Food truck opening brick-and-mortar cafe at MadTree


Food truck owners Jeff and Melissa Ledford are opening a restaurant inside MadTree Brewing this week based on their popular wood-oven concept. Catch-a-Fire Café will continue to offer pizzas that customers know and love, as well as a few new items.
 
The food truck side of Catch-a-Fire launched in February 2013. Over the last year the truck has been a frequent sight at MadTree, which doesn’t currently serve food, so it made sense for the Ledfords to pursue opening a brick-and-mortar space inside the brewery.
 
Like the truck, the main method of cooking in the café will be a wood-fired oven. The menu will include 16 pizzas as well as dishes that use MadTree beer, such as pretzels with Gnarly Brown beer cheese, a PsychHOPathy-infused hummus and wood-fired wings with sauces like Happy Amber barbecue, a PsychHOPathy lime sauce, buffalo and jerk.
 
Ledford also plans to roll out specialty offerings and new dishes often, which will help the café keep up with the constant roll-out of new beers from MadTree.
 
The café will offer 16-inch pizzas in addition to its staple 10-inch. Online ordering will be available for to-go options.
 
Catch-a-Fire Café will be open when MadTree is open but will be closed Wednesday nights for MadTree's Hop Up dinners, which feature meals prepared by local chefs. Hours are currently 4-10 p.m. Tuesday-Wednesday, 4 p.m.-midnight Thursday, 4 p.m.-1 a.m. Friday, noon-1 a.m. Saturday and noon-8 p.m. Sunday.
 
Hours will change in the near future, when MadTree starts opening at noon Thursday and Friday for lunch.
 
And not to worry: The Ledfords plan to continue the food truck, though they'll likely shut down in the winter and start back up in the spring.
 
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Caitlin Koenig is a Cincinnati transplant and 2012 grad of the School of Journalism at the University of Missouri. She's the department editor for Soapbox Media and currently lives in Northside with her husband, Andrew, and their three furry children. Follow Caitlin on Twitter at @caite_13.