The supper club everyone calls

The Monday before Thanksgiving, deep in Green Bay Packers country, is McKim Boyd’s Super Bowl.

Every year, that’s when he opens the phone lines for December reservations at Union, the supper club and hotel his family has run for five generations — and when thousands of callers start dialing.

“Cellcom, a local cell provider, reached out to say that between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m. last year, 26,000 calls — of just Cellcom calls — were attempted,” said Boyd. “At night, when we stopped taking calls, they said we went over 200,000 attempted calls to our number.”

By the end of the day, 95% of all reservations — about 2,730 dining slots — are filled for December.

“It’s kind of like playing the lottery,” Boyd said. “I feel bad. Some people will send screenshots where it shows they made 1,800 calls to our number and never got through. We apologize ahead of time and just indicate that there is no way we can accommodate all the people who want to come in.”

For most restaurants today, reservations happen with a few taps on a phone. During Union’s holiday rush, they still require persistence, patience and sometimes hundreds of calls; it’s an old-school system that mirrors the restaurant itself, where the food, the rituals and even the holiday frenzy have remained largely unchanged for generations.

In Wisconsin, supper clubs are less restaurants than institutions — places where families return for decades for steaks, cocktails and ritual. Union is one of the state’s most enduring examples.

---

Want more great food writing and recipes? Sign up for Salon’s free food newsletter, The Bite.

---

During December, the restaurant leans fully into its old-school holiday charm. The space, furnished with rich dark woods and poinsettia-colored fabrics, is already cozy during Wisconsin’s cold months. But demand for a table explodes during one of the 13 nights when the Yuletide Carolers come around to sing tableside to each diner.

“They can only be in one room at a time,” said Boyd. “We start [the carollers] at five o’clock in our main dining room, 5:30 in our booth room, six o’clock in our card room, 6:30 upstairs. And then we start all over again at seven o’clock. We do get two full rounds through in the process and serve 200 to 210 people each night.”

The holiday serenades, decorations dating back to the 1930s and a Christmas tree with more than 14,000 lights are part of the draw. But so is the taste of tradition Union offers.

For more than 100 years, the restaurant has been serving the De Pere community with classic supper club fare. Like many traditional Wisconsin supper clubs, Union offers a full-course dinner that unfolds slowly over the evening — a style of dining that has remained largely unchanged for generations.

Guests settle into the main dining room, the bar or the softly lit “booth room,” an intimate space lined with two-seater booths. In true supper-club fashion, each dinner arrives as a sequence: a relish tray, soup, salad, potato and dessert.

From there, the menu moves to the restaurant’s specialties: hand-cut steaks aged in-house, sautéed scallops and pan-fried walleye. There’s also liver with bacon and onions for devotees of classic supper-club cooking. At the bar, diners order from an extensive wine list, local beers and a lineup of classic cocktails.

And unlike the Christmas reservation frenzy, this ritual plays out most nights of the year.

“The menu today is very similar to what it would have been back in the ’40s,” Boyd said. “It’s heavy on steaks, and we have a lot more seafood than they would have had back then. We still have a meat cutter each night. We have our own band saw so we can cut Porterhouses, T-bones and club steaks. Before we flipped to a supper club model in the 1930s, the food was served more family style.”

Boyd’s great-grandparents, August and Antonia Maternowski, purchased Union in 1918 and ran it with the help of their 12 children. The Green Bay Packers were formed a year later, and the two institutions, about five miles apart, grew up side by side as cornerstones of the community.

“Through the years, former Packer coach Mike McCarthy has actually been in a couple of times,” Boyd said.

But being a Packers player, coach or front-office insider won’t help you snag one of those coveted seats when the Yuletide Carolers come to Union. Boyd runs the reservation book himself, old-school and by phone only — and there’s simply no cutting the line.

However, he does offer one tip for hopeful diners.

“The Christmas season for us goes almost to the end of January,” Boyd said. “We don’t take the tree down and all our decorations down until probably into the third or fourth week of January, and we do take reservations anytime in advance for that.”

And for those who don’t make it through the December phone gauntlet, the same old-school supper club ritual — steaks, cocktails and a long evening around the table — is waiting most nights of the year.

 

The post The supper club everyone calls appeared first on Salon.com.