A cold and foggy night took us to one last meal with our visitors at a location tucked away beside Highway 172 on Oneida Street, Prime Quarter Steakhouse. I’ve been living in Green Bay for a whole year now and never once heard of the location until our visitors mentioned it in passing. A relative of theirs visits every year and reported on a meal where he cooked the steak himself over a fire pit surrounded by community, and at any other time in my life, I would have been very excited to eat there. Prime Quarter Steakhouse offers a grill your own steak experience with an all you can eat salad bar, texas toast, and baked potatoes. There are many different cuts you can choose from when you get ready to grill, all of which come in at the exact same price. This can be very valuable depending on what kind of steak you choose. Beef prices are on the rise all across the country, and this method can provide an experience for the same price you’d pay on a steak at the grocery store. I, for example, decided to grill my own T-bone steak. A steak that size would have cost me the twenty-seven dollars charged by the restaurant, and it would have only been the steak.
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Right down the lane from Lambeau Field sits Stadium View Sports Bar, an Iconic location during a COVID-19 free NFL season. This time last year I was pressed up against the fence with a can of beer in hand, barely able to fit inside. Getting to a bar for that beer was so insane that I personally couldn’t do it, and my taller and louder husband had to wrestle his way through other thirsty Packers fans to get us hooked up for a post game toast. The Washington Redskins were still a thing, and they had just lost. I went back on the first day of 2021 with some friends that came into town to visit. Friday night at a sports bar while the College Football playoffs are occurring sounds like a bad idea during the pandemic, but as has been the case with most restaurants in the city of Green Bay, I did not feel at risk. The tables were spaced out, and so was the bar. Parties sitting at the bar had two or three chair lengths between them to encourage social distancing. No communal items such as ketchup items were at the tables, and they were only presented to us-- freshly cleaned-- when the actual food arrived. Small Business Saturday began with a coffee and breakfast at the Exchange Coffee, Mercantile, and Eatery in Downtown De Pere on a breezy November morning. It looked different than every Small Business Saturday that went before it with people wearing their masks even on the sides of the road, while they stood in line to go into the small businesses that so need their help to continue to survive the pandemic. The Exchange was no different with spots on the floor to mark proper social distancing and laminated menus to be washed off behind the counter after you ordered. I talked about them more than a month ago when I wrote a short series highlighting favored and interesting local food businesses in the area, and The Exchange was a large part of my coffee article when I discussed other places I still wanted to go. We finally got there that morning, hungry and not at all caffeinated. We changed that quickly in their beautiful indoor dining area. Other patrons made sure to help maintain distance at tables, and the Exchange itself adopted a system where customers deposited their own dishes into washbins to limit interactions with staff during our stay. La Nostra Strada Pizzeria in downtown De Pere opened this week, serving Italian street pizzas in what is my first experience with this style of pizzeria. I missed their soft open Wednesday night, but I couldn’t let another day go by without a visit. So, on my lunch break Thursday afternoon, I stopped in to pick up a few slices for my husband and I to try out. Strada, as it goes by on Facebook, is conveniently located on Broadway street just a few blocks before the roundabout, and right next to Afogatto Bar. Day two, on a thursday afternoon, they had a small line waiting to grab slices for carry out. Social distancing was enforced with those little markers on the floor to tell you where to wait while others were ordering, and the short wait gave me enough time to admire the decoration inside the building. I will always appreciate a new restaurant in an old building that maintains those gold painted, individual plate ceilings. They kept those around during whatever renovations needed to occur for them to set up the adorable interior of Strada. The seating area by the window, while not actively spaced for social distancing, is occupied by visitors in a way to maintain that distance either way. The front area of Strada doesn’t allow for as much spacing as some other locations have done since the 25% capacity order, but it looked to me that anyone visiting knew what they had to do to eat here safely. I also noticed a back room for seating and a bar along the back wall for individuals, so there is plenty of space for customers eating inside. This Italian Street Pizza style location offers a case of pizzas every day, displayed as you enter the line. What’s there is what you can get, and if you’re ordering a full size for home, they display what you’re looking at on the wall so you know the sizes ahead of time. Given that my husband and I are interested in different types of pizza, I believe I will always be stopping in here for two different slices of pizza rather than a whole. All of the pictures I took while at Strada are displayed below, and after that is the actual review of what I ate. When I included Glass Nickel Pizza Co. on my weekly restaurant updates, my husband mentioned a few days later he considered them to be the best pizza he’s had in town so far, excluding any pizzas from the major brewpubs. This was news to me. He never told me this! Prior to COVID-19, Glass Nickel had apparently been one of his office’s favorites to order as a treat to the crew, so with this knowledge, we ordered delivery from Glass Nickel on Sunday evening. They’re clear with the expectations they have for achieving contactless carryout and delivery, and they give them to you in a big pop up box after your order online. This is just good business during the pandemic, and it’s something I can appreciate both as a person who hates the awkward exchange that comes with delivery anything and as a person in a global pandemic. They also have a texting system that informs you of when your order has been received and when it has left the building. Plenty of warning so you can get your pants back on before you have to get to the door. In this house, we don’t eat red sauce pizza, or at least we don’t eat it when my husband is around. My husband has a lifetime dislike of any tomato based sauces, so we decide on pizza places based on what kind of white pizza we are able to get from each location. Glass Nickel is currently doing a promotion where they have staff created pizzas on the menu as a special, and one of those was the foodle noodle which spoke to us immediately. I've talked up the Abbey for being massive supporters of the Eat Local wave going through Green Bay, but I had yet to actually eat there. COVID came right on the heels of me starting a new job, and I didn't have time, money or the ability to check out many of the local icons. Now that I do(and the need is so dire), it feels only right to use what I've got to support the people who are struggling most in the pandemic: our small businesses. I’ve made it a goal to not eat another single meal from a major fast food chain for the rest of the year. Everything is going to come from a local-- coffee, sandwiches, pizzas, sushi, pasta-- all of it. This means that I’ll have to spread my net a little wider to find more people to support. Knowing that the Abbey played a major part in my decision to do this, it felt right to start Boycotting Big by Supporting Small with them. My husband got our carryout order and brought it home. We live in Bellevue, so the meal had to survive about a fifteen minute trip from downtown De Pere. It did. When we cracked open the foam takeout boxes, our food was still warm and our fries still crunchy. Being able to enjoy almost the exact quality of a food as it should have in the restaurant is always an added bonus when the carryout goes well. The hardest part of moving is finding a new sushi bar. We have had relatively limited choices in every other city we lived, and in those conditions found the available options more than adequate. Green Bay has as many sushi restaurants in this one city to equal all of the other sushi places we've eaten in our lives. You can see why this might pose a problem to my husband and I. We needed to find a favorite, and COVID-19 put a pause to this search. We still aren't done, but Umi Sushi, Tim-San's, and Fujiyama have all had things about them that we loved. Koko's Sushi Bar has managed to mark every box for both of us. Cost effective? Husband check. Impressive cocktail menu? Wife check. Fun sushi rolls? Marriage check. Located downtown and right in the middle of a few other places I've grown fond of in the last few months since Wisconsin reopened, it's a wonder we never went before this past weekend. Worry about COVID was on every TV and radio station, and my employer fed into it. Inside of Koko's, I felt safe. The tables were well spaced in the well decorated restaurant, and it felt like I could let myself go just a little bit. Tables were spaced more than the required six feet. I could see the servers sanitizing their hands by the bar almost every time they left the table. If it hadn't been raining, we would have sat outside at their lovely and well spaced outdoor dining area. This is more than a lot of places are doing, but the safety precautions were only the beginning. Prior to COVID-19, I followed the development of this bar/restaurant/arcade so closely that I had every post they ever made automatically filtered to the top of my facebook feed. I wanted nothing more than to have a good beer over a game of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with some friends, and occasionally treat myself to a video game themed burger. I worried for them as the pandemic hit and slowed progress. I was concerned that they would never open at all-- or worse, fail entirely. That hasn’t been the case. For two weekends straight, my husband and I have visited their Green Bay location during their slow hours to take in some vintage games and have a local craft beer while we’re playing games that harken us back to our childhoods. I want so much to further support them, but with the rise of COVID-19 pushing Green Bay higher and higher up the list of outbreak cities, our last trip may have been the last one for a while. So let me tell you about Player 2. A titan among punny restaurants has been in the corner of my vision every single time I’ve driven home from the Saturday morning Farmer’s Market this year. Something about this brisk, 60 degree morning made me miss Surf Bagel in Delaware, where I regularly stopped for a coffee and a New York Style bagel before going in to work just down the road from their Lewes location. Lox, Stock'n Bagel called to me, and I answered it one morning after a veggie heavy market stop.
The moment I walked in the door, I felt the same kind of comfort of a breakfast stop at Surf Bagel. The counter of bagels. The local coffee. The chalkboard walls with the prices in the background. Few things are as comforting to me in the early morning. COVID-19 precautions have put their limits on exactly how we can all enjoy these sorts of places, but the pandemic hasn’t stopped patrons from gathering together at the outdoor seating after a nice bike ride or after their own stops at the market. One beautiful Friday afternoon, I had guests visiting us in Green Bay. We stopped at a local favorite, the 1935 relic Al’s Hamburgers, for a cheap and filling lunch. The beauty of having visitors even in this time of COVID-19 is their willingness to explore and find things with you that you hadn’t thought to visit before without them. Masks on and ready to find something sweet to help wash down beautiful burgers, my friend Jill directed us to Monzu Bakery and Custom Cakes from her searching of google maps. I drove past it three times, even with my GPS on to help guide me. If I had any idea what I would find inside its walls, I wouldn’t have needed the GPS. I will ALWAYS stop for macarons. I’m so thankful for Jill’s sweet tooth for guiding us to Monzu and fulfilling a deep craving that I’ve had since I was last in Cleveland. A good macaron is hard to find even in the biggest cities, but Green Bay has been blessed with pastry chef Jennifer Bukouricz working some making with almond flour and meringue. As you can see in the pictures I took of my bounty, the foot of the cookie is perfectly formed, and she has managed such lovely decorations on each and every one while maintaining the integrity of the cookie itself. |
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