to Mt. Horeb, he or she will inevitably say «Oh! Are you going to the Grumpy Troll?» Or something to that effect. This time, we finally went.
Husb. tried one of their red ales, I sampled their Boreas, and we split the nachos. We both enjoyed our beers, but the nachos were typical subpar bar nachos. They used a three-​cheese blend, one of them being liquid nacho cheese, and within ten minutes our stomachs were turning! People around us ordered the sweet potato tots, and in hindsight we wished we would have tried them.

This place has not changed much from my first time visiting a few years ago.
The service is ok, not bad and not great. Maybe have servers stop by a bit more frequently?
The food is ok to good. It really depends on what you order. I enjoyed the BBQ pulled pork sandwich. The fish is good too. A family member ordered a flatbread and it was not even remotely good. I think they’ve since removed it from the menu.
The beer here is ok. I’ve only enjoyed «Erik the Red.» The others I just didn’t care for. This place always seem to be busy in the bar, the dining area comes and goes as far as traffic.
I’d maybe come back if I knew that they improved the service.

I’ve been meaning to write an update for the Troll… I’ve been back at least six times over the past few years, and none of the additional visits have been worthy of anything more than 1 star.
Why?
— The beer. It doesn’t suit my palette. There are a few that I can stomach (barely) — the Pale Ale isn’t awful, but as another review mentions, there is beer elsewhere that tastes better to me.
— The service. With the exception of 1 abnormally decent visit, the servers are quite absent; when they do drop-​by, everything feels rushed.
— Why is your hostess stand in the far back corner??? ??? ??? ??? I hate having to slither through drunken patrons just to get to the hostess stand and request a table.
— The food. I’ve had a few more fish frys (including fried options), a wrap, a burger, and a salad — none have been memorable.
So… I don’t think I’ll be back. It’s a good looking place, and I like the idea/​concept. Unfortunately, my half-​a-​dozen visits haven’t been positive.