Dave Wood

My wife and I were overwhelmed when my nephew, who knew we and his parents were fans of eating out, sent us two mammoth coffee table books. One was “A Guide to Wisconsin Supper Clubs,” by Ron Faiola. We knew it would be a humdinger because it included Shady Grove, a place not well known, but tops in our book. So we began a hunt, eating at several of the joints mentioned.

Del Bar, in Lake Delton, was a clear winner. So was Indianhead in Balsam Lake, where I ate the best ribs I’ve ever consumed.

Then several of the following destinations were disappointing: Sullivan’s, one of our family’s 0ld favorites, was horrible: cold and unfriendly, nothing like in the days of banjo-playing Ed Sullivan and daughter who held forth in Trempealeau in the good old days. Castle Hill, another former favorite in Jackson County, featured an owner/maitresse’d who had the manners of an SS Commandant and very tough steaks.

We went to Tornado Club in Madison, which was a space-age version pretending to look like an old-fashioned supper club. The food was mediocre at best, and we longed for a return to when it used to be Crandall’s. Next, we took the generous nephew and wife to Miesuille, where we’d never eaten, but always wanted to try. My nephew tried to be friendly and ordered a chocolate martini, snow white with chocolate dripping down its sides.  What struck us all was all but one of the losers was once a favorite of our family’s.

So it goes. Other guidebooks, mostly from the southern part of the state, bear mentioning. One such guide declared the White Pig a fine little bar to which you could take your kids, so we stopped in on the way through Mondovi to find that it was a dump where the regulars used language that didn’t even belong at any down-on-its luck adult bar.

One recent guide I’ve been quoting since our wedding 56 years ago. It was the highly recommended Steamboat Inn in Prescott, where we dined for years on their marvelous snails in butter sauce for every anniversary until it closed about 25 years ago. The writer of this guide must have picked up the yellow pages of an ancient telephone book.

One phone book this critic didn’t pick up was the one for Bluff Siding, home of the Hillside Fish House, where the Lasinski family served fabulous seafood for 100 years, and its current owners are following the Lasinski footsteps. They’ve outlasted competitors across the river—the Hot Fish House which deservedly went under about 50 years ago. My beautiful wife opined that The Hillside was omitted because their beef is nothing to brag about. To me that seems irrelevant because almost all of the steakhouses mentioned had no beef to brag about either.

But grass-fed beef is another story. Author Fiaola was nice enough to print an epilogue about the past great supper clubs like Smokey’s in Madison. And here are some he missed: Keg and Kettle in River Falls, Austin’s White House in Eau Claire, Turk’s near Rice Lake, The Cerise Club in La Crosse, and the Dining Room in Hotel Eau Claire. That’s the “good old days” for you!