The Supper Club Book: A Celebration of a Midwest Tradition Author: Visit Amazon's Dave Hoekstra Page | Language: English | ISBN:
1613743688 | Format: PDF
The Supper Club Book: A Celebration of a Midwest Tradition Description
From Booklist
Mention a supper club and people outside Wisconsin and its immediate vicinity probably think of some fancy nightclub where the well-heeled dance and drink till the wee hours. But for midwesterners, the supper club is an epicenter for social eating, a locally owned roadhouse where families repair for an evening to treat themselves to a hearty meal with friends and neighbors. As Hoekstra points out, every supper club is unique, but they almost certainly host Friday-night fish fries and serve prime rib on Saturday, defining elegant enjoyment for small-town and rural midwesterners. Hoekstra relates the stories of a number of these institutions, their owners, and the people who have frequented them over the past half-century. He holds out hope for their future, noting how some are evolving in new directions, safeguarding local traditions in the face of competition from national chains. Photographs of both restaurateurs and their clientele preserve a sense of a passing era. --Mark Knoblauch
Review
"...for midwesterners, the supper club is an epicenter for social eating, a locally owned roadhouse where families repair for an evening to treat themselves to a hearty meal with friends and neighbors... Hoekstra relates the stories of a number of these institutions, their owners, and the people who have frequented them over the past half-century. He holds out hope for their future, noting how some are evolving in new directions, safeguarding local traditions in the face of competition from national chains. Photographs of both restaurateurs and their clientele preserve a sense of a passing era."—Booklist
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- Hardcover: 304 pages
- Publisher: Chicago Review Press (June 1, 2013)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1613743688
- ISBN-13: 978-1613743683
- Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 8.4 x 0.8 inches
- Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
I purchased this book because I heard a delightful conversation about it with the author on public radio. I did not grow up in the Wisconsin, or otherwise, supper club culture. My first experiences with them, many years ago, were a little unnerving. Just what kind of place is this? Why supper? Why a club? But, after many trips to Wisconsin, I have come to know a few of them well, and to appreciate, if not fully understand, the ones I've become used to.
This book will tell you a lot about the upper Midwest supper club culture and about a few of the clubs in particular. The author gathered a huge collection of odds and ends about individual clubs--history, decor, menu, surrounding community, customers, and owners. People trusted him with a lot of personal information, and he returns that trust by treating everyone well. Calling the book a kindly cultural anthropology would not be too much of a stretch. The book's approach is more celebratory than critical/analytical. I like that.
What I don't like is the writing style. I settled in to read and enjoy in a relaxed engaging way but could not. Sentence after sentence is short, direct and simple--written as unvarying subject-verb-object. Over and over and over. The information about each club is typically presented in an unorganized, slapdash manner without transitions; sort of just decompiling his notes. The staccato presentation clashes with the descriptions of the more easy-going rural supper club culture. Rather than relaxing as I read, I found myself getting jumpy and unable to concentrate. The author is a newspaperman, so this kind of writing is his style, but it doesn't work for this book. What he does isn't really writing in the larger meaning of that word. A genuine essay on each club would have made this a first rate book.
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