- I had never heard of a supper club
because we don't have them
anywhere that I've ever lived.
And so she was telling me about,
[cracking up] "The supper club,
your first job was in a supper club."
- Erin Huggins: Yeah.
- Holly Richards: I was just like, "I'm sorry, what is that?
Like, it was a supper what? You mean a restaurant?" - Yeah, yeah.
- Holly: No, a supper club.
- Erin Huggins: It's these places
and they're kind of dark without windows.
And they're lowly lit.
And I was like, "There's things called relish dishes."
- Holly: Well, and none of that makes any sense.
But then, you come here and you're like,
"Oh, that's exactly what you described."
- Erin: Yeah. And if any of those things
were taken out of this context, it would be really weird.
- No, but it totally works, like, it all works.
Somehow, it is perfect.
And you come in and it's this fully-formed thing
that you get to be a part of, and it's really cool.
[electrical current building to fire up neon light]
["Focus Pocus" Glenn Crytzer's Savoy Seven ]
[1930s-style big band swing music]
[stir stick clinks]
[hot oil spatters]
- Rob Swearingen: The definition of supper club
sometimes does come up over the bar.
And they kind of poke their head through the front door
and wonder what a club is.
They think maybe you perhaps have to have a membership.
Of course, that's not true.
- Terese Allen: It's a unique kind of restaurant
and in its Wisconsin form, it's also very unique.
- Jim Draeger: Everyone has their own definition
of what a supper club is,
but there are certain key parts to any supper club experience.
Supper clubs
are rural places.
It's family-owned business.
- Terese Allen: It has a bar and a dining room.
That's a very specific part of supper clubs.
It's a dinner place,
not a lunch or breakfast place.
It's usually dinner-only,
usually located in either the "Main Street"-area of a town
or maybe near a lake,
some kind of nice setting like that.
- Tom Schmock: Tucked away somewhere
and you see the neon lights from far away.
- Larry Schmock: And you walk in the door, past the hostess,
put your name in, you head right for the bar
and order a Brandy Old Fashioned Sweet.
- They have simple menus that are very predictable.
It serves a relish dish before the meal.
People drink before and after dinner drinks there.
- Mark Andrea: A supper club is a good place to come and have
some ambiance and really good food.
- Marge Gogian: The supper club is
a nice place where you are dining.
Not just eating at a fast restaurant,
but dining with tablecloth and napkins,
and I believe in that.
- Anne Glowacki: The supper club traditionally
is a venue that has dining and entertainment,
whether it'd be dancing, live music.
- Terese Allen: It does have a family feel to it,
so whole families can go or adults can go
or friends can go together.
It's very much a place where regulars go.
- You don't go to a supper club,
quick wolf down some food, and go on somewhere else.
The supper club is somewhere where you linger
and you spend some time.
That's why the social dimension of supper clubs
is such an important attribute of defining what they are.
- Kirby Nelson: You go into a place that has
its own unique decor and personality.
You're going to see maybe a similar offering,
but yet done in that particular restaurant's version
of how they want it done.
You knew what to expect, but yet, it was unique to the owner.
And you could always, again, just expect great hospitality,
just leaving feeling that
you'd been welcomed, appreciated,
satiated,
and you're ready to go home and relax
with a smile in your face.
*
["When I Sleep Polka" by Gary's Ridgeland Dutchmen]
[concertina plays in fast 2/4 time]
- Jim Draeger: Wisconsin is an amazing state.
And I think one of the things that makes Wisconsin
a very distinctive place
is its distinctive geography.
One part of the state is quite different from another part.
You have the wooded Northern Wisconsin.
You have the Kettle Moraine on the east side of the state.
You have the sand flats in the middle of the state,
the Driftless area in the west,
and all of that affects the way people live.
You layer on top of that the various ethnic groups
that have lived in Wisconsin.
At the end of the 19th-century,
Wisconsin is the most ethnically diverse place in the country
and each one of those ethnic groups came,
settled in their own enclave,
brought their own cultures and their own traditions
and those traditions have slowly melded together
into what we consider to be Wisconsin culture today.
So the "beer, brats, and cheese" stereotype of Wisconsin life
is based on this melding
of all these different cultural traditions.
[polka]
The supper club is one of those.
The supper club's a very distinctive Wisconsin building.
People who grow up in Wisconsin
think supper clubs are everywhere
and they realize that once you past the borders,
you are no longer in supper club land.
It's a very distinctive Wisconsin thing.
It says a lot about the Wisconsin experience.
["Bottoms Up" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators ]
- While the supper club's
kind of a Midwestern phenomenon,
in Wisconsin, it just seems to have taken hold
and survived quite well.
If you Google "supper club" and you compare them state by state,
you'll just see that there's hundreds more in Wisconsin
with "supper club" in their name
and that doesn't even account for the ones
with just "club" in their name.
It's just kind of a crazy phenomenon.
[drum finale]
The supper club was invented by a Wisconsinite
except in Beverly Hills, California.
He created kind of the prime rib,
Yorkshire pudding menu and was really kind of credited
with the idea of pairing
fine dining with entertainment.
- Jim Draeger: He invented the doggie bag.
His theory was that people might be embarrassed
to be served too large of a portion of food,
although they may want more food than they're willing to admit.
So, he gave a doggie bag along.
In theory, you could bring that steak home to your dog
though most people ended up eating their whole steak.
[playful, energetic swing music]
Jim Draeger: Lawrence Frank's idea
spread out of California
and really took root in Wisconsin
in the time period just prior to World War II
and especially after World War II.
*
Jim Draeger: The term "supper club"
came to be associated with these restaurants
because they borrowed that term
from the 19th century term for
a private eating club
to convey that sense of elegance, sophistication,
that was important to establishing supper clubs
as being distinct from other kinds of eating places.
There were a number of reasons
why it caught on so well in Wisconsin.
["Trepak" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators ]
There was already a tradition in Wisconsin
going out into the countryside to drink.
- Brenda Bredahl: Wisconsin
didn't abide by Prohibition.
The federal agent that was here basically said,
"This was the 'Land of the Wets'
"and that people drank here freely
and without care," essentially.
Senator John Blaine of Wisconsin
introduced repeal in 1933.
The model had already sort of
been set up in Wisconsin vacation areas
and in sort of these log cabin, chicken shacks
and, kind of, roadhouses that were in Wisconsin.
- Jim Draeger: They located out in the country
to be outside of the eye of the law.
Many of those
roadhouses evolved to include dance halls.
After World War II,
dance hall craze got a lot less so
because people are buying phonographs
and their own records.
Television is coming in.
So, some of these roadhouses
converted their dance halls to dining halls
and they became supper clubs.
Before Prohibition,
bars were very "male" spaces.
Self-respecting women didn't go to taverns
because many taverns were brothels
or were associated with prostitutes.
When the tavern comes back
following the repeal of Prohibition,
women come to the tavern yet,
but women aren't really comfortable at taverns
and some taverns weren't comfortable
with having women clientele.
Some taverns banned women from the bars
even after Prohibition.
The first real democratic place for women was the supper club.
They become places that are okay for women to drink
because they're not really bars.
They're restaurants that have a bar attached to them.
And because of that women feel comfortable
in coming to a bar in a supper club.
So, supper clubs are really one of the first places
that are completely gender-neutral,
where it's just as common to see a woman sitting at the bar,
as it is to see a man sitting at the bar.
And it helped to break down some of the stereotypical attitudes
about women and drinking that existed before Prohibition.
*
- Another possible reason
that supper clubs really are so popular in the state
has to do with something called
"gemütlichkeit."
It's a term that's hard to describe in one word.
It means a variety of things:
it means good fellowship, good community
and good conversation,
kind of a congeniality all around the table,
all around the concepts of food and drink.
It's an aspect of German culture
and because we've had so much German immigration here
and there's so much German influence here,
that is probably the origin of it there.
It's really not so much about the drinking and the eating,
but those things are part of what is the community,
the aspect of coming together,
of enjoying each other's company
and sitting down,
even if you're all around the state at different supper clubs
and enjoying the same meal and the same time together.
["Mr. Rhythm" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators ]
- Judy Knuth: We came here,
and we were
almost bowled over
by the friendly attitude,
the embrace of customer service,
how they made us feel so comfortable.
And we have said, every time we eat dinner here, it's
"We're having dinner at our kitchen table,
but we don't have to clean it up."
We sit here and it's not unusual
for somebody on the other side to yell at us,
"How's the soup tonight?"
We don't know them at all,
but we let them know how the soup is tonight.
People feel comfortable.
People feel a sense of community.
You're not eating amongst a bunch of strangers.
- My name is Steve Krabbe
and that's my wife, Cheri,
and we own Krabbe's Kountry Klub
in Seymour, Wisconsin.
We bought our supper club in 1980.
I always wanted to be in business.
And there was a supper club in town that was for sale
and we were able to purchase that.
It was a good fit at the time and turned out to be a love
that we've got today yet, for it.
We really enjoy the supper club business
because it's not like a bar.
It's a family operation.
We're having people come to our dinner table
and enjoy a nice meal with us.
They're coming to our house.
That's the big thing and they're our friends.
Truly, in our kitchen,
it's like they come in our kitchen at our house.
They just walk in and say, "Hi, how are you doing?"
More people go through her kitchen
than the entrance, a lot of times,
because our customers are our friends
and they always want to say hello to her.
- Cheri Krabbe: A lot of times, I'm a little too busy,
but I try to make time to talk.
And they know all the waitresses,
so they'll talk to the waitresses
and then they'll kind of look at me and say,
"How are you doing tonight?"
"Really good, great, wonderful."
- Steve Krabbe: She'd be upset
if certain people don't poke their head in and say 'hello.'
People that like the supper club atmosphere
will drive a long way for it.
We do ourselves on our night off.
We're not afraid to drive an hour, hour and a half
if there's a place we heard was really neat.
I have customers from Fond du Lac
that still drive up here just for dinner.
They want to try a new place, even though it's old,
they want to try a new place that they heard about.
- Without the automobile, there
would not be a supper club.
The history of the two of them
are tied together.
Car culture was
a big part of supper clubs
because a supper club was a destination point
for people who were traveling by automobile.
The supper club was the culinary equivalent of the Sunday drive,
where you could go out for a ride in your car,
end up at a destination that was worth going to.
So, the journey was a part of the fun.
That's one of the reasons why
supper clubs were located in rural areas,
was to give people the experience of traveling.
Wisconsin had the largest amount
of paved rural roads in the country
because Wisconsin farmers
needed to get their milk out to market in any weather.
Because of this extensive network of paved roads,
Wisconsin was a great place for the supper club,
because it was easy to get out in the countryside
and almost any rural location
along a road
could be a place where
a supper club could flourish.
They understood that their clientele
were coming by automobile
so a lot of supper clubs
were designed to exploit that as well.
They use flamboyant exotic designs
that were meant
to be read from the road
at a high rate of speed
by people traveling by
on the highways of Wisconsin.
["Rose Room" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators ]
- Erin Huggins: My grandparents literally would travel hundreds of miles
to go to a supper club.
Like, they would make it an all-day event.
- Holly Richards: She drove me an hour and a half when I was starving
to go to a particular supper club.
- My mom did, yeah.
She was like, "We're going to this supper club."
- Like, we passed three or four supper clubs at least.
Each one, like, I was like getting closer to fainting
and she's like, "NO! We've got to go."
Like, I don't even remember
which one it was, but, yeah, it was good.
- So, I feel like I'm carrying on
my grandparents' tradition of going to supper clubs.
- You are.
- Because, I guess, it's something that our family does.
- Which you do.
- We appreciate the supper club.
["Ten Til Five" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators ]
- Jim Draeger: Every building is built of a time and a place
and it represents a certain moment in time.
People build the way they do
because it represents something that's important to them
and you can see that history in supper clubs, as well.
The first supper clubs
tended to be rather
tavern-like in their appearance
because they were growing out
of that roadhouse tradition.
But when people started building
specific buildings
as supper clubs
there were a couple of different themes
that they picked up on.
One of the themes was a very exotic appearance
that related to the adventure of travel,
and the adventure of eating out.
So, they would pick themes
that were popular in American culture and history.
In Northern Wisconsin,
you saw a lot of supper clubs that were rustic in design,
that used log construction,
that were picking up
on native American motifs
or folklore of the Northwoods.
There were supper clubs that had exotic flamboyant appearances
like The Pyramid Supper Club.
Supper clubs that looked like southern plantations
that were trying to pick up
on the southern hospitality.
There were supper clubs that were designed to look
consciously like people's houses
to give that impression
that the supper club
was your home away from home.
That it was
a family-oriented place,
that it embodied those simple domestic values
of that time period.
["Ten Til Five" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators ]
- Steve Krabbe: When you talk about the drinks
that are served in a supper club,
the Old Fashioned's by far the signature drink
of an old-fashioned supper club.
- Karl Van Roy: I used to make
Brandy Old Fashioned Sweet
in my sleep.
I'd be dreaming about them for years.
- Terese Allen: Old Fashioneds, they're a drink,
but it's a recipe.
It's not just
splash two things together,
it's actually a recipe
like food, like dishes.
And like these sort of iconic
or really important other food ways in the state,
there's a specific way that you make it.
There's a lot of variations from family to family.
There's variations from bar to bar,
from supper club to supper club.
- Mark Andrea: We start with an Old Fashioned glass
and put a little bit of simple syrup
that we make ourself
and angostura bitters.
[drip, drip]
And then, small piece of orange
and usually regular ones with charged water or seltzer.
Could be "sweet" with 7UP.
Some people have it with water: "sour".
We muddle the orange...
[squish, squish, squish]
...and the simple syrup and the bitters together
and you notice it kind of foams up.
Ice, two shots of brandy.
[slosh, slosh]
Top a little more charged water,
[splash, splash] seltzer water.
Usually, put two sticks in.
The idea with an Old Fashioned
is that you kind of stir
the simple syrup that's underneath it
to make it as sweet as you want it.
["The Grass Is Always Greener"/ "Payin' No Mind" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators ]
- Woman: I'll have an Old Fashioned.
- Jim Draeger: If Wisconsin were to have a state drink,
it would surely be the Old Fashioned.
The drink itself has very long roots.
The Old Fashioned
is among the first American cocktails.
It goes back to the 1700s.
Comes from a family of drinks
that were known as "bitter slings."
The Old Fashioned in the 19th century
was not a sweet drink and it wasn't a fruity drink.
The Brandy Old Fashioned that we drink today
was a consequence of the speakeasies.
During Prohibition,
people began drinking sweet cocktails
because the alcohol they were buying
was rotgut liquor and tasted awful.
So, by adding soda
to the liquor,
it made it sweeter and it made it more palatable.
So, the Old Fashioned becomes sweet drink
as a result of Prohibition
and they began putting soda,
maraschino cherry,
orange slices.
It became much more the drink that today
people consider to be Old Fashioneds.
- Debbie Landgraf: Only in Wisconsin do they know
what an Old Fashioned is.
- Tom Landgraf: And brandy.
If you go to another state,
you can be in Florida or something
and ask for a Brandy Manhattan or a Brandy Old Fashioned
and whoever is there
if they're of any age, they'll say,
"I bet you you're from Wisconsin,"
because that's the only place that has it.
*
- Terese Allen: Supper clubs have, across the state,
a somewhat limited and very special menu.
There are certain things
that you will find on every supper club menu,
even though there are variations.
They are very specific types of things
that constitute a supper club menu.
You usually will get a relish tray
to start off your meal with some bread.
Sometimes, you don't get the relish tray,
but typically, at supper clubs, what will come out
is either some kind of a cheese spread with crackers.
Sometimes, it'll be a whole lazy Susan of choices
like a noodle salad, and pickles,
radishes, carrots, olives, that sort of thing,
and again, the cheese spread.
If they don't serve a relish tray,
there's almost always a bread and butter
that comes out first.
Usually, choice of soup or salad,
a very simple salad with dressings.
Sometimes there is a salad bar,
which is really kind of a combination
of the relish tray and the salad course together.
There's always steaks on the menu,
usually prime rib.
There's fish of some kind.
Sometimes it's local choices
like a walleye or bluegill or perch.
There's shrimp or lobster, sometimes both.
Usually some kind of
oven-roasted or broasted chicken.
Sometimes there might be duck on the menu,
sometimes there might be pork chops,
sometimes even a ham slice or something,
but, typically, it's the steaks, ribs, fish and chicken.
You will get a choice of potato with the main course.
Could be baked, not so often mashed,
but hash browns, American fries,
and sometimes French fries, but there's always a choice.
To finish the meal,
though this is not an automatic part of the meal,
would be dessert.
And the dessert menu is very limited
and sometimes ice cream drinks.
Like a Grasshopper or Golden Cadillac,
or the Pink Squirrel made with ice cream and liquor.
And then, the drinks
are also sort of part of the supper club menu.
["Fumblin' Around" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators]
- Judy Knuth: I'm not supposed to tell this,
but I'm gonna.
I know for a fact that this supper club
does little favors
for its regular customers.
Like, one customer,
needs a heart-healthy diet.
All right, we're going to use
no-salt butter.
And they get to know their customers
and they're very willing to accommodate their needs
to keep them returning.
- Rob Swearingen: As much as we stay to tradition,
times have changed in terms of diets.
And so, you have to have some heart-healthy dining,
something for a vegetarian.
Gluten-free is an issue these days.
You have to roll with those changes.
["Rainy Days with You" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators]
- Terese Allen: Supper clubs will have specials, typically,
and Friday night, it's always the fish fry.
Saturday night, it's the prime rib,
and Sunday, sometimes it's like a chicken dinner.
Maybe ribs on Tuesday or Wednesday,
but always the fish fry on Friday nights.
- Cheri Krabbe: On a Friday night,
we serve quite a bit of fish.
- Steve Krabbe: A lot of my older customers,
it doesn't pay to show them anything else,
they have fish on Friday and that's it.
- Terese Allen: Typical fish fry menu
would be, usually, it's coleslaw for the salad version of it,
and then the deep-fried fish, and then some kind of potato.
There really is no state that I know of,
or have read of, or heard of,
where pretty much everybody knows and goes to fish fries.
And they go often, they go every Friday night.
- Rob Swearingen: This area is fish fry crazy.
It's clearly still our biggest night of the week.
It's not unusual in the summertime
to have people outside
actually having somewhat
of a tailgate party,
whether they're throwing a frisbee
or enjoying a cocktail
on the picnic table under the umbrella,
just waiting in line to get their table.
And sometimes waits can extend past an hour
and people are still content with that.
If you don't do a good Friday night fish fry business,
especially in this neck of the woods,
it's going be tough for you to survive.
- Terese Allen: Fish fry is so popular in the state
for a lot of reasons.
It isn't just an ethnic tradition.
It isn't just a Catholic tradition.
It isn't just a geographic tradition.
It's all of the above sort of thing.
First of all, Wisconsin geographically
is the perfect place for fish.
The state is, basically, surrounded
almost completely
by water.
The Great Lakes, the Mississippi River.
We have all kinds of
thousands and thousands
of rivers and lakes
within the state boundaries.
So, everybody knows water here
and everybody eats fish here,
and has, way back to the original pre-Wisconsinites,
the Indian tribes who lived here
and also to the Europeans who came
and to many of the other groups
that have been continuing to come,
right up into the contemporary times.
So, we have that geographic.
We have that cultural kind of connection,
but we are also a Catholic state.
Catholics, of course, until the early '60s
were not allowed to eat meat on Fridays.
And so, we were, have been
historically very used to eating fish on Fridays.
["Old Man Winter Blues" Glenn Crytzer's Savoy Seven ]
Then, there was this thing
called Prohibition that happened
and that really is what helped formulate the fish fry
into the tradition that we know it today.
Bar owners needed a way to bring customers in.
So, what they did is they knew
that there was this cheap abundant source of food, fish,
so they started to offer very cheap or free
lunches or meals of fish and they would fry it,
because that was a cheap way to cook it
and then they would serve it to customers to lure them in
and then also sell them
liquor under the table.
It did lure people in, it also lured whole families in,
partly because Friday typically was payday.
And so, these large-- many of them Catholic-- families
in Wisconsin,
had an inexpensive way to feed the whole family
on a day when they were feeling flush.
Fish fries, then, kind of developed
even after Prohibition into this tradition.
They took hold and people got used
to going out on Friday nights with their family.
It developed as an intergenerational kind of thing.
- I'm from Florida so I'd never really
done a fish fry or anything before I came up here.
And with us being from Florida, you'd think that,
we have fish fries all over the place.
There's absolutely nothing like this where we can go
and just have a family fish fry and everything.
If you want something,
you've got to go to the big chain restaurants.
- Growing up here in Wisconsin,
we always went for Friday fish fry.
Spending time with family
is the biggest reason why we come up here.
It's nice to be able to bring the kids along with us
and we can just sit and enjoy our time.
We can talk, laugh, have fun,
and still have delicious food.
["Old Man Winter Blues" / "Wallingford Wiggles" Glenn Crytzer's Savoy Seven]
- Cheri Krabbe: We here at the supper club
like to make as much as we can from scratch.
That's what's missing in the chain restaurants,
everything is prepackaged,
everything is brought in,
everything is weighed and measured.
I just always like cooking.
I don't like to clean up, but I like to cook. [laughs]
["Wallingford Wiggles" Glenn Crytzer's Savoy Seven]
- M. Gogian: My dad always said,
"Never, never stop using
"the best quality you can buy.
Don't ever buy mediocre stuff."
And we never did.
And I don't because I don't believe in that.
My help laugh at me.
They think I'm old-fashioned.
So be it.
I don't care. [laughs]
- Mike Obis: To me, everything
we make homemade is just better.
We know what we're putting in it.
We're not putting a bunch of preservatives in it.
We're making smaller batches.
We're using them up in a day or so
and then we make it again.
- Butch Lehman: It's a from scratch restaurant
and a lot of supper clubs are
and that's one of the things that sets them apart.
Everything is from scratch.
We make all our salad dressings.
All our soups are homemade.
We actually age and cut our own meat.
We use the best
quality produce that we can get.
Anything that comes in the door is top-shelf quality
and comes in its rawest material state.
- Rob Swearingen: In my case, many of the recipes came
with the building when I bought them.
So, the barbecue rib sauce, the Friday fish fry,
how we bake the raisin nut bread,
all those recipes were passed on--
right down to the potato salad--
were passed on to us.
And those are the things that you don't mess with.
You don't change something that works
and that's why people keep coming back and returning.
- Ray Olson: In the old days,
you used to have a good cook
that was with you for years and years and years,
and they did a good job.
I interviewed
hundreds of different cooks
when we were hiring for here
and they didn't know how
to make sauces, they didn't
know how to make a roux.
They just open a package
and that's how they're taught,
and I think that really takes a lot away from it.
- Denise Olson: Homemade food, there's something about it
that you can't get any way, shape, or form,
from something that's frozen and it's warmed up
or a package and you add liquid.
Everybody does it already at home now,
because we're run, run, run.
So, you throw something together.
You want something that's like,
"Wow, I can taste that rosemary, I can taste that garlic."
and it's like, "What is this?
Oh, onion powder, too, oh, fantastic,"
and cooking it nice and slow.
There is a warning:
If you have homemade food, it's really hard to go back.
Hopefully, some of the old-fashioned ones
want to stay with home-cooked food from scratch.
It's important to keep the tradition.
["Skinny Minnie" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators ]
- Steve Krabbe: When we buy our meats here,
it comes right from Green Bay.
And we always get the best we can get.
We never bicker on price.
Because of that, they know, and they take care of us.
And if I ever have a problem with any of my steaks,
they'll come out and bring us new items,
whatever we need to make us happy.
It's nice to buy local, they know us personally,
and they know what I expect,
and what I want for my customers.
So, we buy a lot of groceries right local.
And then some of the farmers' markets around here
we buy from them, too, just to keep it local.
- Cheri Krabbe: I have a girl that works for us.
She has extra tomatoes, so she brings them in.
I put them on the salad bar, and everybody loves them.
In fact, just had a lady on Facebook ask
what kind of tomatoes they were.
- Steve Krabbe: Can't beat fresh and in season.
We like to use them as much as we can.
["A Case of the Blues" Glenn Crytzer's Savoy Seven ]
- Kirby Nelson: I love supporting
independent locally-owned businesses
whether it be breweries,
restaurants, auto repair,
you name it.
The more locally you buy right now,
the stronger our nation's gonna be.
- What makes Ray Radigan's different,
maybe a lot of supper clubs different,
is everything's sourced locally.
They tell you where the asparagus came from.
They tell you
what farm the veal comes from.
They tell you what's fresh.
Today, there's so much discussion
about local sourcing and being natural foods.
This is the history of the supper club.
People are trying to be what they have been
and what they are.
- Henry Doane: We love supporting things
that are high quality and local.
There's actually a place
only a few blocks from here
that makes its own
rum, whiskey, and this wonderful honey liqueur.
It's actually a little cheaper
because they don't have to deal with the transportation costs.
- Tom Schmock: Of course, at the bar,
you have so many wonderful
Wisconsin beers
produced within
50 miles of Madison.
There's no reason to look much farther than Wisconsin
for some great beers.
["A Case of the Blues" Glenn Crytzer's Savoy Seven ]
- Steve Krabbe: Supper clubs are definitely a family business.
We have multi-generations from grandma upstairs,
to our children, and soon to be
their children, working in them.
It's the only way they can operate.
People come here to see us and our family.
Supper clubs won't operate properly
if the owners aren't present.
It's just tradition.
- Cheri Krabbe: It's kind of like going to your neighbor's house
and your neighbor's not there.
You don't want to go there.
- Steve Krabbe: You can't hire managers and things like that.
You can't afford it.
Our price structure is low.
We don't build in all this stuff like a chain restaurant would.
They know if I'm here, they see me,
they know Cheri is in the kitchen.
And it makes a big difference
on how they feel about the whole process.
- Cheri Krabbe: When he's not here, and I'm here,
I make sure I tell the bartenders,
"Tell them that I'm still here."
Then, it's okay.
- Some of the older people still feel as that,
"It's not going to be good
because the owners aren't there."
You still have that. - Right, exactly.
Otherwise, they think that
we're both out running around
having a good time. [laughs]
- Brenda Bredahl: Most of them
are around 50 years old.
They're probably going on
their second or third generation.
Keeps it in the family
and there's a little bit more flexibility
in that capital investment in starting a restaurant.
["A Case of the Blues" Glenn Crytzer's Savoy Seven ]
- Butch Lehman: We've always had our kids
busy and working here
as they've been growing up.
And our second son,
John Lehman, has come back after he graduated from UW-Madison.
Sometimes a lot of people wonder
why you'd come back to be in a business
where you work night and day.
He had some job opportunities,
but he chose to come back
and he's been here
about three years now
and is fitting in very well
and is enjoying it.
- Randy Daubner: This boy has
been in the restaurant with me
ever since he's been a baby.
And so is my other one.
Both of them are raised
in the restaurant business.
They were always in the kitchen,
always in the dining room,
in their cribs.
So we've always had them here at the restaurant.
And they've learned every step of the way with us.
- Tommy Daubner: I've always looked up to my dad.
And when I looked up to him, he was always cooking,
and then I always tried to learn what he did.
I just love doing it.
It came very easy to me.
- Randy Daubner: He was a baby when we owned the other restaurant.
He wouldn't be happy in the kitchen
unless he was on my shoulders.
So, I actually cooked with him
seven nights a week on my shoulders, in the kitchen.
That's where he wanted to be.
So, he was on the line with me
when he was even very little.
- Mark Obis: When you walk into
an owner-operated restaurant,
there's no replacement
for the owner not being there.
You just get a different feel,
a different energy.
It shows in their product,
the decor,
the way you're treated
all the way through.
And, chain restaurants can't duplicate that.
Most of the chain restaurants are not individually owned.
So, they go through their managers
and they may be there three, five, ten years,
but they haven't been there 51 years.
- Denise Olson: The customers loved it.
We would come out
and actually talk with everybody and especially Ray would come
because he did most of the cooking.
If we weren't swamped or anything,
he would come out and talk to each person at the table
and they really like that,
because it's like, where do you go
and that you have the owner / manager or cook
come out and actually talk with you?
And I think that's wonderful.
- Marge Gogian: My dad remembered everybody's name.
If you came here and you never came back again
until 50 years later,
he would know what you had on,
if you were married, everything about you.
He remembered all of his customers.
That's what they liked about him.
And that's what they like about supper clubs.
- Anne Glowacki: There's a lot of people that
I think sometimes they come in
because they enjoy the recognition.
There's someone that comes in and you recognize them
and they're kind of like, "Wow, you remember me?"
and it's like, "Yeah, I remember you.
"You were here a month ago having dinner.
"You sat at that table over there,
and you usually prefer to have a drink first."
I think they don't get that personal touch
when they go to franchises or other restaurants.
At least we try to make that our signature,
that personal touch.
- Don Levin: The relationship my family has
with the Radigan's family
goes back well before my birth.
When I started coming as a kid,
Michael was, is my age.
And we'd run around the restaurant together.
We grew up together.
And Michael's very much like his father was,
very friendly, very open, makes notice of what you like.
They remember.
- Butch Lehman: It's a great business to be in.
It's difficult, you work really hard,
but the rewards are just amazing.
And I'm not talking monetarily.
The satisfaction that you get from owning your own business
and being in a business like this,
it can't be matched.
Bye guys, thank you very much.
Happy birthday, take care.
- Guests: Bye. - Girl: That was good soup!
- Butch Lehman: Have a nice day at school tomorrow.
- Girl: We don't have school tomorrow.
- Butch Lehman: Why not?
- Other Girl: It's over. - It's over and I love the soup!
["Beaver Bump" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators]
- Steve Krabbe: My employees here are great.
The employees that I have,
and you'll see at most of these mom-and-pop supper clubs,
is what I call ours.
We're here.
We're the mom and the dad,
and all the rest of these are our children.
They come and even though some may be older than us, they come,
they worked here, their kids have worked here.
Now we're getting to where their grandkids
are starting to work here.
A lot of our employees come from
friends of good employees that we have.
So, we never advertise for any help and the help stays.
I would say the average person here, is here at least 12 years.
That's over the average,
so two of them, 26 years, two of them, 23 years.
That's unheard of.
In the chain restaurant business,
you're not going to see that.
But hometown supper clubs,
yes, you have loyal employees
that come back and stay with you for years and years.
*
- Karl Van Roy: To me,
it never was, "You're working for me."
You're working with me.
We used to have good times together.
We had parties together.
And that's what makes it good.
And that's what customers felt.
This is what supper club
and this is what camaraderie is about.
- Sean Shinkay: I've been very blessed here at the Stagecoach
in that I've kept the majority of the original
core service staff,
as when I've first bought the restaurant.
They love all the customers that come out here.
They're very, very good at what they do,
and I think they make a nice living.
It's very much a family atmosphere.
- Rosie Pierce: The reason I've been here
for so long is because
we have so many customers
that have been here longer than I have.
People come out here and even if they don't know anybody,
somebody at the bar will start talking to them
and you make friends.
It's just a really cozy type of a restaurant.
And so, people have come here forever and ever.
We've seen kids born and raised here.
- Mark Andrea: Supper club kind
of brings families together.
We have a lot of families that come out
from the time they're born until into high school.
Expose them to some different food besides fast food.
They kind of learn how to behave and have a good time,
but also enjoy a good dinner
and experience of the supper club type atmosphere.
- Larry Schmock: We're seeing third and fourth generations
that are coming in and they bring their families
and we'll have tables with three generations at the table.
Of course, when you grow up going to an establishment,
when you move away, you always come back,
and you go to that establishment
again and again and again.
So, a lot of our business
is just repeat customers and their descendants.
- Tom Schmock: They've instilled these supper club values
to their children and their grandchildren.
It's great to see that.
["You Don't Say" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators]
- Steve Krabbe: It's amazing how many customers come in
and don't know the person sitting next to them.
But my job as a bartender is to get people engaged,
so I'll go over and chat with them
about how their day is or how their kids are doing.
And you can see the person next to them
kind of perking up a little bit, and I'd say,
"Well, how are your kids?"
The next thing you know,
those two people are talking, and I can walk away
and go talk to somebody else.
And I can have the whole bar talking to each other.
It gets to where the next time they come in,
they'll see them across the bar
and they'll wave, "Hey, how have you been?
I haven't seen you for a week or two."
People really enjoy that.
They like the fact that they can meet new people.
And now when they come to our supper club
and they see those same people there
that they met two weeks ago, they'll go right over
and sit down by them and have a nice conversation.
- Brenda Bredahl: The supper club is akin to a church
in that it's kind of a community gathering place.
Whether or not you're eating or drinking,
it's a place where people meet.
It's a place for weddings.
It's really central to a lot of communities in Wisconsin,
and I think that's really why we have so many
and why it survived.
- Judy Knuth: There's a party room behind you
and they make that party room available at no charge
for any community organization
who needs a meeting spot.
I think that is fabulous
that they give up their space, free of charge,
for an organization to meet.
That's another part of community that they're giving.
- Marge Gogian: I think it's very important
to take care of your people in the community.
It's very important for the community.
They come back here because they like the individual restaurants,
and they like the people who run them.
And lot of times they like the people who serve them.
- Sean Shinkay: Since we are a small restaurant
and we know most of our customers really well,
we get really personable with them.
Especially toward the end of the night when you can tell a joke
and maybe share a cocktail with people.
That's part of running a supper club.
- Steve Krabbe: On a normal Friday night,
what's going to happen is that the door is going to open up,
and I've got three customers that always sit
in these three spots right here.
I can always count on those three to be here.
If they're not here,
we call and find out what's going on
or why somebody is sick
because they're just always here.
- Butch Lehman: I think it's just a wonderful thing
that people still have this opportunity
in a community like this to mesh and get together.
And those people, eventually customers become friends
and friends become family here.
And it's really a neat experience, I think.
- Karl Van Roy: That's, I guess, what the supper club part means.
That it can be a relaxing atmosphere
and be something where you can join together and be social.
And to me, that's what we need today,
is social.
-Karen Woltjen: We came up here
40 years ago
for a summer vacation
with our children,
and then, of course, found this place,
and just kind of found our second home.
- Rollie Woltjen: I mean, you don't eat in a restaurant
three or four nights every week unless it is a special place.
It has been one of the few constants in our life
other than our marriage.
The people and everybody there
are as important to me as the meal.
*
- Steve Krabbe: Everybody is so busy nowadays
that they don't take time to enjoy a meal
and enjoy the pre- and the post- of the meal.
They want to come in and have that nice meal,
but they may want to sit at a noisy bar
with three or five TVs going in the background.
But that's what they've been led to believe
is how you go out for a nice meal.
Yeah, we have one TV for a packer game
but that's all that's on.
We encourage them to come out and talk to each other
and maybe leave their phone at home
or whatever it might be or turn it off.
That type of relaxed dining is starting to be lost
in the shuffle of our fast-paced world.
They are starting to dwindle.
- Marge Gogian: Mom-and-pop operations, they're dying out.
- Henry Doane: In the last 10 or 20 years,
there's been a lot of decline.
I've seen a lot of closed supper clubs.
I've seen a lot of for sale supper clubs.
- Mike Obis: Now, there's a lot of chains.
They affect the business
because they take from our percent.
And they have a huge advertising budget nationwide.
And a lot of times people go where they're comfortable with
instead of where it's actually more comfortable.
- Karl Van Roy: There was a shift in how things went.
But I still believe if you do things right,
there's a good niche
for people that want to go out to dinner.
Sometimes you want to jive.
It's probably not the words that the young people use,
but there's other times you like to be relaxed
and be able to talk with each other.
So, I think there's room for places like this.
- Mark Andrea: I think as people get tired of some of the chain restaurants,
hopefully, we see a lot in the younger kids
coming back and realizing,
"This is kind of a nice place to eat
and their food's really good!"
- When we talk about going out to dinner together,
we talk about going to supper clubs.
We don't talk about chains.
And it's more about,
"Where can we sit and relax
"and have a drink
"and talk to each other
and see people that we might know?"
It's more about that.
So, I hope, I pray, that supper clubs stay around.
- Don Levin: I think they'll be here for always,
because Wisconsin is special.
A supper club is to Wisconsin
what a hotdog stand is to Chicago.
It's part of the environment, it's part of the world here.
I wouldn't know what to do if this place wasn't here.
The loss of the supper club, the loss of Ray Radigan's,
would be like losing a member of my family.
- Tom Schmock: If you're in a new town,
don't you want to go find out where the locals go?
Find out why a restaurant has been open for over 50 years?
There's got to be a reason for that.
- Steve Krabbe: Come out and enjoy
an old-fashioned supper club
and realize the quality of the food and the hospitality
that you don't get at chain restaurants.
["Deep Down in Caroline" Glenn Crytzer and his Syncopators ]
- Terese Allen: The supper club is a place where we all gather
and we all basically are eating together.
We may be drinking together, too,
but it's about being together that's important.
We don't mind waiting in line at the supper club.
We don't mind waiting in line for the fish fry.
Because we're chatting with our neighbors.
We're going to a place where
we're going to know somebody.
We like to take that night to relax, be together,
and eat the same meal together.
And whether it's a fish fry on a Friday
or a prime rib on a Saturday,
we have that strong sense of community
and good fellowship around food.
*
[glasses clink]