A WISCONSIN SUPPER CLUB TO REMEMBER

 ISHNALA

In New York we're used to waiting; waiting in line to see the newest fashion exhibit at the Met, waiting at Morgenstern's for the newest ice cream flavor, waiting for tickets to Friday's newest release from Hollywood or just waiting at Duane Reade to pay for a tube of Crest and a two-liter bottle of Diet Pepsi. But I'm not used to having to wait for anything back in Wisconsin. What could possibly be worth it?

This was not the first time we had driven up to the Dells area with the intent of having dinner at one of America's premier supper clubs, Ishnala.

We'd made a previous trip in April only to find out Ishnala is a seasonal restaurant. Don't try to go when there's still snow on the ground and in Wisconsin that means anytime before May because the doors will be locked and the barstools will be set upside down on top of the bar .

This time we checked out the situation on line just to make sure that this second attempt wouldn't end up with us having to go to our second choice: McDonalds. Their website showed the hours: Open from four until the kitchen runs out of steaks. It gave a preview of the menu and then the kicker: no reservations.

With all this knowledge we set off around noon planning to make a few antique stops and then head over for an early dinner. We never attempt a road trip without making significant plans for stopping and scouting out the area's trash and treasures. We thought we'd shoot for somewhere around 4:30 for dinner. I know, I know, with a four-thirty dinner goal it would appear that we'd somehow graduated to entry into the grey-haired, assisted walker crowd. Not so fast.

It was a Tuesday. We thought we'd get in relatively easily since in our current state of ageism denial we still assumed we all had the ability to out run that grey-haired walker crowd.

Ishnala is a Winnebago Indian word meaning, "By Itself Alone". The way to the restaurant is through a winding road lined with hundreds of acres of northern pines and bright green forests dappled in brilliant sunlight. The road ends in a parking lot just short of Mirror Lake, a parking lot that at 4:30 was already packed with cars. We'd clearly miscalculated and we clearly weren't alone.

The walk from the car was a bumpy one ill-suited to our wheeling walker dinner competition even with tennis ball caps added to the two back legs of those stabilizing walkers we felt we still had the edge on getting to the front of the hostess line.

It was going to be a race through the beautiful patios dotted with bright red seating. We should have taken the hint to grab one of those seating settings before they were completely filled with other hopeful diners.

The approach to the restaurant reveals the log cabin exterior built upon and enlarged from the original cabin built by the Coleman family back in 1909.

The north woods appeal of Ishnala is true and certainly not disappointing. Indigenous flagstone from a nearby quarry, log construction and artifacts of the hunt adorning the walls all add to its authentic charm.

What had the possibility of disappointment was the hostess' greeting that began with "How many?" and then ended with "Currently you're looking at a two hour wait time". What do you do? Do you turnaround and hang your head in submission to your plan B, McDonalds, alternative?

The hostess saved us with her reminder that we could have a seat at the bar while we waited for a table. Duh! The bar, or bars are a quintessential part of any supper club and Ishnala's horseshoe bar is a drunkard's dream.

It's a real trip back to the fifties where mortar and pestles line the bar as bartenders muddle oranges and cherries for the restaurant's famous sweet Old-Fashions.

The bar literally juts out over Mirror Lake. Surrounded by windows the view is spectacular but if this isn't enough you can take your drinks out to one of the many terraces or walk down to the beach.

You are given one of those beepers that will begin a light show and vibration thrill in your pocket to let you know when your table is ready. This helps so  you needn't worry about getting too far afield or too inebriated to miss your table. Clearly we didn't mind the wait. It was almost disappointing when our alarm went off and we had to return to the hostess station to be escorted to our table.

The dining room is tiered so that all tables have a view of the lake.

The menu is traditional supper club fare stretching from local fish to Chicken Cordon Bleu to several cuts of steak.

It's not cheap but it's totally delicious and what wouldn't be after two hours of bar time.






















THE GALLERY

Canoe, 1990
Sally Gall, photographer
Represented by Julie Saul Gallery

WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST AND WORST PART TWO

WALL STREET JOURNAL

We published our best in last week's blog post but the WSJ only mentioned our worst. Here's the whole story of what we sent them


































THANKSGIVING OVEN

It was the late eighties. Rick had started his campaign for a weekend home. I was only willing to agree if I could get a dog but it became a pretty regular weekend activity to go a little farther away from the city to meet with realtors to look at properties. The fantasy went on for months before the fantasy progressed to a possibility and then to a serious option.  We ended up about a three and a half hour drive from the city in the Upper Catskills when Rick's dream home finally manifested itself. Now he had to convince me. It took several months before we purchased a six bedroom board-and-battened Carpenter Gothic cottage built in 1869 in need of some extensive updating. This was not our first rodeo with kitchen design but this was going to be our first kitchen that didn't involve a paying client. We were going to get to do this one just the way we wanted or so we thought. First, came the concept and we wanted a kitchen that would serve as the heart of our home. Those six bedrooms were going to be filled every weekend with friends and family. Since the small town we had settled in had no amenities, the nearest grocery store was a twenty-five minute drive away; food was going to be a major activity and daily concern. Our first construction decision was to blow through a wall and double the footprint for the kitchen. In order to accomplish this renovation (the total project would stretch over seven years) we ended up having to call on our gracious vendors, old friends, new local friends and talented family members for a boat load of favors. Cooking was going to play an important part in our entertaining so everything in this kitchen was going to get the soup to nuts treatment. We researched tiles, floorings, and cabinetmakers. We ended up with a local cabinetmaker that built out our kitchen using the auto body repair shop in the neighboring town to spray paint our cabinets with an auto grade enamel finish. The beveled glass cabinet doors came courtesy of my brother's stained glass studio back in Wisconsin. We looked at Sub-Zero, Viking and Miele appliances going over options like side-by-side versus  separate fridges and freezers. We looked at commercial versus residential appliances. We looked at every bell and whistle kitchen manufacturers could dream up in the era of eighties technology and that's how we ended up with an actual industrial restaurant grade six-burner range with a griddle and oversized oven so large we could roast a 28-pound turkey in it. Unfortunately we hadn't done a commercial project yet. So we weren't aware of the peculiarities of a commercial oven and the early eighty's was before the "professional kitchen" trend had taken root and options were limited.
It was our first Thanksgiving after we had completed our kitchen renovation. All the bedrooms were full for this our first Thanksgiving and christening of new kitchen with our commercial range. An incredible menu had been written out. A 24-pound turkey had been reserved weeks in advance and picked up on the Wednesday before Turkey Day. The master plan for beginning our Thanksgiving prep had us putting the turkey in that brand new oven around nine in the morning. It was going to take eight hours of constant basting to get the turkey ready for a six o'clock sit-down dinner for sixteen.  At exactly nine, just as the Macy's Parade television coverage was to begin the turkey that had been wrapped in herb and butter soaked cheesecloth was ready to go into the oven. Rick flipped the dial to lite the oven. Nothing happened. He tried again and again and again. What we didn't know about commercial equipment was they need to be used constantly or they don't perform. You can't leave them dormant. A weekend home by definition is only going to get an oven fired up a maximum two out of every seven days at best. Some two hours later, after taking input from every guest in the house, we got ahold of Bill, the local handyman and a neighbor with a blowtorch. Bill lit his blowtorch and with a bit of finagling got the oven going.  The blowtorch method from then on became our only way of ever getting our oven to work. The lesson here was unless you're going to turn your country home into a farm to table restaurant don't go commercial, stick with high-grade residential. But just in case keep a blowtorch handy for those special occasions when you really need to fire up your bird.
THE GALLERY

From "Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death"
Corinne May Botz, photographer
Represented by Benrubi Gallery

WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST AND WORST PART ONE

MILK CANS

Every so often I get a request from the Wall Street Journal to contribute a story or a comment about design for their Friday section, Off Duty. Last week I got a request asking for a reply about both a personal best and worst design related purchases. It made me take inventory of our years of collecting. What I found was that those things that mattered most weren't necessarily the most expensive but they were the ones that held stories. I'm breaking this post up into two separate posts. This is the one I told the WSJ about our best.
For Rick and me it was one of our first trips to Europe together. We were both in our early thirties. I'm sure Rick will point out he was a little closer the early side of thirty than I was. The trip came after Rick had tried his hand at the culinary arts studying as a sous chef with Peter Kump. As part of our trip and with this burgeoning interest in haute cuisine we'd decided to do a tour of some of the famous Lyonnais restaurants we'd heard so much about. We'd made reservations with Paul Bocuse, and Les Frères Troisgros months before we were to travel. We first ate at Paul Bocuse. We still have the menu that included his famous turtle soup. At Paul Bocuse you consume more than what's on the menu. You drink in every aspect of the room's interior, the table settings and the service. We didn't think anything could be more memorable. We were wrong.
Les Frères Troisgros had already acquired its third Michelin star. We'd scheduled our reservation for a lunch. While we'd be staying in Lyon the trip to Les Frères Troigros required a train ride to its bucolic setting in the small hamlet of Roanne. It was a late lunch. When we arrived many of the other lunch guests had already left. I'm not sure if it was our relative youth, our American novelty (not many Americans traveled to Roanne) or what we wore. I remember there seemed to be a real fascination with the pink knit tie I had worn. Several of the kitchen staff kept sneaking a peek at us from behind the swinging portal door leading in and out of the kitchen. Lunch was lengthy and superb but our most graphic memory was of dessert brought to our table on a cart filled with French cheeses, fantasy inspired pastries, and an assortment of handmade ice creams and sorbets; the latter all presented in little metal milk cans similar to the ones we had seen throughout the Rhones-Alpes region at restaurants both grand and humble.  As with most of the courses at Troisgros the desserts came in threes. After a sabayon and a cheese tasting we closed our meal with the ice creams. We can't remember if it was a glace a la manderine or a lavender infused selection we chose, but by then we were so full I was thankful it was only a small scoop that was pulled from those little milk cans.
 As we left there was a little gift area in the entry with Troisgros souvenirs, plates with their logo, aprons and branded utensils displayed in a dimly lit case. Sandwiched between the plates and serving pieces were the very same silvery ice cream milk cans with the Troisgros name engraved on them that we had just seen on the dessert cart. We both looked at each other with a different kind of hunger in our eyes. These beckoning sorbet servers seemed the perfect souvenir to take home. This was prior to cell phones with built-in calculators and we were so stuffed with all the butter and sugar we had just consumed our minds weren't working at full capacity. We tried doing the conversion calculations from francs to dollars in our mathematically challenged brains and somehow came up with a cost of $37.50 for each can. We bought two thinking we had scored a sweet souvenir deal, the perfect memento to remind us of our glutinous tour of French culinary royalty.  Having just started our lives together, we were very aware of what extravagances we could afford.  Lunch with the Troigros brothers was about all we had budgeted for that afternoon.  It wasn't until we got to the train station that we realized in our wine soaked heads we had misplaced a decimal point on the cost of our charming milk cans.  Turning them over we discover their Sterling Silver stamp.  Our sweet little souvenirs had cost us $375.00 each!  The sweat of realization began to pierce through my crisp white shirt into the armholes of my linen sports coat. We debated going back. We didn't. We held that bag containing our treasure very tightly on our train ride back to Lyon only to breakout into hysterical laughter once we were safely back in our hotel.
We love our silver milk cans. Turns out they are the perfect fit for a pint of Haagen-Dazs pineapple coconut ice cream. Yum!
THE GALLERY

Rue Rambuteau, 1946
Willy Ronis
Represented by Peter Fetterman Gallery