Boxed and Burlap Downtown

There is a speakeasy in the basement. Boxed and Burlap's downtown Delavan location runs as a coffee shop by day and a retro cocktail bar by night, with the upstairs cafe and the downstairs speakeasy operating as two essentially separate moods inside the same building. That is a useful arrangement for a small Wisconsin downtown.

Upstairs is light, airy, calming. Big tables. Couches. Leather chairs. Private nooks tucked away from the main floor for people who want to disappear into a book for an hour. The Sugar + Spice Latte and the Sunrise Latte are the named featured drinks. The salted honey latte got called the best a regular has ever had, which is the kind of claim that lands harder when it comes from someone who has tried a lot of them.

The kitchen pulls its weight with a sourdough BLT (avocado, garlic aioli) and a chocolate chip cookie that gets ordered alongside the lavender lemonade. Scones are on offer too. If you are staying, ask for a ceramic mug instead of paper. The room is clearly set up for the long-stay customer rather than the grab-and-go one.

For remote workers this is close to ideal. Large tables, plug outlets, easy parking on Sunday. The atmosphere holds at conversational levels rather than the loud-coffee-shop default. Groups can stretch a coffee meeting into an evening cocktail run downstairs without ever leaving the building, which doubles the use case in a way most cafes cannot offer.

The reviews do not indicate it is dog-friendly, so leave the dog at home. Otherwise this is one of the more flexible coffee operations in southern Wisconsin. It is a cafe that turns into a bar, which is a useful thing for one building to be. The Walworth Avenue location is the right choice on a Sunday afternoon when you want to start with coffee and end with a manhattan.