Atlas Obscura readers share their favorite historically significant eateries.
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Atlas Obscura readers share their favorite historically significant eateries.
The guberburger lives on, despite the shuttering of its original home in Sedalia.
FROM THE OUTSIDE, A MIDWESTERN “supper club” might seem like a typical, if slightly old-fashioned, restaurant. But these establishments, especially concentrated in Wisconsin, are their own genre. They’re distinguished by taxidermy, dark wood, and their location: romantically remote, on the borders of lakes or forests. The specials have a cheerful regularity—fish fries on Friday, chicken on Sunday—and on other nights, customers feast on steaks, seafood, bread, soup, and complimentary relish trays of cheese, salads, and pickled vegetables. Washed down with cocktails and boozy ice cream drinks, it’s a bountiful eating experience. It’s also one with an inextricable whiff of the past about it, something that has both helped and hurt the supper club tradition. For many diners, their love of supper clubs is partly nostalgia. Documentary filmmaker and supper club-chronicler Ron Faiola remembers going with his grandfather during fishing trips. “Growing up in Wisconsin, that’s something you do,” he says. Supper clubs are grandfatherly restaurants—their heyday was the post-war time of plenty. But, Faiola says, the supper-club’s model goes back further, to Prohibition-era New York “in the speakeasies,” where people furtively drank during dinner. “Under your table, there’d be a bottle.”
GAS STATION HOT DOGS DON’T take breaks. You may pull into a rest stop, refill your car’s tank, empty your own, grab some snacks, and peel out again. The whole time, the dogs will have been rotating, slowly, on their shiny metal rollers. When you finally turn in for the night, they may be turning still. Once it has begun its treadmill journey, how far does your average hot dog go before it’s sent to the Great Bun in the Sky? And if, for some reason, it kept going—spinning slowly, hour after hour and year after year—how far could it eventually get?
