Anders Nienstaedt
On a visit to Denver in May, I was a little taken aback when my Coloradan friends suggested we eat at their neighborhood’s new hip eatery, a self-proclaimed “Wisconsin-inspired supper club” called The Shanty.
It wasn’t so much that I was worried the restaurant would get the cheese curds wrong. It was more that I felt uneasy that an institution I’d taken for granted was being singled out for display. I felt flustered and self-conscious, like when somebody asks if I say “milk” or “melk.” And, yes, I suppose I was also afraid the place would get the cheese curds wrong.
To my great relief, The Shanty got a lot of things right. The cheese curds were fresh and delicately battered, the brandy old fashioned was served with crushed ice, and the fish fry happened only on Fridays. If you’d be inclined to use the adjective “authentic” to describe an encounter with Wisconsin cuisine, knock yourself out.
On the other hand, the restaurant’s interior decorator seemed to interpret “supper club” as “generic hipster minimalism.” Instead of the standard issue knotty pine paneling, drop ceilings, and booths lit by bumpy glass tea lights, The Shanty had an abundance of natural light and reclaimed brick, complete with an Edison bulb chandelier and a 12-foot-high mural of a bearded, pipe-smoking sailor. Standard fare for 2019, and maybe not such a bad thing in this case. Given the tendency of all things curated to slide into self-parody, it might be borderline heroic that The Shanty didn’t try too hard to look like a real Northwoods establishment. The restaurant’s only concession to Fargo-level irony was the forgotten Christmas wreath on the back wall. I’ll eat my yellow foam hat if that wasn’t intentional.
I suppose the presence of a “Wisconsin-inspired supper club” in Denver makes you think about the future of the institution. Are hip diners from Brooklyn to Seattle about to wax poetic for pot roast and prime rib? Is iceberg and thousand island the new kale and balsamic? Is the Wisconsin supper club due for its Hollywood close-up? Can’t you just imagine Wes Anderson training his camera lens on an exquisitely balanced composition of wall-mounted fish?
If the idea of coast-to-coast Wisconsin supper clubs — or, even worse, a franchise — gives you more indigestion than the Packers’ 2018 away record, you might not have to worry just yet. The presence of a supper club in Denver might have more to do with the dynamics of the Mile High City than a coming wave of enthusiasm for Wisconsin cuisine.
As Shanty owner and Milwaukee native Tim Doherty likes to point out, Denver’s recent population boom has made it a city of expats. That includes a lot of Midwesterners hungry for a taste of home or a place to watch Wisconsin sports (The Shanty is an official Packers establishment, according to a framed certificate by the door). For now, the hip urban take on the Wisconsin supper club appears to be limited to The Shanty and a few new restaurants in Chicago (including Millie’s Supper Club and The Tortoise Supper Club).
That’s fine with me. Part of my relief stems from my reluctance to set boundaries around the supper club, to define what it is and isn’t. To me, a supper club’s ingredients should remain somewhat ephemeral, like the faintest memory of cigarette smoke in walnut-stained wainscoting. When I go home to the Northwoods to visit my family, we like to eat at the Double D Lounge in Aurora, Wisconsin — a cozy place named after its owners (Diane and Dave), with a horseshoe bar and a few video slot machines in the back corner. The Double D has a great fish fry and a tasty burger, but the menu is mostly Thai — the native cuisine of Diane, who is also the cook. Usually, my family alternates between ordering pad thai and cheese ravioli.
There isn’t any one menu item or decorative element — neither the walleye on the menu nor the one on the wall — that makes the Double D a real Wisconsin supper club. If I had to put my finger on it, I would say that its supper club status has something to do with its pace. The server will warn you that dinner at the Double D usually takes a while. If you’re too hungry to wait, order an appetizer; if you’re in too much of a hurry, drive across the river to Michigan and get some fast food. A supper club is a place where the restaurant host sometimes strong-arms you to the bar for some compulsory hobnobbing while the server “gets your table ready.” It’s a place where you can linger to watch the last points of a basketball game on television without worrying about someone hustling you out.
Which — to the Shanty’s credit — is just what we did. The Bucks ended up losing in double overtime in game three of the playoffs in Toronto, as we boxed our heaping leftovers and sipped the last puddles of sugar from the bottom of our old fashioneds. Before we left, my friends and I gave a toast to meeting again and sharing another Wisconsin meal — on the other side of the Mississippi.