The Alcove by MadTree: Restaurant, or the Mac App?

#The short answer: it is a restaurant

The Alcove by MadTree is a restaurant and bar in Cincinnati, run by MadTree Brewing, and it is not software of any kind. If you typed the alcove by madtree into a search box, the odds are overwhelming that you want a table, a brunch menu, or the address, not an app to install. So the useful thing I can do first is send you the right way: search for their own website or their Instagram, where the hours and menu are current, rather than trusting a page like this one that I do not keep in sync with a kitchen.

I am a Mac developer. I write this blog to explain the small world of MacBook notch apps, and one of those apps happens to be named Alcove. That single word is why our two audiences collide in search results. The brewery got there with a restaurant; a different team got there with a utility. Neither borrowed from the other as far as I can tell, and there is no relationship between them. It is just a common English word that two products picked.

#What Alcove by MadTree is known for

Here is what I can say honestly, and where I stop. MadTree Brewing is a Cincinnati brewery, and Alcove is its restaurant-and-bar concept. From what is public, the flagship sits in Over-the-Rhine, the neighborhood usually shortened to OTR, and a second location opened in Blue Ash’s Summit Park. The name that shows up in coverage and on social is Alcove by MadTree, handle @madtreealcove. Where it gets written up, the words that recur are brunch and private events.

Now the honest limit. I have not eaten there. I cannot tell you today’s menu, whether there is a happy hour this month, or who pours the best Bloody Mary in Cincinnati, because ranking cocktails in a city I do not live in would be me making things up, and this blog does not do that. Those are exactly the questions their own page answers and mine cannot. So if your search was about food, drink, hours, or booking a room for an event, treat this paragraph as a signpost and go to the source.

That is genuinely most of what a disambiguation page owes you. If you got what you needed, close the tab with my blessing. The rest of this is for the smaller group who meant the software, or who now want to know why a word like this ends up attached to a Mac utility at all.

#The other Alcove: a Mac notch app

Alcove the app lives in a category most people have never heard named. Recent MacBooks have a camera notch cut into the top of the screen, and macOS itself does almost nothing with the space around it: the menu bar just wraps around the cutout. A handful of small developers build apps that turn that dead strip into a live status area, the way the iPhone’s Dynamic Island behaves. Music controls dock beside the notch, a timer pins to it, activities expand out of it. Alcove is one of those apps, and it leans toward a clean, minimal take on the idea.

It is paid software, and the exact price and feature set change often enough that I will not quote a number I would have to keep correcting. Check its own site. If you want to see how much these apps can differ once you look past the shared visual gimmick, the settings side of the category is deeper than it seems, which I got into in what you can actually customize on a Dynamic Island app. And there is a whole open-source wing of this world too, with its own trust trade-offs, which I weighed in is Boring Notch safe.

I should be upfront that I compete with Alcove the app directly. I build a rival called NotchBay. That means I am not a neutral referee on which notch app is best, and you should read any comparison from me with that thumb on the scale in view. I try to keep the factual claims about other apps checkable against their own sites, and to be clear about where mine falls short.

#Which one were you looking for?

Sort yourself in one line. If your search was tied to Cincinnati, OTR, Blue Ash, brunch, a bar tab, or a private event, you wanted the restaurant, and nothing on a software site helps you. Go to the MadTree or Alcove restaurant page and stop reading here.

If your search was tied to a Mac, a MacBook notch, the menu bar, or the phrase Dynamic Island, you wanted the app. In that case the honest next step is to compare the notch apps against each other rather than take any single maker’s word, mine included. I wrote a direct head-to-head in NotchBay vs Alcove that lays out where each one is stronger, and a second comparison against the most established paid option in NotchBay vs NotchNook. Read them as a starting map, then trial the ones that look right on your own hardware.

One requirement worth knowing before you get attached to any of these apps, because it catches people: the whole category needs a MacBook that actually has a notch, and the newer ones need a current macOS. NotchBay, for instance, requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) and a notched MacBook, and it renders nothing on an Intel Mac or an external display. Alcove and the others each have their own floor. Check the requirement before you spend an evening choosing, so you are not choosing between apps your machine cannot run.

#Frequently asked questions