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From Supper Clubs to Fish Frys: The Roots of Wisconsin Dining Culture

5 minute read

  • Wisconsin history
  • Supper club traditions
  • Fish fry

There’s a story behind every dish we serve at Emmi’s, and most of those stories begin in the same place: a low-slung building on a county road, a neon sign glowing against the pines, the clink of glasses, and a bartender who knows exactly how you take your old fashioned. The Wisconsin supper club isn’t just a kind of restaurant. It’s a ritual, and like most rituals worth keeping, its history is equal parts documented fact and beloved legend.

We’ll be honest about which is which.

What makes a supper club a supper club

Filmmaker Holly De Ruyter, who spent years documenting the tradition for her film Old Fashioned: The Story of the Wisconsin Supper Club, defines it simply: an independently owned restaurant, usually rural, open only for supper, with a short menu of homemade food. But the definition undersells the ceremony. A proper supper club evening starts with cocktails at the bar, no rush at all, then moves to the table, and often circles back to the bar afterward for an ice cream drink: a Grasshopper, a Pink Squirrel, a Brandy Alexander.

And before any of that, the relish tray: raw vegetables, pickled beets and asparagus, cheese spreads. Ron Faiola, whose books and documentaries made him the tradition’s best-known chronicler, draws the line firmly: “if it doesn’t have a relish tray it’s not a supper club.”

Where it came from (the story, and the stories)

Here the history gets pleasantly tangled. The most common Wisconsin account holds that the “supper club” idea was carried west by Lawrence Frank, a Milwaukee native who opened a famous supper-style restaurant in Beverly Hills. That version is told by the state’s own tourism office, which also notes that early Wisconsin supper clubs were “simple roadhouses with more choices of alcohol than food.” National Geographic, meanwhile, traces the form back further, to English theater-crowd haunts and the nightlife of 1920s New York, before it spread across mid-century America and then faded away everywhere except here.

What’s not disputed is what happened after Prohibition ended in 1933. Wisconsin’s roadhouses, dance halls, and not-entirely-legal drinking spots didn’t need to reinvent themselves. They just turned the lights on. As Faiola put it: “Once alcohol was legal, these places just continued to do what they were doing, but now they were legally doing it.” Some kept their colorful pasts on display: Little Bohemia Lodge up in Manitowish Waters still shows off the bullet holes from the FBI’s 1934 raid on John Dillinger.

The golden age came in the postwar decades, roughly 1945 through the mid-1960s, when Milwaukee clubs booked Dean Martin and Tony Bennett and every crossroads had its surf-and-turf house. When the trend collapsed nationally, Wisconsin held on. De Ruyter credits, among other things, the state’s dairy-and-agriculture backbone and its network of paved rural roads. National Geographic points to something harder to measure: the German notion of Gemutlichkeit, that warm, unhurried, grandma’s-living-room feeling where everybody belongs.

Friday night belongs to the fish

If the supper club is Wisconsin’s cathedral, the Friday fish fry is its weekly service, and this tradition’s roots run deeper than the state itself. Culinary historian Kyle Cherek traces the meatless-Friday practice back to church canon law in 1249, centuries before Wisconsin existed. When Catholic immigrants, heavily German and Polish, settled here, they brought Friday abstinence with them, and Wisconsin’s lakes obligingly supplied the alternative. The state tourism office sums up the recipe for the tradition in three ingredients: the Catholic Church, Prohibition, and an abundance of cheap freshwater fish.

The details are wonderfully specific. In Milwaukee, Kashubian fishing families from the Baltic coast of Poland settled Jones Island in the 1860s and ’70s and built the city’s fishing industry. Cherek describes a community of 1,500 people with eleven taverns, and taverns, of course, served fish. During Prohibition, fish plates kept those taverns alive. And when the Church relaxed year-round Friday abstinence in the mid-1960s, it hardly mattered. By then, as the tourism office puts it, “going out for fish” on Fridays was simply an integral part of Wisconsin life.

The plate standardized early because everything on it was cheap and plentiful: battered perch, walleye, or cod; fries or potato pancakes; coleslaw; a slice of rye bread. Order a fish fry anywhere in the state tonight and that’s more or less what will arrive. It’s a meal that hasn’t needed improving in a hundred years.

The brandy old fashioned: a legend, corrected

Every Wisconsin bar rail tells the same origin story: German Wisconsinites tasted Korbel brandy at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and never looked back. It’s a great story, and De Ruyter tells it in her documentary. But the documented history is different. Drinks writer Jeanette Hurt went through two centuries of newspaper archives for her book Wisconsin Cocktails and found that even Korbel says it can’t confirm the World’s Fair story. Korbel had actually stopped making brandy during Prohibition and didn’t resume until the 1960s.

The real turning point, per Hurt’s research, came after World War II. American distilleries had spent the war years off whiskey duty, leaving a shortage of well-aged spirits, and Wisconsin distributors pounced on roughly 30,000 cases of beautifully aged Christian Brothers brandy. Offered inferior whiskey or superior brandy, Wisconsin chose brandy. Brandy makers noticed, and a state signature was born. By 1966, Wisconsinites were drinking twelve times as much brandy as the rest of the country.

The legend is lovely. The truth, that Wisconsin simply refused to drink anything second-rate, might be lovelier.

Why it endures (and where we come in)

Emmi grew up in the back seat on those county roads, watching the neon come into view, riding past the diners, drive-ins, and supper clubs where the food was always hearty, always satisfying, always shared. That’s the inheritance Emmi’s Lake Geneva was built on, and we keep it the old way: a Wisconsin Old Fashioned made with Central Standard brandy and the proper muddle; hand-battered walleye fish & chips, Friday night fish fry any night of the week; a wedge salad we’re not shy about calling a supper club centerpiece; and yes, Grasshoppers, Pink Squirrels, and Brandy Alexanders for the ride home.

The supper club survived in Wisconsin because it was never really about the food or the drink. It was about the unhurried evening, the familiar faces, the sense that you belong at the table. That’s a tradition we’re honored to carry forward, overlooking beautiful Lake Geneva, no rush at all.

Sources & Further Reading