IN the era of the eyedropper-wielding cocktail artiste, I take pleasure in the fact that there are still guys like Tom Kelly around. Mr. Kelly, the longtime bartender at the Al-Gen Dinner Club in Rhinelander, Wis., has a neatly trimmed gray mustache, wears a shamrock tie pin and makes what I will unreservedly call the perfect gin martini. It is served limpid and glacially cold with two plump olives (or, if you’re feeling particularly old-school, two pickled mushrooms) and a minimum of conversation. “I’m just part of the real estate,” he said genially when asked how long he’s been at the job.
About that real estate: The Al-Gen occupies a tamarack-log cabin that was built as a restaurant in the 1930s by a couple named Al and Genevieve Nelson and was updated only once, and minimally, in the late 1950s. On the roof, the establishment’s name glows in green neon letters that illuminate the towering fir trees surrounding the gravel parking lot. There are no windows in the Al-Gen’s cozy lounge and red-carpeted dining room, which are adorned with all manner of taxidermy, from fish to megafauna.
Imbibed in this north woods sanctum, Tom Kelly’s cocktails are a potent tonic for body and spirit alike. It helps, perhaps, if you’ve spent the day hiking amid the magnificent birches and pines of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, which extends in a vast patchwork across this lake-studded swath of northern Wisconsin. It also helps to know that a thick slice of prime rib is waiting for you at the end of that drink. You know this because the hostess, dressed in a prim black waitress uniform with white piping, has already appeared alongside you at the bar unbidden, pen poised over order pad, asking what you’d like for dinner and informing you that your table will be ready whenever you happen to be — no sooner, no later.
That is how a Saturday night gets started at a proper Wisconsin supper club, a curious genre of old-fashioned fine-dining establishment that is particular to the state and had its heyday in the middle decades of the 20th century. Growing up in Chicago, I spent my summers in Wisconsin, weaned on the iceberg salads, cold relish trays, char-broiled steaks and Friday-night perch dinners that constitute the bill of fare at a typical supper club. I fell in love with these restaurants long before I’d ordered my first cocktail, and for good reason: the food was always tasty — supper clubs were doing custom-cut dry-aged steaks long before the practice became an urban fetish — and the vibe was always pure Wisconsin gemütlichkeit, leavened by a lively mix of locals and vacationing families.
Dozens of these restaurants still exist, some having been handed down, generation to generation, and though they have been on the decline in recent years, a combination of nostalgic attachment, new devotees, and a more modern generation of spots — mainly in bigger cities like Madison and Milwaukee — that recalls their charms have sustained the tradition.
Don’t let the term “club” mislead you: these open-to-all restaurants are about as welcoming as it gets. The term is a holdover from the Prohibition era, when all-in-one establishments offering dinner, drinks and dancing got their start in Wisconsin. The dancing component is mostly gone, but good supper clubs have fine-tuned the rituals of dining and drinking to near perfection.
My visit to the Al-Gen was the culmination — or nearly so — of a three-day road trip I’d embarked on with my wife, Michele, through a hundred-odd miles of northern Wisconsin in search of these living vestiges of the pre-Interstate era. The day before, we’d visited a handful of hoary old supper clubs with names like McGregor’s Blink Bonnie and Marty’s Place North, but at the Al-Gen I felt we’d really hit our stride. Before we were halfway through our drinks, Michele struck up a conversation with a woman in her 60s named Karen who had remarked by way of introduction, “Hey, we’re wearing the same shoes!” Ten minutes later the hostess had added two place settings to their table and we were sitting down to dinner with Karen and her husband, Rollie, tucking into prime rib and broiled walleye. “We’ve been coming to the Al-Gen for years,” Rollie said. “We’ve moved around a lot, and this place sometimes feels like the only constant in our life.”
Consistency and a loyal clientele are the central pillars of any worthy supper club’s operation. People go back to these places again and again over the span of decades — not for gastronomic discovery but for comfort, for that peculiar sense of well-being experienced when eating food that is delicious in precisely the same way it was when you were a child. To this day a supper club meal remains the common touchstone for me and my far-flung siblings whenever we pay a visit to my parents in Wisconsin. I actually choked up when my daughter, now 4, tried her first fried cheese curd (a classic Wisconsin appetizer) at the Sister Bay Bowl, a supper club in Door County that my family has been going to for 35 years.
“Consistency is the hardest part of the job,” said the owner of the Al-Gen, a ruddy-cheeked man in his late 40s named Rob Swearingen. “Everything has to be just right, every day, week after week.” To judge from the capacity crowd on the night we visited, his cooks were sticking to the script faithfully.
After our meal, at Mr. Swearingen’s suggestion, Michele and I drove north on Route 17 to a supper club called the White Stag Inn to end the evening with an ice cream cocktail, an after-dinner tradition in Wisconsin that merges dessert with digestif.
Here was another north woods gem: a convivial bar dripping with ephemera — beer steins, meerschaum pipes, more taxidermy — and, beyond that, a bustling dining room. From a brick-lined charcoal hearth built into the room’s far wall emerged gorgeously seared steaks, lobster tails and skewered shrimp, all whisked to the table on little charcoal braziers that kept the food sizzling.
Our ice cream drinks — a brandy Alexander for me and a grasshopper for Michele — came in coupe glasses and were thicker than milkshakes. While we nursed them, I chatted with the garrulous hostess, Anissa Widule. She was the daughter of the owner, David Widule, whose own father, Louis Widule, bought the building with a handshake in 1955.
Among fans of supper clubs, there’s a palpable sense of urgency in keeping them alive: a Milwaukee videographer recently made a film about them that’s been showing on public television all over the Midwest, and in Madison a handful of restaurateurs are breathing new life into the genre. Crandall’s, an old restaurant near the Capitol, was reborn a few years ago as the Tornado Steakhouse, complete with a period-perfect 1940s-era lounge and a cocktail list that includes a turbo-charged old-fashioned — the supper club cocktail par excellence — made with Cognac.
More recently, Tami Lax, the former chef de cuisine at Madison’s farm-to-table temple L’Etoile, opened a restaurant called, aptly enough, the Old-Fashioned. On the city’s central square, it is an unabashed homage to the Wisconsin supper club, with a 50-strong draught beer list — almost all Wisconsin brews — and a menu featuring locally sourced meats, cheeses and fish, as well as a choice of two or three “lazy susan” appetizer platters that hark back to the crudité-and-cheese trays of yore.
“I was in panic mode,” Ms. Lax told me when Michele and I stopped by the Old-Fashioned on our way back to Chicago. “So many of my favorite supper clubs were closing, or they were going downhill, buying all their ingredients off the food-service truck.”
At 4 p.m. on a Sunday the place was packed wall-to-wall with college students, young families, artsy hipsters, grandparents, professorial types and others. “I didn’t expect all this for a minute,” Ms. Lax said of the crowds, which have made for famously long waits. “I was just obeying the rule ‘Do what you know.’ ”
IF YOU GO
The towns of Rhinelander and Minocqua are both good bases from which to experience north-central Wisconsin and its supper clubs. Most supper clubs in northern Wisconsin are open year-round, but it’s still a good idea to call ahead and check during winter.
Al-Gen Dinner Club, 3428 North Faust Lake Road, Rhinelander; (715) 362-2230. Entrees start at $9.95.
White Stag Inn, 7141 Wisconsin State Route 17, Sugar Camp; (715) 272-1057. Entrees start at $15.
McGregor’s Blink Bonnie Supper Club, 1506 County Road C, St. Germain; (715) 542-3678. Entrees start at $11.95.
The Old-Fashioned, 23 North Pinckney Street, Madison; (608) 310-4545; theoldfashioned.com. Sandwiches start at $7.95; entrees at $9.95.
Tornado Steakhouse, 116 South Hamilton Street, Madison; (608) 256-3570; tornadosteakhouse.com. Entrees from $19.
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