The people who dine regularly at Ray Radigan's Restaurant in Kenosha, Wisconsin, do not find any particular virtue in proximity. On a weekend evening in the temperate part of the year, the Radigan's parking lot is lousy with out-of-state license plates. Once December blows the bad weather in off Lake Michigan, patrons from Iowa, Minnesota, Michigan, and Indiana are compelled to stay home. This forces Radigan's to rely on customers from Chicago - a little over an hour away to the south - Milwaukee - a bit under an hour's drive north - and points in between. There are upstanding steaks to be had in Milwaukee, and world-famous ones available all over the old stockyard city of Chicago, but Radigan's clientele is not much impressed. A steakhouse is really only a tavern that prepares fine red meats, and steakhouse habitues are similar to barflys; they cannot imagine an establishment superior to the one they frequent. The surprising thing about Radigan's, a converted farmhouse where the red neon sign outside glows "Wonderful Food," is that it truly is as good a steakhouse as there is in the United States.

Part of this is the eating. "Old Man" Ray Radigan died three years ago, and his son, a graying duck hunter in his late forties who is known as "Young Mike," now runs the restaurant. Young Mike is the first to say that "Radigan's will always be my dad's place," and to be sure, everything is still done the Old Man's way. Supper at Radigan's begins with relish. To most of the country, relish is a gently spiced, pickle-based condiment that goes nicely with a hot dog. At Radigan's, relish means a tray piled high with hearts of celery, pickled okra, a couple of par-five black olives, locally grown scallions, carrot sticks, cucumber pickle slices, and some miniature sweet red peppers, all of it on a bed of crushed ice. Along with the relish comes one bowl of homemade kidney-bean salad, and another of a food which has sustained such persistent calumnies of a certain kind - bland, insipid, downright jejune - that it has become to flavor what Doris Day is to thespians...cottage cheese. If good cottage cheese is a curiosity, Radigan's is a revelation. This chive-infused concoction is so tasty that cottage-cheese-addled locals sometimes appear out of the night to claim a take-out pint or two.

Homemade is, in fact, something of a redundancy at Radigan's, where everything from the salad dressings, to the crusts and fillings of the banana and coconut cream pies, to the soups, to the French fries, to the baking powder biscuits for the strawberry shortcake is made from scratch without - pointedly - the aid of a microwave; no Radigan has ever allowed one on the premises. This is an operation that permits a purveyor only one mistake, where the leaves for the warm spinach salad are carefully hand-veined, and where, it is rumored, the fried chicken has been prepared in the same black skillet since time began - since 1933, that is, when Old Man Radigan first opened for business. Radigan's trades only in Minnesota-bred chickens. Young Mike believes that southern hens are fed "fish meal or somethin' and they don't taste as sweet."

It is possible to dine at Radigan's on a perfectly respectable plate of shrimp Louie, and to follow it up with strawberries San Francisco. It is also possible to get by in Tuscany on lo mein. Radigan's is no place for slimmers. Most of the people who graze here are stout, beefy men who come in the company of similarly proportioned women - often their wives. Some of them crave an entire Lake Superior whitefish. Others may have a yen for a hillock of calf's liver slathered in sauteed onions. Lobster Thermidor, two-inch thick lamb chops, veal cooked any number of ways, and pork chops the size of a shoe are also popular. A Ray Radigan's twenty-eight ounce T-bone, however, is the piece de resistance.

Ray Radigan was never a cook. He came up in restaurants as a waiter, and in the kitchen he relied on his eyes rather than recipes. He could look at a pan of something mid-sear and say, "That's wrong." People wondered how he know. "I just know," he'd reply. "You see it right enough times, you know when it's wrong."

What he knew best was beef. Radigan bought sides of prime-grade beef in Chicago, where the Irishmen working in the slaughterhouses made sure to point some of the most beautifully marbled loins toward "the little Mick in Kenosha." (During World War II, when meat was scarce, they sent him barrels of beef, packed in dry ice, that had been side-lined for a general.) Radigan hung it up in his meat locker until the surface was leathered black and fuzzy with what looked like mildew. Usually this dry aging took three weeks. Then he asked his butcher-cook, whose name, not surprisingly, was Victor Prime, to trim away the mold, cut the side down to steaks, and cook them without any additional. seasoning. The dry aging gave it all the flavor and tenderness Radigan required. If the restaurant was crowded and someone called for an entire porterhouse, Radigan would motion the waitress aside and serve it himself. Settling the meat onto a platter, he held it up high and took the most circuitous route possible through the dining room to the table. He walked slowly to be sure everyone got a good look.

These days, in the interest of reducing transportation costs, the meat business has consolidated. Most of the slaughtering and butchering is now done in huge processing plants that beef companies have built right alongside their farms in places like Iowa and Texas. Shrink-wrapped in plastic, and much of it portion-cut, the beef is trucked to a distributor who sells it to markets and restaurants. Meatpackers may change their ways, but Radigans don't. Young Mike still buys whole sides of prime. He takes it out of the plastic and hangs it up for a few weeks. Next he broils the meat without using any seasoning. Then he frets. "Beef today isn't what it was fifteen years ago," he says. "They've lowered the standards for prime twice. Younger animals come to the market, and there's less hearty beef flavor to the meat." This may be true, but the old-timers who eat at Radigan's are not complaining. They say Radigan's steak tastes as good as ever to them.

It is possible to work up quite a thirst eating steakhouse fare. Wisconsin is, of course, well known for its German brewers, but few Radigan's customers bother to wash down their meal with the local hops. Why settle for Leinenkugels in a top-shelf joint? Back during Prohibition, Old Man Radigan made the money to open up his place by working for bootleggers in "blind pigs" - speakeasies. His days of dumping food coloring into bathtubs full of rotgut so that the hooch could be sold as bourbon - if you substituted juniper essence you had gin - left him with little use for bad booze. He developed a corresponding respect for the good stuff, and he passed it along to Young Mike. Behind the long horseshoe of Radigan's bar you can certainly find Jack and Jim. But keeping them company are vodkas imported from several different overcast countries, special-batch bourbons, single-malt Scotches, and a congregation of cognacs, not to mention a bartender familiar with the old-fashioned way to build an old-fashioned. There are no soft-drink guns back there. Bottled soda mixes a better cocktail.

Downstairs is the wine. One of the wonders of the mid-western world is Ray Radian's cellar. These days people aren't drinking the way they used to, yet Young Mike still stocks "long-dollar" bottles as variously and deftly chosen as a 1973 Chateau Margaux, Lafitte Rothschild 1974, Chateau Gloria St. Julienne 1993, and Kenwood Artist Series 1991. There are hundreds of others. Young Mike, who has a graduate degree, is an aficionado. When he discusses a wine, he imbues it with feminine characteristics because "women have a romance guys don't have." His father, who never got through high school, was not so poetical. He simply liked nice things.

Restaurants make a profit by selling a lot of drinks. One way to keep them flowing is to do likewise with the talk. Ray Radigan's approach was to pour his regulars nearly as full of stories about himself as with good liquor. After a few stiff ones, inevitably something was gained in the details. That is to say, Ray Radigan's business was hard on his biography. '"Ray grew up around gangsters in Chicago," one veteran tippler said not long ago. "He was raised in Hull House. He came up in Chicago taverns. Once he was working in this joint, and every time Ray went by with a tray of food, this mobster would pick food off it. Ray kept telling him not to do it. Finally the guy did it another time, so Ray shoved the tray in the guy's face and ran out the back door. Ray told these stories for hours. Baby-sitters got rich on him."

In fact, Radigan never lived in Chicago. He was born on the family farm outside Kenosha. His mother died young, a baby brother was killed in a road accident, and his father, Joe, took it all so badly that he soon became permanently fuddled on drink. All three remaining Radigan children were taken from Joe and installed in Catholic orphanages. When two of them got out, they wandered more or less straight into the whiskey. As for Radigan, following his years in the "bread and jelly joints," as he called the orphanages, he went down to Waukegan, Illinois, at the age of sixteen and got a job busing tables. He wasn't big - perhaps five foot four - but he didn't back down. A waitress was palming his quarter tips and switching them to nickels. He confronted her. She was not contrite. He ventured into profanity. She responded in kind. He threw what was in his hand at her, and with that nickel curve went his job.

It was clear to him, however, where the money was. So he became a waiter, first at the blind pigs and then at northern Illinois and south Wisconsin supper clubs. In those years he did meet some burly men from The Outfit - the Chicago Syndicate. "They'd walk in with a babe on each arm., tear a hundred-dollar bill in half and say to my dad, 'Hey, little man, you take care of me, you get the other half,'" says Young Mike.

Taking care of people became his specialty. When Radigan went into business for himself, his customers could do no wrong and his waitresses were advised not to, either; they worked for him for thirty minutes or for thirty years. Radigan dressed them in starched white dresses and white stockings, and he did not allow heels or jewelry. "You're not here to put on a show; you're here to serve them" was his reasoning. "People are driving forty or fifty miles to have dinner here. They can get mediocrity anywhere." Everyone who came through the door was to be treated like a lord. That went for Lions Club members - known to be parsimonious - and those most famously ill-tempered of all customers, former smokers. Radigan taught his help to memorize names, to linger over people, massaging them with an extra "honey," darling," or "sweetheart," to say to carefully dressed women "Hello, Slim" and chubby men "Hi there, Handsome." Men getting on in years, he said, liked to hear a "Goodnight, boys," as they were leaving. Younger types reacted better to "Stay out of trouble, you devils." When a good waitress got too old to drive, Victor Prime was sent out to pick her up for her shift, and then to take her back home afterward. Many of these women have finally retired or passed on. There are Radigan's customers who grow positively lachrymose at the mention of Irma or Pauline. As for the current waitresses, some of them think so highly of Radigan's food that they occasionally come in for supper on their off-night, even though there is no staff discount.

Old Man Radigan was all about consistency. He always wore monogrammed shirts fastened with monogrammed cufflinks, a silk necktie, and an apron neatly folded down at his waist. He greeted all the customers as they walked in the front door, and he looked in again at least once while they were eating. Never give a customer the chance to send back food, he told the waitresses. Send it back first yourself if you have any doubts. Then explain what you did, and instead of a problem you've got a better tip coming.

Radigan did not like trays. Arm service looked more elegant to him. So it is that veteran Radigan's waitresses have Chicago-sized shoulders. Other steakhouse rules: every table is covered in two layers of white linen; every glass must be hand-wiped, preferably in view of the customer; white wine and champagne are served in genuine silver-plated buckets; fresh table flowers are as mandatory as salt and pepper.

There are people who don't like a lot scrutiny during their meal, so Old Man Radigan designed a private dining area off the lobby. Among the waitresses, this intimate compartment came to be known as the "Cheaters and Mobsters Room." It didn't have any windows, and nobody saw who went in or out but the waitress.

When Old Man Radigan said "good-bye" to customers, he inevitably added, "We're open tomorrow night." If he was out of town, his wife, Wilma, said it. On the rare days that neither of them was around, a Radigan always called in to make sure all was well. One night in 1968, Old Man Radigan was on his boat in Florida, and Wilma had her feet up at home. A little before closing time, she rang the restaurant and got no answer. After alerting the police, Wilma got into her car. The police arrived first and found a man in a ski mask waving a shotgun, with a towel full of money stuffed under his arm. The officers had no trouble subduing the only fink who has ever tried to hold up ray Radigan's. As the night ended, Wilma thanked everyone concerned and told them, "We're open tomorrow night."

Toward the end of his life, Old Man Radigan spent a lot of time talking over his personal concerns with his physician, Dr. Charlie Pechous. "I'm afraid the service at the restaurant will decline after I'm gone" was always at the heart of it.

A Place Where Nobody Can Die

Ray Radigan opened up his restaurant in the country, by the corn and pumpkin fields on Sheridan Road in Kenosha, because Kenosha was what he knew. This remains an unlikely spot for a classy steakhouse. Kenosha was, and is, a blue-collar factory town. American Brass, Simmons Mattress, Allen-A Hosiery (now Jockey) were all Kenosha concerns. Through the mid-1950s, so was Nash Motors. Then the company merged with Hudson to form American Motors. The Rambler thrived, and so did Kenosha. By 1960, it was a certifiable company town, where just about everybody worked for the "Motors." Radigan's wasn't the sort of place where people who read a menu right to left dined often, so the autoworkers tended to unwind elsewhere. Old Man Radigan's customers were the bosses, the newspaper publishers, the shop owners, the local pols and traveling businessmen. As word spread, he fed people from all over.

Before the big interstate came in the 1960s, Sheridan Road was a main artery from Chicago to Milwaukee, making Radigan's a high-class roadhouse. People were always pulling up at the Cackovic family service station on the state line to ask if they'd ever heard of this amazing restaurant that was "supposed to be around here somewheres." Among the patrons there were a few exotics. Kenosha-born Orson Welles spoke of "that nasty little town," but he came back home a few times in the 1930s and '40s, and when he did, he ate at Radigan's. So did Jack Benny, who had family in Waukegan. Ray Kroc opened up his first McDonald's in Des Plaines, Illinois, yet when it came time for his own meal, he drove over to Kenosha in a powder-blue Cadillac with a golden-arch hood ornament. Also from Chicago came Bears football coach George Halas, Mary Tyler Moore, assorted opera singers - including Maria Callas - plenty of well-heeled Machine politicians, and the velvet-voiced WGN nighttime radio host Franklin McCormick, who provided a free plug for Ray Radigan's Restaurant every night he was on the air. Chrysler bought American Motors in 1987 and closed it in 1988, during which period Old Man Radigan saw a fair amount of Lee Iaccoca. Muhammad Ali stopped by once with his entourage. The Champ made brisk work of a T-bone. When banana cream pie arrived, Ali looked at his trainer. The trainer shook his head. Ali pushed his plate away.

It's never the celebrities who make money for a steakhouse; it's the regulars. Radigan's has taken in all kinds. There are the Waukegan bachelors at the bar drinking loud-mouth soup and telling jokes on Norwegians. (Norwegian humor is popular all over Wisconsin.) There are divorcees looking to meet bachelors - but, please, not those. There are heavily jeweled women of a certain age who eat in four-somes on Wednesdays - Wednesday evening is widows' night out in Kenosha. There is the instrument factory owner who always orders for his guests. They get T-bones and cognac blended with ice cream whether they like it or not. There are husbands and wives who have selected a soothing location to discuss the mother-in-law who thinks her side gets fewer visits. There are Wisconsin Germans who changed their names during World War I. There is the man who, in the midst of a dreadful day, once told a waitress what she could do with the potato she was serving him. The next time in, hangdog, he apologized. At his insistence, she has waited on him ever since.

Back in the 1970s, another man who also always wanted the same waitress was Frank Balistreri. Balistreri ran the Milwaukee mob. The first time he dined at Radigan's, a waitress named Annie served him. From then on, he always asked for her. Annie is Young Mike's wife. She grew up in Montpelier, Vermont, where there are very few gangsters. Young Mike knew exactly who Balistreri was. With her limited experience in these matters, all Annie noticed was that Balistreri always came in toward the end of the evening, wore expensive clothes, inevitably had a different gorgeous woman on his arm, and left hundred-dollar tips. Annie would sometimes ask Young Mike, "Who is this guy?"

"Ah. He's from a family in Milwaukee."

"I never figured it out," she says now. "Mr. Balistreri was always emphatic that he wanted me, and Mike thought I'd be nervous if he told me who he was."

Balistreri wasn't the only fellow in his line of work who had a table at Radigan's. One afternoon not long ago, a red-faced man sat reminiscing at the bar over a V.O. and Seven. "Every politician from Chicago to Milwaukee came here," he said. "There were a lot of things done. You also had, let us say, Italian groups that met here. You understand what I'm saying? There was Tony the Dove. He would blow your left eye out. In here he was always a gentleman. Mob guys send you a bottle of wine if they recognize you. You take it even if you don't drink. The reason the guys from the mob came up here was that they were safe. Ray wouldn't allow no shit. He was a tough Mick. He could guarantee you'd walk to your cars and wouldn't get blown away. It was neutral ground. A place that is neutral ground is a place where nobody can die. Truthfully, this was always a mob place. All the other people came here because the mob has good taste."

Old Man Radigan was no gangster, but he wasn't opposed to games of chance. Radigan's is outside the city limits in Kenosha County, and until 1948, the county was wide open. Radigan took advantage. He had slot machines installed in the front hallway, just to be sure that nobody went out the door with any loose change. By closing time, his one-armed bandits had swallowed enough coins to fill up two milk buckets. Upstairs in the early years there was craps, roulette, blackjack - a little of everything. For many years, Radigan hosted twice-annual nine-course private clambakes for his friends. The food was on him. The friends paid for drinks. Old Man Radigan always turned a profit. One way this happened was that during the meal he set up a board-game lottery, took up a collection, and raffled off five hundred dollars. In all the excitement, few people noticed that Old Man Radigan usually took in about a thousand, meaning that he was pocketing five hundred dollars for himself. "Ray was a slick operator," says Bob Will, an Illinois lawyer who has been buying meals at Radigan's for fifty years. "You'd shake dice with him for tens and twenties after you ate. He'd always win. Sleight-of-hand tricks, you know. And he had little hands. That's not easy. A slick operator, he was. And everybody loved him."

These sentiments were held by the pure of heart as well. Just three miles down the road from Radigan's is Zion, Illinois, founded in 1900 by a devout Scotsman named John Alexander Dowie as a place where virtuous men could live a blameless life. Zion wasn't just closed: it was shut tight, battened, locked, and sealed. Dowie banned doctors for it was the Lord's job to heal, not man's. Also forbidden within the city limits were alcohol, tobacco, dancing, billiards, spitting, bacon, chewing gum, red shoes, and a plethora of other profanities, including profanity. When the local bowling alley once tried to stay open on a Sunday, the owner was hauled off to jail. Zion got rich on the out-of-towners the sheriff spotted driving through the city limits at night with a cigarette aglow in their mouths. Dowie would not have approved of Zion men patronizing a place that served the demon rum, but he was dead by the time Radigan's opened. The newer generation of town elders came to look benevolently upon Old Man Radigan's Place. How bad could a man be who included a chocolate chip cookie made by the Zion Baking Industry with every bowl of ice cream he served.

Dee Is Sweet Only to Customers

In the 1940s and '50s, from the edge of the Chicago Gold Coast through southern Wisconsin, Sheridan Road was the consummate middle-American byway. Barns and fields were punctuated by the towns with their restaurants, snack bars, cafes, service stations, churches, motels, and shops. It all had a look of tidy permanence. The people who sold you a tire patch or an egg salad sandwich were the same people whose name was on the sign out front. Today, many of the windows have boards over them, and when people want coffee or pie, they visit Ray Kroc or Dave Thomas. "All these changes, none of them for the good," are what the old-timers say.

Kenosha, too, is transformed. Most of the truck farms south and west of the city have disappeared, and virtually the same can be said for downtown. Nickerson's Toys is gone, Lepp's Furs is, too, and the Dayton Hotel. It's bleak around there now, and taxpayers keep away at night.

The 1970s and early '80s were not good years for American Motors. A lot of people remember the AMC Pacer, but few of them actually bought one. They were hideous, and so were profit margins. The cycle of layoffs wore on Kenosha so much, that in 1987, when Chrysler took over the company, workers carried signs that said "Lee Iaccoca For President." But the plant was rusting and the union so powerful that, after less than one year, Chrysler said it couldn't afford to do business in Kenosha. When Iaccoca announced that he was closing all the Kenosha factories except the Jeep engine plant, 5,500 people were out of work. There were signs that said "Ayatollah Iaccoca," while the refrain in the bars and the beauty shops was "How am I going to feed my kids?"

Kenosha made out OK, or wooh-kay, as they say in Wisconsin. The strong auto union had always made it difficult for the city to diversify. With the U.S. Dismantlement crews pulling down the old AMC sheds along the lake, new industry began to move in on the western edge of the city. Several large industrial parks, a dog track, and two new marinas later, Kenosha was a city flush with jobs. If you had been at the Motors taking home $16.50 and hour along with all those benefits the union had squeezed from the company, you weren't impressed by the so-called Miracle of Kenosha. But if you liked sleek mini-shopping malls and neat suburban tracts and could get used to the wife going off to a nine-to-five, too, it all wasn't so bad. Highway 50, the main drag these days, has the same burger stops, lube shops, and cineplexes you see everywhere from Nashua, New Hampshire, to Tyler, Texas. That downtown is dead is not exactly a loss singular to Kenosha: Kenosha has changed the way American has changed.

Among the Denny's, the Long John Silver's, the Perkin's Pancakes, and the Shoney's on Highway 50 is a restaurant called Taste of Wisconsin. Taste has big windows, interior walls of blond wood, a chef who is very familiar with wursts, cheeses, thick soups, and chopped-meat pockets, and a gift shop that sells Holstein souvenirs and Brett Favre bars. There is quite a bit of duck-shaped stained glass around as well; Taste is Young Mike's place.

A modestly priced, family-style restaurant with homemade native food seems like just the thing for today's Kenosha. It also seems pretty far afield from Ray Radigan's. That was more or less Young Mike's thinking. A dining room of his own has made it easy for Young Mike to keep Radigan's intact, which, aside from small indiscretions such as the Ducks Unlimited sticker that recently began sharing Radigan's front door space with the AmEx and Visa welcomes, he mostly has.

With two restaurants in the family and a wife who is enjoying her retirement from the business, it is not always possible for Young Mike to have a Radigan on hand at Radigan's. It is his good fortune that Lou - short for Louise - Van Hoof and Divina - long for Dee - Herzog can run things in his absence. Both managers are older women with bad feet and vivid, approving memories of Old Man Radigan. This is especially true of Dee, a plump, white-haired grandmother who has worked at Radigan's for forty-four years.

Dee is sweet only to customers. When an American Cancer Society representative came around to the restaurant soliciting contributions, a simple "no" did not do for Dee. The first thing she had to say was that she was glad to give money to anybody she knows who is in need, but not to "big organizations" that spend their money on "marketing." It went on from there. Dee is no warmer to boyfriends calling in to talk with waitresses. Waitresses who confess their mistakes by saying, "I'm so stupid," are told, "Yes, you are stupid." Watching Dee baste a regular with felicitations and then pivot - with astonishing agility - on her heel to hurl invective toward the kitchen is to understand why she receives handsome gifts from customers at Christmas time; it is best to stay on her good side.

Not long ago, Dee found herself talking about Old Man Radigan. She was trying to explain how it was that in Kenosha, where virtually nothing is done the way it once was, Radigan's still thrives. She had many thoughts on the matter, and as she offered them, the telephone kept ringing. Each time it was Young Mike, at home, on his night off, just making sure everything was fine. After an hour, he'd called five times.

It's more of a relaxed world and time now," Dee said. "People have got away from dressing up. The old-timers will come in here all dressed up, look around and say, 'Gee whiz, doesn't anybody dress anymore?' But we've stayed the same." The telephone rang. Dee scooped it up, reassured Young Mike once again, and then continued. "In Ray's day everything was Mr. and Mrs. Now we let the waitresses call someone by their first name. So I guess we're not as formal as it used to be around here. But for the older customers, we put on the dog. The food is the same as always. We had some customers who'd moved away and hadn't set foot in here for thirty years. They said, 'Do you know what, nothing's changed in thirty years.'"

Young Mike telephoned and Dee gave him a swift click this time. "Michael calls in a lot," she said thinly. Then she said, "Our clientele was mainly from Chicago and Milwaukee. We seldom got Kenosha. They thought we were stuffy and expensive until they decided they wanted to impress somebody. Then they came. Ray, you know, went to Milwaukee and Waukegan on his off-nights. He preferred Milwaukee to Kenosha. People enjoyed themselves more there, he said. They go out there more. Kenosha people don't go out much. Milwaukee has always had later-closing bars and lots of nice restaurants. Ray liked to go to nice restaurants and he liked to be fussed over."

As printed in DoubleTake Magazine
Winter 1999
by Nicholas Dawidoff