Last week I found a cheap room in southwest Wisconsin, less than 10 minutes from downtown Dubuque, in an area rife with supper clubs. If you aren’t familiar with the concept, supper clubs are part fine dining experience—what was considered fine dining in the 1950s, anyway—and part neighborhood tavern: you can savor a juicy steak (after filling a plate with iceberg lettuce and ranch dressing at the salad bar, and—if you’re really lucky—with pickled gizzards), then sit at the bar sipping a Brandy Alexander (or Bud Lite) while chatting with your friends. In Wisconsin, supper clubs aren’t just a place to eat, they are a lifestyle choice.
Not all supper clubs are created equal, however. On my first night, I had a pedestrian meal at the Kall Inn, a supper club next to the Mississippi River that I had high hopes for. The food could have used some flavor, and so could the beer. For a beer snob like me, the beer options weren’t just unsatisfying, they were mortifying—the only “specialty” beer they had was Leinenkugel, which I remember getting for $4 a case back in my college days, well before they re-branded themselves as a hip microbrew. A couple of nights later, though, the Country Heights Supper Club surprised me with a very tasty stir fry of beef rib tips with onions, green bell peppers, and mushrooms seasoned with a Cajun herb mix. Yum. I can still taste those tender, juicy chunks of beef.
After I checked into my bargain room for my first night of seven, I went out to eat and promptly lost my room key, something I didn’t realize until I got back to the motel. I spent nearly five minutes searching my pockets and the inside of my car hoping to find the keys, then pointlessly repeated the whole process as I felt more and more freaked out. Just as I was heading inside to ring the bell for the manager and confess my shame, she came out and asked if I had eaten at the Kall Inn that evening, because someone had found a set of room keys. I breathed a sigh of relief and went back to the Kall Inn to retrieve my keys. The man who found them, Al, is the township clerk. We chatted for a few minutes about his work and my project. I mentioned that I had been searching, in vain, for historical information about the unincorporated village of Sandy Hook. A few days later I was drinking coffee at his kitchen table in his Sandy Hook home and sorting through material he and his wife had collected over the years about the township.
Does anyone know how to parallel park anymore? Watching (presumably) suburban Chicago residents trying to park in Galena is almost as amusing as the Daily Show, and the Daily Show is really damn funny. Seriously, don’t you think someone would figure out that you should be turning your front wheels before the rear ones hit the curb?
Bad Decision of the Day: I nearly got myself locked inside a church on Sunday. The door was open, so I wandered in and took shots of the sanctuary and didn’t see anyone around. Just as I was leaving, the person with the key was at the door, ready to lock the building. Had I left just a minute later, I might have been staying the night (or gotten an introduction to the local law enforcement professionals).
© Dean Klinkenberg, 2009
