So Long, Milwaukee

I'll be the first to admit it: I've been a bad Brewers fan. I haven't been to many games and I only really keep track of them when they're winning. I've already moved on to preparing to be a Rockies fan ... though I'll probably do that half-heartedly, as well.

Our first year in Milwaukee I was still commuting back and forth to Chicago and mostly living there. That was the year the Brewers won their division and were pretty awesome. Everybody was excited about Fielder and Braun and I was somewhat swept up in the fervor -- that is, I watched a couple of games by myself at a depressing sports bar in Chicago while wishing I was just living and working in Milwaukee.

It wasn't until I finally moved my entire life to Milwaukee that I got to go to a game at Miller Park. So it was probably in the wave of relief and excitement at not having to make the slog back and forth along I-94 to Chicago that I experienced that first game. For whatever reason, I loved it.

I thought the stadium -- while not the classic structure I have come to love in places like Chicago and St. Louis and very different from my fondly remembered SafeCo field in Seattle -- was beautiful, the way elves from a Tolkien book would build a baseball stadium. And the fan-shaped retractable dome is special and -- as I understand it -- the only one of its kind in North America.

This place just bumped its little self onto the list with an utterly delightful brat/fries/beer lunch in their sidewalk seating area today. When you think of the quintessential Milwaukee meal, it has to be something like this: a fresh brat -- not too tough, not too mushy -- on a pretzel bun (of course); parmesan-crusted fries (unexpected AND delicious); PBR served in two 9oz mugs (adorable). There's nothing like ordering one beer and getting two (even if they are half the size).

Having outdoor seating is always appreciated on a sunny spring day, particularly on always charming Ye Olde Historic 3rd Street (or whatever we're meant to call the few blocks of 3rd that have cobblestone roads and places worth going to).

We explored the Sun Fair on Mitchell Avenue yesterday. A family-friendly event complete with rides from your childhood like the "Tilt-A-Whirl" and "Pharoah's Fury" as well as dozens of opportunities to win generic stuffed animals of varying sizes depending on what feat of strength/accuracy/luck you have demonstrated competency in, the Sun Fair was tons of fun. We were definitely there at an off time (as one often is when accompanied by an almost-three-year-old), and so missed the mariachi bands and the liveliness of the evening hours, but it meant no lines and lots of attention from friendly vendors.

A fun game recommendation regarding those friendly vendors: walk back and forth through the gauntlet of games (including favorites like "Let's Go Fishing", "Pop the Balloon", and "Throw a Baseball at the 'Glass' Bottles") and see how many different pick-up lines you are subjected to. (Probably especially interesting to guys like me who don't hear a lot of pick-up lines in their daily lives.) Some of my favorites were "Come on, Dad, catch her (my daughter) a fish, and I'll give you a Tweety Bird" and "Come on guys, be real men and shoot some guns!"

We passed up the games but did manage to get on a couple of the rides, in spite of a lifelong distrust of large rides that seem to suddenly appear, disappear and reappear in new locations all over the world. How safe can something so impermanent really be? Sometimes you just have to trust.

Tess is a fine restaurant, as restaurants go. I am not a food critic or even endowed with a particularly acute palate and so beyond a certain point (somewhere a few rungs beyond Olive Garden, perhaps), my discernment of restaurant quality becomes fairly untrustworthy. But Tess is certainly in that area of fine restaurant above those rungs, so that is something, anyway.

What made Tess a fun place for me was sitting at its bar prior to our meal. Their bar staff were some of the most knowledgeable/willing-to-talk-to-you I've encountered and gave us everything from insider tips on how to make particular drinks, spot-on recommendations, and history lessons about brandy consumption in the state of Wisconsin.

I'm not entirely sure what my reasoning is in putting St. Paul's Fish Company in the top 100 Milwaukee experiences. Not that I don't think it belongs here, but it is not exactly what I would point to as a quintessential Milwaukee landmark or the most amazing food (although the food is good). I think my reasoning comes in prongs (probably three, as I tend to think in threes).

1. It's in the Public Market and people like to make a big deal about the Public Market. I've always found the PM to be vaguely disappointing, never completely living up to the hype. It's missing something that I can't quite put my finger on but want to say has to do with a lack of farm-fresh local produce and/or buskers. In any case, St. Paul's is kind of the saving grace for the PM in my mind. I'm sure mine is a minority opinion in this regard.

2. They have crackin' lobster rolls. And their fries are baller, too.

County Clare should probably come much later on in this list as it is quite possibly my favorite place to go each OR drink in Milwaukee and VERY likely my favorite place to do both of those things simultaneously.

County Clare is very Irish (named after a real-life Irish county) and thus it serves many of your favorite dishes found in American Irish pubs (I know embarrassingly nothing about ACTUAL Irish pubs): shepherd's pie, corned beef, Guiness Guiness and Guiness. Plus it has at least one bartender and several patrons who speak in what appear to be authentic Irish accents, which leads a fair amount of credibility, am I right?

I can probably count on one hand the number of restaurants that we've been to more than two or three times in this fair city, but County Clare would take up one of those fingers ... and probably one of the prettier/bigger ones. I love it's curry gravy that you can dip figuratively ANYTHING into, the fact that you can almost always get a table, and the fact that I have been able to take my daughter here at many different developmental stages (from slumbering newborn to the rambunctious toddler) and she fits right in with the crowd.

Also, it lets out rooms hotel-style. And I think each room has a jacuzzi, but I may be inappropriately extrapolating from one specific experience in one specific room that was not even been let out to me. But in any case THAT room had a jacuzzi, as well as an otherwise charming decor, and some funny signs about when and when not to operate the jacuzzi. 

I had never visited an urgent care facility in my life ... and my mom worked at one for most of my childhood.

Then I had a kid.

Now we LOVE the urgent care centers near us! We're particularly fond of the Aurora-branded ones here in town ... for their mix of down-home charm and luxurious, mood-lit waiting rooms. (I'd have to visit one during a more daytime-ish hour, but during all of our evening/late-night encounters, they have been decidedly romantic in their lighting schemes).

The first time we went -- for an undisclosed malady suffered by my wife -- my daughter was a 6-month-old (or thereabouts -- read "mushy baby") and it was quite possibly the most relaxing hour I experienced that month: completing a crossword puzzle in the warm glow of a couch-side lamp the effect of which was soporific enough as to keep my daughter happily asleep for the duration of our visit.

The second time was the night before we escaped to California for a Christmas vacation -- the perfect time for an eye infection, this time for the toddler. The ever-friendly staff and doctor (who, as I recall, asked us to buy him a steak ... or something) didn't even allow me to have my hour of respite, because the wait time was so short. But for the few minutes that we were in the lobby, we enjoyed what I think was a faux-fire-place and some easy week-night meal recipes from "Family Circle Magazine." 

This was something of a last-minute addition to the list, as I hadn't even visited it when I started the countdown. In fact, I wasn't sure I'd ever get around to it (especially after lazily missing two interest-piquing special exhibits -- one about poop and the other about pirates), but then my mother-in-law rather handily came up with freeby tickets through some ridiculous museum swap system ... so we went.

I was pleasantly surprised. The Milwaukee Public Museum has all the hallmarks of a local natural history museum -- dinosaurs, glaciers, and the obligatory dioramas complete with life-size native peoples and homely dutch women placing bread on their little Dutch tables ... all with some reasonable but tangential relationship to the Milwaukee area and its peoples. Despite the familiarity and somewhat out-of-datedness (for instance, so glad that we get to peek in the window of a member from each European nation's kitchen -- seriously, they ALL have spinning wheels! -- but where are the little kitchen areas that relate to our Latino and African-American citizens?) of the permanent exhibits, they are fun to waltz through and they are impressive in quality. 

I grew up on a steady diet of "SuperCuts," that impersonal, anonymous but ubiquitous mecca of mediocre hair styling. There I had my needs met reasonably well by a revolving door of 19-year-olds fresh out of beauty school who were fairly able to provide me with buzz cuts, bowl cuts, and preacher cuts (what we called the extreme side part that my brother and I rocked from third grade until high school graduation) that would not get me terribly noticed (the goal) at school.

Entering college -- a wilderness from which I emerged with any kind of attention to personal appearance or personal hygiene only if I knew I was going to be seeing my mother in the near future -- I entered into on-again/off-again relationships with several snooty salons, primarily because they were nearby but also because I had caught the distinct impression that it was no longer acceptable to frequent SuperCuts, ProCuts or any other econo-chain stylist establishments.

It wasn't until after college that I began to really try to frequent a barbershop/stylist that I could call my own. This resulted in me being vaguely uncomfortable and feeling like I wasn't "cool enough" for the ultra-tattooed gum-smackers hacking at my hair -- which is, admittedly, somewhat akin to a wild and thorny bush -- with moderate to minimal success ... and paying somewhat more than I thought reasonable for the privilege.

This inordinately long preamble is intended to set the stage for Aaron, the agreeable Russian who is the owner and sole employee of "Pete's Barber Shop" on Brady Street (Between Glorioso's and Sciortino's). I found Aaron after my first Milwaukee haircut -- organized for me by my well-meaning wife at a garishly pink (inside and outside) building that gave garishly pink haircuts -- met with disastrous results. A coworker suggested I find "the Russian Barber of Brady" (or something like that) and a quick drive-by scan of the establishments and a pop-in at "Pete's" confirmed that I had found the right place.

Pete's is sparsely decorated and has two chairs, one for people to get haircuts in, the other apparently for show or to hold certain supplies when needed. There are the requisite chairs for folks to sit and wait and sometimes even strike up lively neighborhood conversations (so long as one of the patrons is of the older persuasion).

But the main reason to love Pete's is Aaron himself. He is the first barber I've been to that was easy to talk to and didn't seem like he was making conversation as a business decision. He loves to spout off -- in his heavily accented and sometimes hard to understand English -- on the various goings on in the area, the local sports teams, recent crime reports, etc. If you get to know him, he has great stories of his time in Russia and as a young barber when he started out in Milwaukee. 

Yeah, the Bronze Fonz is in basically every "Exploring Milwaukee" feature article you'll ever see in one of those cheezy local mags, but the Bronze Fonz is a a whole lot more than just a goofball statue for tourists to snap selfies next to.

Don't get me wrong -- tourists do and should snap selfies next to the BF. How could you not? But there is something encouraging, cheerful, and dependable about a guy who, in the midst of Milwaukee seasons (all of them -- including the Polar Vortex from which we mere mortals cower, flee, and shiver) stands resolute, feet shoulder-width apart, thumbs toward the heavens, smile gleaming (sometimes quite literally, depending on the amount of sunshine). The BF isn't just there for your drunken summertime staggers along the River Walk -- he's there to encourage you as you slog your way through the winter drudgeries, too, should you happen to slog along the river at some point.

I've been to exactly two framing shops in my life (not counting big box stores that offer framing in addition to everything else under the sun). One was all class: sparsely decorated, organized, clean, well-lit, and -- of course -- ridiculously expensive. The other was a hot mess: frames of all types strewn about seemingly tossed willy-nilly into piles and onto racks and surrounded by posters, and other assorted clutter, seemingly miscellaneous or -- at best -- tangentially related to frames. 

The second of these two is Frame and Fabric, my go-to place for framing needs in Milwaukee. For whatever reason we had several framing projects with which we required professional assistance last year, and we took them all to Teresa, the owner/operator of F&F. Despite the aforementioned state of chaos the shop appears to be to the untrained eye, Teresa knows exactly what she has and where it is and each time I've been in she's found something that suited my needs. Luckily my need has never involved the "fabric" part of frame and fabric, because apparently Teresa no longer deals in that particular trade. She just hasn't got around to changing the name of the store to reflect that business decision.

We have developed a crutch while living in Milwaukee. A crutch that keeps us going during those tired and/or sick and/or (extremely cold) weeks. And there are lots of those weeks.

That crutch is Louise's. 

More specifically, it is Louise's pizza delivery and take-out service. To this day I've never actually eaten IN Louise's, though I have had the odd drink at the bar while waiting for my pizza order to come out. We have, however, become frequent appreciators of Louise's pies. Our go to order: a large pepperoni pizza with the complimentary bread and oil. Sometimes we go nuts and put mushrooms on half of it.

Louise's always does us right. Just enough grease to let you know you're indulging yourself in something. Plus a non-descript white box that lets you feel superior in the fact that the thing you're indulging in is not Dominos, Papa Johns or something equally ubiquitous. 

Another exciting exploration from "Doors Open Milwaukee," we've actually never seen a show at the Pabst (again, I remind, we have a two-year-old). Getting to walk around the stage and backstage areas was pretty fun, though, and the building has always impressed me from the outside. Plus, it has an old-school chandelier suspended above the auditorium that is both scary and awesome and some amusing anecdotes about the backstage area and "green room" that I've since forgotten. May need to take the tour again, though I'm pretty sure they involved Van Halen debauchery or else an epic foosball game or something.

I don't dry clean a lot. When I do, I like it to be at a place with a little history, y'know what I mean?

Well, lucky me, in the heart of Milwaukee is a dry-cleaning establishment that has been in operation since 1908 (as it's website says: the year "the first passenger airplane took flight; the first Mother's Day was observed; the first horror movie debuted; the Model T was introduced, and Taft was elected President). That's the year a Greek immigrant living in Milwaukee started what would become the London Cleaners, probably the coolest-looking dry-cleaners you'll ever go in. 

When we first moved into our apartment in Milwaukee -- with the help of my younger brother and my parents -- we decided to take everybody out for pizza and beer (that being what one does when non-professional mover-people help one move in). We found our way -- as people new to the area seem to -- to Brady Street, where my gregarious father began asking strangers on the street where we could find good pizza. Without fail each of the three people we asked pointed us down the hill toward the lake to Zaffiro's, claiming it to be the "best pizza in town!" 

Perhaps it had to do with being literally three blocks away from Zaffiro's when positing the question to the aforementioned strangers, but the complete and utter consistency of the responses was striking.

The pizza itself was fine, for a crispy thin-crust thing (side-note: our most recent abode prior to MKE was CHI, where I particularly loved the decadence and bloated feeling that came with the local deep dishes). The ambience was better -- neighborhood barry meets Italiany foodsy. We've been back a few times since then with the main barrier to more frequent usage being a lack of delivery service during the dinner hours.