PBS Wisconsin Documentaries

The following program is a co-production of Wisconsin Public Television and University Communications at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.

conversations in background

I think that it’s just an experience that is like no other. Oh, I think it’s awesome. It’s Midwest, definitely Wisconsin. You know, you go out of state and– I don’t know– you don’t find many Supper Clubs.

We moved out to Wisconsin 12 years ago, and the Wisconsin supper clubs were something that people knew about in New England. And it was something we kind of sought out. I always like to think “Wow! You know, everybody in the state is kind of sitting down with me at the same table.” We are Wisconsinites.

We go to supper clubs. They’re a culinary tradition in the upper-Midwest. Hometown restaurants that serve hearty helpings and carry on Wisconsin heritage. Spend enough time in Wisconsin’s 300-plus supper clubs, and you’ll learn about the state’s history…

its culture… and the cutting edge research preparing its future. There’s a ton of science behind what we eat, especially at a supper club. They’re definitely an experience.

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A very unique experience.

water bubbling and flowing

For half a century, the Hobnob restaurant has stood near Lake Michigan between the cities of Racine and Kenosha. Hobnob was built in 1954. The original owner designed the building itself from a restaurant that he saw in California. It is kind of off the beaten path.

Kind of remote with a beautiful view and beautiful scenery. It is an independently-owned restaurant. It’s been around for 50 years. A little over the top in the style.

Somewhat retro, a little Art Deco here and there. Swanky. So that describes it. That’s a good word to call it.

Northwest, in the town of Plover, is the Sky Club… a family business now run by brothers Eric and Patrick Freund. The Sky Club, this is now it’s 80th year, but back in the ’30s, it was an old gas station. It’s been in our family since 1961.

We’re the third generation to have it. We’ve grown up with generations of customers. So, not only our regular customers, but also their kids, their kids’ kids. I mean it just goes on.

Toast. Cheers! Oh God, it’s like family! There’s still people coming out here that, when I was a kid, that used to come out here.

Continuing north, in the smaller community of Minocqua, is the Red Steer, a restaurant recently bought by Brad and Alison Kusek. Well, it’s been a restaurant for approximately 86 years. It’s been a supper club for at least 50 years, if not more. It started off as a hunting shack.

So, it’s pretty cool that we get to tell that story when customers come in. The fireplace is made of river stone. There is a woman that came in with her husband and her two kids, and she had told me the story of her grandfather and three of his friends had gone up to Superior and hand-picked the river stone. And they came back and built the fireplace.

I would say at least once or twice a week we get customers that come in and say, “I’ve been coming here for 40 years, 30 years, what have you. Thank you so much for taking over the place and keeping the nostalgia going.” You know, they just love it. Each place is unique… but each is considered a supper club.

Just what that means depends on whom you ask. Supper club, I believe, is a family-run business that’s not a chain. And you have unique family recipes and unique regional recipes to that area. Well, it’s relaxed.

Obviously, it’s not fast food. You come here to relax. You come here to visit with your friends or your family. But supper clubs mean so much more than just what is eaten there.

There’s this sense of specialness, togetherness. Supper clubs are a place where everybody’s welcome. Rich… poor…

young… old. Everybody’s welcome. If you walk in and you see a full bar, a big bar in a supper club, with a great bartender behind the bar,

liquid flows quickly from tap

that’s what supper clubs are, I feel. There are some traditional things that go along with

most supper clubs

several courses… And that’ll be a good start. Nice comfortable atmosphere, nothing rushed, everything made from scratch. A supper club is sort of Well, it’s a club that you can have supper in but it’s kind of like a nice club that you can come in, eat a nice meal, there’s live music and it’s just got a very lively atmosphere.

It’s an experience rather than just going to get something to eat. It’s a two-hour, three-hour experience. University of Wisconsin folklorist Jim Leary says the term “supper club” was first used to describe informal social groups. In the early 20th century, before the Volstead Act of 1919 that barred drinking, we know that there were actual clubs where they would go once a month or something, they would go to such and such place to eat.

And, then, of course, things changed after that all around food. Food writer Terese Allen says the term soon took on a different meaning. Supper clubs really started showing up in the United States as a name of a dining establishment sometime in the 1920s. And they were sort of destination places.

And then they really got popular in the 1950s and ’60s and that’s the time frame we tend to think of supper clubs. This was the time when supper clubs were really a little bit fancier, when it was not a place to go just for the meal; it was a place to go for a whole evening of entertainment. Those evenings of entertainment often began with a trip to the bar… and a drink that’s become a supper club staple.

It’s the Brandy Old Fashioned Sweet. The Old Fashioneds. Yep. It’s a Wisconsin thing, I believe.

Oh yeah, you got to have an Old Fashioned here. Yep, Brandy Old Fashioned Sweets are very popular. A large part of the 19-century immigration to this state was from Europe, especially Northern Europe. And those countries have sort of a sense of drinking spirits, especially on the sweeter side, and so they brought that tradition here.

Voil. All done. Lately, another drink has been gaining ground at the bar. Draft beer is definitely increasing, especially with the boom with all the crafts and small brewers.

We actually have four brewers in the county. Supper clubs are seeing and playing into the local foods movement, and the local foods movement is about being proud of what is grown and produced and sold and made locally. The number of beers made in Wisconsin is growing… and so are the opportunities for budding brewers.

It’s important because it’s a growth industry, and as you begin to see all those new breweries show up, whether it’s brewpubs or whether it’s really people who are going to be manufacturing beer for packaging, that requires staff. Jim Steele is a professor of food science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. One of the things that we’re trying to do is train brewers to go out into that industry. We get these students in the brewing program as seniors.

And really, we’re integrating the entomology, the chemistry, the microbiology and the engineering principles that they’ve learned as they come through the program. University researchers are also providing key insights to those working in the beer industry. They’re even investigating one of the key building blocks

of beer

yeast. What we’d like to be able to provide, of course, is a yeast strain to the industry that provides new and unique flavors. There is a strain that we’ve isolated from Wisconsin that is one of the two parents of the lager strain. And that strain we’ve made beer with now a couple of different times.

It’s a different, very unique flavor. Kind of reminds you of a lambic or something similar. It’s not quite like a lambic, but it’s more like a lambic than would be a traditional lager, and a very interesting beer.

beer pouring into glass

of beer

Back at the bar, new brews are only part of the picture. And for supper club regulars, the company they keep is even more interesting than the beers they drink. It comes with the atmosphere of a supper club. It invites you just to sit down and relax and just have a cocktail at your leisure.

You enjoy family time. Enjoy the people you’re around. Don’t be in a rush. Yeah, don’t be in a rush.

Just do it how it’s done. Just eat, I guess. Make an evening of it. Yep.

conversation in background

of beer

It’s the experience. It’s just come in and relax, and have a good time. Still to come… Medium rare.

Medium rare. Sizzling steaks and flaky fish take center stage in supper clubs. But before the main course, we’ll take a look at two Wisconsin traditions that make eating your vegetables oh-so easy. After soaking in the character of the place, catching up with a few old friends, and enjoying a trip to the bar, the meal can finally begin.

Supper clubs traditionally follow a core menu of a relish tray, salad bar or other appetizers, a hearty main course, and a sweet desert if you still have room. But they all share one key ingredient… If you’re going to come to a supper club and you’re going to have a two- to three-hour experience, I think the food should be fresh. We cook everything fresh from raw, scratch in a supper club.

We can’t just pull something out of the freezer quickly and prepare it or zap it in a microwave. It’s all made right here. Majority of the foods that we do bring in are made here in Wisconsin. We are a farming state so we draw from all kinds of different traditions around food.

Lots of places still have the quintessential relish tray. Just some cut vegetables. You’ve got root vegetables, or hearty ones that will keep like carrots, radishes, and celery. Not even a dip.

Just a little salt, you know, to dip the vegetables in. Very simple, and really good to begin a meal. The traditional, typical vegetables that you see, for example, the relish tray, those have been an integral part of Wisconsin’s Ag industry since the very beginning. As the agriculture industry grew in Wisconsin, so did the size of those relish trays.

But how do you show off all of those veggies and keep them fresh? The Sky Club claims they found the answer. The first ever salad bar was created, invented here in Plover at the Sky Club in 1950. Louie and Evelyn Schnittger, the previous owners, had asked Russell Swanson from Swanson Bars to manufacture something that could keep their relish trays and their vegetables cold because they were spoiling.

He created this little salad bar. It’s nothing like the one we have right now. It kept your carrots and your relishes and your potato salads and coleslaws cold in, I guess, what you would call an “ice bath.” So, that’s one thing that our family is extremely proud of is being the first-ever salad bar in the United States. Today, the salad bar is rooted in abundance and can often resemble an entire meal, in and of itself.

We have romaine lettuce, regular chopped lettuce. We’ve got different pasta salads. Giblet mold, and that’s an oldie. Cheese spreads, carrots, cauliflower, creamy cucumbers.

Shredded cheese, onions, bacon bits. Jell-O. Only in Wisconsin will you see Jell-O on a salad bar.

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Oh, yeah, we’ve got beets, too. Pickled beets. We have the best pickled beets around. Lots of good stuff.

All of those things have been mainstays and you’ll see those in abundance. And a lot of that is locally-produced material. We’ve also seen this big trend from farm-to-table. We actually have our own garden in the back.

We do grow some of our vegetables here. We’ll be like a little test market, too. We’ve got some of the farmers and distributors, they’re dropping off new styles of potatoes. And they’ll say, “Try these out”.

And we’d be happy to do that. We’ll do something, and then, we’ll give our information back to them. Sharing field research is at the heart of the University of Wisconsin. Horticulture Department Chair Irwin Goldman develops that research into real-world applications.

We breed new cucumbers for pickling. We breed new carrots for processing and we also breed beets. We’re studying aspects of those crops that relate to something the consumer can benefit from and, also, the farmer can benefit from. So, for the consumer side, we might be interested in breeding for flavor, or breeding for color, or breeding for shape.

Something that people can interact with directly. In the case of the farmer, we’re interested in developing something that has more yield or disease resistance. We can buy it fresh from them. And it’s nice that we can bring that experience to the customer.

There’s a really nice connection between the supper club and the Wisconsin Ag history.

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A state whose Ag history is no stranger to the dairy industry and leads the nation in cheese production. John Lucey is Professor of Food Science and Director of the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin. Some of the research that we’ve done here has led to improvements in cheese flavor. One of the actual cultures that was discovered here and used for cheese making is now probably used in almost every cheese plant across the U.S.

The industry has seen a shift in new varieties of cheeses and flavors, often making their way into different appetizers at supper clubs. Dairy has been around forever, but it’s always kind of reinventing itself with slightly different flavors, slightly different textures, different diversities, and that’s what you see in the supper clubs as it slowly percolates into menus and items that people have. Steak carpaccio. I make a bleu cheese mousse, which is bleu cheese and cream cheese mixed in.

It’s got shallots and garlic. For New Years Eve, I made a smoked Gouda and Gorgonzola mousse. Sometimes you get these little pots of cheese mixtures and so forth. It can be interesting if they have wine or strange stuff in them.

Well, it’s good Wisconsin cheese mixed up into a spreadable… for crackers and stuff. I’m not going to tell you exactly how it’s made because it’s, you know, it’s our, kind of, secret. What’s no secret is the access supper clubs have to fresh cheese.

Our cheese curds are from a cheese factory right down the road. Since we are in Wisconsin and we have so much dairy products made here, it doesn’t have to be shipped very far. So, we have an advantage in our supper clubs being able to source high quality, great tasting, fresh products. It’s nice to make everything on the menu homemade.

And to be able to have the fresh ingredients, it just makes it better. Fresh, regional ingredients make up the supper club menu, but what’s on the plate for the main course comes down to history and which night you decide to dine. While drinks, relishes, bread and butter may be supper club traditions, it’s the main course that steals the show. Each night has its own star, and on Friday the spotlight falls on fish.

Friday at a supper club generally means fish fry. Fish fry is one of my favorite customs, or culinary customs, if you will, in this state. It’s one of these unusual situations where all kinds of things have come together to create the fish fry tradition.

hot oil bubbles and sizzles

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If you look at this state, geographically you see water everywhere. Wisconsin has about 15,000 lakes. We’ve got the Mississippi River. We’ve got two Great Lakes that we border on.

Our history is really about fishing. Then, of course, we have a historically-large Catholic population. Catholics for many, many decades did not eat meat on Fridays. And then Prohibition also had an affect.

That’s really when the Friday night fish fry began to really take off. When taverns and bars could no longer serve alcohol during Prohibition, they needed to get people into the doors in some way. So, they would offer free or very cheap meals of fish on a Friday or a Friday night. And whole Catholic families would come in.

So, then, of course, by the time Prohibition ended, we had kind of already gotten used to eating these fish fries. Typically, you would be eating yellow perch, bluegill, walleye, a lot of local fish that people are familiar with. But, when you go to your typical fish fry these days, you’re probably going to be eating fish from outside of Wisconsin. Kathy Kline is an Education Outreach Specialist with the University of Wisconsin Sea Grant Institute.

Our local fish supplies started to dwindle because of problems like overfishing, but also environmental problems in the Great Lakes and changes in the food web. A lot of invasive species moved in and they’ve changed, basically, what’s eating what. The UW Sea Grant Institute is helping restore and maintain the health of Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes. The research that we’re supporting is looking at what’s going on in Lake Michigan and Lake Superior to our commercial fisheries.

Then, we’re also supporting research to find out how to raise some of these typical fish that Wisconsin people like to eat. A good example is yellow perch. Yellow perch used to be a very common fish in Lake Michigan, especially. So, we’ve been working on this for several decades and it’s paying off.

We’ve been partnering with Growing Power in Milwaukee. They’ve been raising yellow perch in aquaponics systems. Aquaponics is fish and plants living together in a closed system. Growing Power has been raising yellow perch with their plants.

They sell their plants to local restaurants. They’ve also now been selling their fish to a local restaurant. So, you can go now to a restaurant in Milwaukee on a Friday night and eat yellow perch that was grown right there in Milwaukee. Fish may be a Friday tradition, but on Saturday nights beef rules supreme.

Beef is king and U.S. is king at beef. Their steak or their prime rib. That’s what defines them.

My favorite would probably be the steak in a skillet. Big steaks. Our New York strips, our bone-in rib eye. Prime rib.

We have a phenomenal prime rib. We brought back a 20-ounce cut prime rib. The Emperor Cut. It’s hard to go wrong.

It’s hard to go wrong with anything here. Making the best steak possible means starting with the best meat possible. If you don’t have a nice piece of meat, then you’re not getting a nice steak. The higher quality, obviously, more tender, more flavor.

Marbling is very important. More marble the better, definitely, more flavor. The white specs of fat that’s in the meat. Fat is really, really important for meat products because it provides flavor and juiciness.

Jeff Sindelar is an associate professor of animal science at UW’s Meat and Muscle Lab. We have research that’s being conducted at a very molecular level to understand how to improve the quality of meat products. We’re trying to control that degrading of meat and trying to extend its life, so that we can utilize it the best before it spoils and goes bad.

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grill sizzles

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If you order a piece of meat, steak, or a sausage there’s a very high likelihood that those products are coming from Wisconsin. There’s some supper clubs that will purchase never-frozen, only fresh beef products. We have marvelous steaks. They’re all trimmed and cut in-house.

We’re starting from a big chunk of meat, cutting it up, trimming it up, and putting it on the grill. Love it. Love it. You get hands-on, you know.

When you go to a supper club and you order a meat product, you know first and foremost that that product represents, really, the fabric of the state of Wisconsin. At the University, researching food and drink is serious science. The University of Wisconsin has been involved in helping people produce food ever since the university began. That’s been a big part of what the university is all about.

At supper clubs though, food and drink are responsible for something else… not so serious,

but just as important

bringing people together. We’ve gotten to know people over the years and you keep seeing the same people over and over again on Friday nights, which is, I think, part of the Wisconsin tradition. It’s like “Cheers.” It’s where everybody knows your name. It’s going back in the time of hobnobbing and getting to know your neighbor.

It really has been 70 years, 80 years of growing up with these folks. It’s community. It’s pretty cool. In short, supper clubs serve much more than supper.

Which could be why so many see so much hope for the future of this Wisconsin tradition. I think they’re going to be here for a very long time. I think for as long as Wisconsinites are calling themselves Wisconsinites. You definitely go in there for the experience, from the minute you walk in the door to the minute that you leave.

Between the ambience, the view, the customers that come in, nothing’s better. And when you combine that and you look at our history, and you see how many different crops, products, meats, fish are grown here, are produced here, are gathered here… You have a state that has an incredible history of, and an incredible culinary culture around our foodways. And that really sets the stage for discovery.

And that goes on everyday here at the University of Wisconsin- Madison, and I expect that to continue for years and years and years to come. Look at what’s local and what’s regional, and ask what it says about that place. Any kind of understanding of that, I think, connects you a little bit more to the geography of the place; it connects you to the people. Hopefully, we can create a lot of special memories for everyone, now and in the future.

It is truly a Wisconsin experience. I enjoy the history and the memories. My mother and dad brought me here for the first time with my brother. I was eight-years-old and I still remember our suits and our bow ties.

When I come in here, I see my mother and dad. I see my brother. I see I can see where we sat 25 years ago, 40 years ago. Literally, this supper club looks like my grandparents’ house use to look, so coming here brings back a lot of memories of what it was like when I was his age going over to their house for dinner.

They actually have the same carpet and tile out front that I was used to seeing when I was growing up. You said you guys come and have cocktails. What kind of cocktails are you having? Um, sometimes…

Shhh. We’re on camera, remember?

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but just as important

Sometimes, I’ll have a blackberry tea, or when I’m in a really fancy mood I’ll usually have a Shirley Temple. Yeah. The preceeding program has been a co-production of Wisconsin Public Television and University Communications at the University of Wisconsin- Madison.