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| - Run by a Fascist Eeyore, but that totalitarian grump grows on ya!
Food a total sideshow to the beer for the most part, but seriously, what else do you need while watching Madison's classiest babes dance to polka music and inebriated customers sing raunchy Boy Scout lyrics (along the lines of "There was a man from Eau Claire...") beyond pretzels and dollar burgers that probably set the management back 5 cents?
I won't deny it. The Essen Haus is a very strange place. One of the strangest. You have to have a certain sense of humor to even walk in the door. But for all its faults, at least it doesn't try to be some pompous yuppie brewpub. It is peculiarly and idiosyncratically Wisconsin in all its tacky, bizarre glory. You will not find it elsewhere. Alas, it is also part of a dying breed. This is not what the dot-com start-up generation gets involved in when they create a restaurant. The world will be poorer when a tasteless generation bulldozes it into Lake Mendota. And that is cause for an adorable 64-ounce glass boot of teardrops.
My advice is: feel sorry for the servers, leave an extraordinarily liberal tip, and only go on the weekends. The mid-week polka bands are for that handful of old farts who saunter in.
Also haunted.... The bouncer gave me an upstairs tour once. This vast, sprawling building -- part misbegotten compound of greed, part bed-and-breakfast, part beer hall -- is one of the oldest buildings in Madison and was apparently a whorehouse in antebellum days. Ask to see the amazing storage area upstairs: basically a museum of the vanishing Midwest. Boxes full of dead men's steins, paraphernalia of the old immigrant drinking clubs, the decor of "Are You Being Served?", and local ghosts.... The bouncer and I both felt a strange chill and heard weird stuff going on in the walls up there. We bolted down the stairs. The veteran bartender agreed that he had heard and seen weird things upstairs for years.
The 2-liter glass boots are a ginormous bacterial infection waiting to happen. But good, solid American fun.
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