The elusive, enduring power of Minnesota supper clubs

The Midwestern supper club is having a moment. There are James Beard Award-winning chefs holding pop-ups with supper club menus. Relish trays were just featured prominently in Food & Wine magazine. And more new restaurants are hanging the supper club moniker onto their names.

While Midwestern supper clubs are a longstanding tradition, defining them is harder to pin down.

“There’s this intangible thing that makes a restaurant a supper club,” said Ward Johnson, co-owner of Creekside Supper Club. The south Minneapolis restaurant is inspired by chef/co-owner Eli Wollenzien’s childhood memories of rural Wisconsin dining. The walls are covered in kitsch, the menu offers walleye, relish trays, popovers and ice cream drinks — all efforts to capture supper clubby authenticity.

“To me, a supper club setting is more the decor,” Johnson said. “It’s not Disney. People would bring decor from their house or their collections and there’s a bit of randomness to it — an irreverence. We say, ‘It’s fancy for a farmer.’”

Linda Koutsky, who helped chronicle the state’s dining history in "Minnesota Eats Out," says supper clubs are defined by the dishes they serve, too: “Tabletop relish trays, salad bars, popovers, wagon wheel chandeliers, low to no music, family-friendly but with a separate bar area, and steaks or fish fries.”

For those behind the restaurants, the definition is just as elusive; they just know the elements add up to the feeling of warmth and care, from the food to the decor.

While Wisconsin’s supper club culture is more robust, with documentaries, books and fan clubs devoted to them, Minnesota’s is just as special — but perhaps a little more buttoned up.

“I wish I could say they were my great-grandmother’s and they came all the way from Greece,” said general manager Alaina Pappas. “But I don’t know where they come from.” Her great-grandfather purchased the sandstone hotel that dominates the town’s main street, but it was his son-in-law, freshly returned from serving in World War II, who turned it into a supper club.

The Hubbell House is now in the hands of restaurateur John Powers, who devoted the decor in one of the dining rooms to the Pappas family. The hallmarks of a traditional supper club are still here: prime rib specials, family recipes and service from professionals who have been in the industry for decades.

Unlike Wisconsin, where much of the supper club experience is tied to the bar, Minnesota supper clubs often separate drinking and dining.

“Back then, diners began in the bar, where there was no food,” said Dale Koch, who owns the Branding Iron in Preston. Pre-dinner cocktails led to a dining room, where meals began with a relish tray and bread basket before moving on to soup or salad and eventually an entree, always with a choice of potato. The Branding Iron’s bar is still on the other side of the building.

Dessert was often an ice cream cocktail, like a minty Grasshopper or Golden Cadillac — both still served at places like Wiederholt’s in Miesville, which is on its fourth generation of Wiederholt ownership.

Branding Iron’s Koch and his wife, Becky, began their hospitality careers at a supper club and knew they were special places worth saving. Dave and Ann Forland of the Old Mill in Austin and John and Christine Schiltz of Lake Elmo Inn took over restaurants where they had once worked.

Others fell into it. Cristina and Hal Berg were getting toward “retirement-ish” age when they saw the listing for Fisher’s Club, a 1930s-era cabin-type building on Middle Spunk Lake near Avon. They became one of a handful of owners in the supper club’s history, embracing the small-town life ownership affords. “Even the word ‘supper’ is so Minnesotan,” Cristina said.

Lori and Paul Sugimura were checking real estate listings in the Brainerd Lakes area when they found that Norway Ridge, the 77-year-old supper club where they had their first date, was for sale. “I had sold my company in the Cities and thought, what’s next for us?” said Paul.

“It was important for us to keep its classic supper club charm,” said Lori. “Generations of people come here year after year, and we wanted to continue that.”

With several owners starting their culinary careers at supper clubs, taking over the business was more than a job, but a dream realized.

“We’ve lived through the housing crisis, the Great Recession, 9/11 and the pandemic,” said John Schiltz of Lake Elmo Inn. “This was the only restaurant I ever wanted to own.”

For 30 years he’s run the restaurant he dreamed of building. He and Christine took a combination of dilapidated rooms and created a main street centerpiece. Around the holidays, the dining room drips with thousands of vintage Christmas ornaments collected over the years. Like the ornaments, the lessons learned from supper club stewardship developed over time.

“I remember asking Bill Kozlak of Jax Cafe, ‘What do you do when your customers start to get old?’ He said, ‘Their kids will come. Just so long as you care for them, the memories will bring them back.’”

It’s that enduring allure that is spurring the next generation of supper club owners.

“I remember dining out as a kid with my mom,” said Creekside’s Johnson. “It feels like a big deal — and they had au gratins and ice cream. It feels warm — comfortable and like home. That’s a supper club."