September 15, 2019—First Day in River Falls
On my first full day in my new home town, I took a walk downtown (about two miles) for breakfast at the South Fork Café. Two doors down stood a bar/restaurant that had loomed large in our memories and was one of the things Kathleen and I looked forward to upon moving to River Falls. On an earlier visit, a year or two ago, we conducted an impromptu pub crawl along Main Street and stopped into the bar called Bo’s ‘N Mine. We wandered in, and the bartender immediately informed us that we could enter the “Meat Raffle” free of charge. We declined, as we were just visiting and had no place to store any meat. Periodically, during the night, however, they would call out a winning number and someone won some meat. We thought it might just be venison, or wild turkey, or some sort of game, but they actually awarded nice cuts of beef, poultry, or pork, packaged and ready to cook. Now I discovered that Bo’s ‘N Mine was gone and a new place called The Nutty Squirrel had taken its place. My disappointment was severe, and I ate my breakfast thinking we had missed out on our chance to win meat on a Sunday night.
Just when I thought that our protein intake would suffer by moving to a town that no longer had a meat raffle, my spirits soon picked up again. Upon leaving the South Fork Café after a breakfast that couldn’t be beat, I noticed signs and banners every few steps that advertised the “Bacon Bash,” a small festival that would be held that very day. I had no idea what to expect, but that afternoon I attended the Bacon Bash with Kathleen and Lucas, our six-year-old grandson.
What we found was the typical, small-scale festival with booths hawking everything from hand-made jewelry to windows capable of insulating the owner from Wisconsin’s onerous winter winds. At one end of the street fair, a Janis-Joplin-Wannabe was belting out bluesy songs, but most people gathered around tents with radios broadcasting the Minnesota Vikings versus Green Bay Packers game—a huge regional rivalry in this town near the state border. The centerpiece of the event, however, was the row of food tents, all offering various items containing greater and lesser amounts of bacon. The savory scent of cooking bacon wafted through the air, tempting even the most health-minded people to sample the strange concoctions. Everything there had some sort of bacon–even the cinnamon rolls. For those lacking in imagination, bacon-on-a-stick offered a simple solution to satisfying their pork craving. With a cup of semi-sweet white wine in hand, I chose the shrimp kabob, with each jumbo shrimp wrapped in a brown strip of fried bacon. Kathleen opted for a chicken-wrap sort of thing with bacon bits scattered throughout. Lucas proved to be the most adventurous of all, picking the cheese curds smothered in bacon bits.
For the uninitiated, cheese curds are a regional delicacy found in Canada and northern parts of the US. “Curds” are sort of the dregs of cheese remaining after the cheese-making process is completed. They are little pieces of cheese in balls or small lengths, and, in Wisconsin, they tend to be made of cheddar. While the cranberry is the official state food of Wisconsin, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a restaurant that does not serve cheese curds. In fact, cheese in general is ubiquitous. With every meal you order, you might be asked, “Do you want a wheel of cheese with that or just a wedge?” Another feature of Wisconsin-style cheese curds is that they are invariably lightly battered and deep fried. If the mere description of these little treats doesn’t have your mouth watering and your arteries hardening, picture them mixed with fresh bacon fried to a crisp brownish-red color scattered generously on the top. They were amazing.
As a post-script to the day, I later bought a local newspaper, which comes out weekly. That particular issue contained a story about the closing of a local landmark, the Bo’s ‘N Mine tavern. Apparently, the bar and restaurant had been operating at that location for more than a half-century. Then the story got a bit strange. The owner hadn’t sold the business, he still owned it but had simply renamed it to The Nutty Squirrel. I’m not sure why you would change the name of a business with fifty years of name recognition built up, but that’s exactly what he did. The story went on to explain that they had done extensive renovations on the interior of the building. So, later that week, we eagerly took the family to the new Nutty Squirrel to see what it looked like after the massive changes. Inside, however, I could detect a few cosmetic changes, but no substantial differences from what it had looked like before. Now admittedly, I had only been in there a couple of times before, so perhaps I was missing something. I’ll keep you posted.