Beloved campus-area restaurant Madistan is set to close after the new owners of its building decided not to renew its lease.
Madistan, 317 N. Bassett St., has been around for over a decade, serving up Pakistani and Indian cuisine. Its current owners, Narseen Saleem and her husband, Mohammed Qureshi, purchased the business over a decade ago from its previous owner after he sought to retire. The business is a family affair and has been a cultural mainstay for students in the area as a late-night option to eat and hang out.
“There’s a lot of culture here. It’s very mixed,” said Khizer Saleem, son of the owners. “There’s new students that come here, freshman, they come in here at like 12 a.m.. They’re like, ‘Wow. We love this place. We’re going to be coming here every weekend now.’ And it’s heartbreaking to hear that now.”
Saleem is sad to have that grounding experience so many UW-Madison students face no longer be something that each new cohort has.
“How do I tell them that you guys came here for the first time, saw this place, but we’re not going to be here in less than three months?” Saleem said. “It’s a really weird feeling to be in some place for 10 years, put all your effort, blood, sweat, and there’s almost nothing to come of it.”
The original plan for the place was to sell Madistan, but that is no longer on the table. Saleem has been managing the transition for the family and speaking with the new property owners to hopefully come to some deal to have more time, but it hasn’t yielded any results.
The building was previously owned by a local to the area, Wayne Dishaw. After his death, his children took the reins, but ultimately decided to sell the building to Chicago-based Altitude Capital Partners.
Qureshi trusted the family a great deal and had a good relationship with their father. Every time a lease renewal needed to be signed, he blindly did so because of the trust that had been built over the years.
However, the last renewal came with some unrealized caveats that the new owners would take control in the next round.
“The third [lease], I never knew that new management was going to be involved. I never knew there was nothing for us. They didn’t mention that your lease is 100% gone in 2026, so you have to leave,” Qureshi said.
Qureshi and his wife purchased the restaurant over a decade ago. While they were not the people who started Madistan, they owned it far longer than its original owner and have been very vested in the community.
Qureshi ventured into the restaurant game after working in gas stations for over a decade. He and his family immigrated from Pakistan in 2004 and worked their way up to owning their own business.
The whole family works or has worked there. And while there were some talks about selling the store one day and retiring, they wanted to transition the store into a more cafe-style business. They wanted something a bit easier to manage that could still keep them within the campus community — but that’s gone now.
Saleem has attempted to speak with the property owners and management company to hopefully work something out. There is a fair bit of work needed to sell off equipment, but they need time and that hasn’t been allotted to them.
“I did try to contact them. I said, ‘Please give us a month-to-month lease. We’ll pay you guys — we’ll do the $300 increase a year that was in the original lease. We’ll pay you guys $4,000 a month even for this 1,200-square-foot space, and we’ll give you guys $4,000 a month for three months,’” Saleem said. “But there was absolutely no response; then we went into panic mode, looking for places.”
With no fruit from attempted negotiations, the family has accepted the reality that Madistan will close. They plan to operate as a catering business for now, so the community can still access their food.
They do still want to open a cafe and hope to stay within the campus area.
Madistan is planned to close in late August or on Sept. 1st. The lease ends on Sept. 30.
Updates on its catering and cafe can be found on Madistan’s Facebook page or Instagram.
