Postcards From Milwaukee
Discover more from The Crunchwrap by Adam Chandler
Dear Friends,
Last week’s Crunchwrap was lost to a bloat of cheap lager and cheese curds as I went to Milwaukee to do some reporting for my next book. Sorry about that!
I can’t neatly sum up what I was doing there (beyond shattering saturated fat recommendations and trying to hack my AirBnB’s Hulu account), but suffice it to say that heading to the Midwest for a project about work in America means dwelling in the gloom of where we’ve gone wrong. And maybe how we can go right again.
Ahead of my trip though, I did receive the perfect omen: About 48 hours before I left, the city of Milwaukee had to remove its famous bronze statue of The Fonz from the riverwalk because someone vandalized it! The Fonz, of course, is the best remembered character from Happy Days, the nostalgia-drenched sitcom set in a very idyllic version of postwar Milwaukee and America. The idea that someone in 2023 would douse this cheery symbol in black goo is quite literally on the nose.
As for the city, I loved the brats and Italian sandos and tortas and burgers, seeing polka at a Friday Fish Fry and the Frank Lloyd Wright affordable housing system as well as meeting all the people who swore and then apologized for swearing, but easily my favorite thing about Milwaukee was the bar culture. The taverns I visited (many on recommendations) were classic third places, where neighborhood news gets shared, there was an easy feeling, and people of different generations mingled. I admit I’m basing this entirely off of the six or so smaller bars I went to in the warrens of East Milwaukee over five days. But STILL, it’s a surprise when you go somewhere and it’s not 12 stools with people locked in an endless scroll or dumbly watching Around the Horn on mute.
I don’t know what about Milwaukee seems to have resisted that swerve into antisocial behavior at bars, but having bartended during the transition from dumb phones to smartphones, anytime I see a place where it’s music instead of TV and conversation instead of a despondent sort of myopia, I feel better about the world. (I probably need to get out of the Northeast.)
If you find yourself in Milwaukee, I highly recommend Wolski’s (since 1908) or a bar called Jamo’s, which trusts its patrons enough to have carpet(!) on the floors and leather banquettes alongside their $3 bottles of Schlitz. Also, it was nice to find some e.e. cummings graffiti in the men’s room!
Crunchkeeping
Speaking of American decline, earlier this month, I wrote a piece for Slate’s Fast-Food Week about how we’ve been outdone and outclassed by Canadian McDonald’s. Cheers to Jon Fischer who left this opening paragraph completely intact:
In those dark, sunless winter months when the temperature hits minus 20 degrees Celsius on the moose-lined banks of Lake Louise, I imagine that each Canadian is warming themself with the knowledge that they’ve beaten us at our own game. Canada has something America doesn’t and perhaps never will: McDonald’s supremacy.
Lastly, thank you to Crunchwrap readers David Kogan and Jesse Hirsch, both of whom wrote in to let me know that recalls like the wild ones I wrote about at Trader Joe’s last month are actually pretty par for the course in the grocery and food biz.
Readers, I’m sorry if I led you to believe that Trader Joe’s is uniquely bad. In hindsight, what I should have been clearer about is that Trader Joe’s is not uniquely unique at all and that the bizarre Trader Joe’s halo is what really makes their recalls stand out.
Moreover, I assume that about 40 percent of what I get at Stop & Shop has stray rocks in it. All of which is to say, I’ll never take your comments and responses for granite. (eh? eh?)
Thanks as always for reading and putting up with me.
Love,
Adam