Racine Landmark Totero's to Close After 75 Years

Totero's, a priceless, one-of-a-kind Italian restaurant in Racine, Wisconsin, that I just discovered a couple years ago, is going to shutter on June 26 after 75 years in business.

Totero's was founded by Calabrian immigrants Achille and Mary Totero as a tavern in 1939. It was subsequently run by their son Santo "Sam" Totero and his wife Virginia, and is still run by Sam's children Al and Angela. Al runs the bar, Angela the kitchen. Sam died in February 2011 at the age of 89. The building is a converted schoolhouse. The 36-foot bar was contributed by the Pabst brewery back during The Great Depression.

Albert and Angela Totero have decided to retire. "It’s just been a long, hard road," they told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinal, "and it’s just time. The place is old, and it needs some work." Their children have their own professions and don't want to take over.

Totero's is one of the most unique places I've ever had the pleasure to visit. As I said in my 2012 post, "There is often a line, for this 72-year-old, family-run restaurant is only open Tuesday through Friday, and even then for just two hours, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. The peculiar schedule harkens back to Totero's roots as a lunch place serving the working men in the area. There used to be dinner hours, but they were eliminated a number of years back. Despite—or maybe because of—the limited window of opportunity, Totero's packs them in. People take the time to visit in the middle of the day, queue up and load up on homemade, hearty Italian fare."

Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: Jumes Restaurant Is Dead

Back in 2008, I posted a short item about Jumes, a wonderful old corner diner in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. I swung by the place earlier this summer to sadly find it out of business.

As I wrote back then, it once called itself the oldest continually operating restaurant in the city, having begun life in 1929. Jumes actually opened its doors on Oct. 1—just daysbefore Wall Street took a dive. George and Ted Jumes were Greeks; George came over to America when he was merely 14. Their first Sheboygan restaurant was called the Coney Island Restaurant, for some reason. It was renamed Jumes when it moved in 1951 to its present—and now final—location. A fire gutted the place in 1990, but it soldiered on.

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Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: Fred's Parkview

While driving through Burlington, Wisconsin—a mid-sized town in southeastern Wisconsin with a impressive number of old buildings and old businesses—to visit a particular tavern (about which I will post another time), I chanced upon this lunch room, Fred's, in the center of town. Fred's, a single-story corner building which has evidently been added to over the years, boasts of having the "World's Best Burgers." I didn't have time to test that claim, but I can attest that it has one of the world's best storefronts. Take a look at that unique bit of neon on the front of a man chowing down on one of Fred's choice burgers.

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Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: The Hob Nob

The Hob Nob is a classic Wisconsin supper club that sits alongside Lake Michigan in a lonely stretch of rural highway between Racine and Kenosha. Is was founded in 1937 in downtown Racine by the Higgins family. In 1954, it moved to its current location. It is currently run by Mike Aletto and Anne Glowacki. Like all supper clubs, it serves things like steaks, seafood, prime rib, and Friday fish fries, along with old school cocktails, in a comfortable, homey, and hopefully old-fashioned atmosphere. 

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Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: Cape Cod Hotel

The Door County resort area of Wisconsin has suffered a great deal of overdevelopment in recent years, with unsightly condo villages popping up everywhere. But much of the region's old charm remains, including many restaurants, shops, hotels and motels that date the mid-20th century, when Wisconsinites and Illinois residents first discovered the scenic joys of the peninsula county, which juts out into Lake Michigan, and was settled in the 19th century by Icelandic and Norwegian immigrants.

There are a lot of similarities between Door County and Cape Cod—the climate and abundance of shoreline and beaches not the least of them. That must have been on the minds of the founders of the Cape Cod Motel when they named their small Egg Harbor residence. The motel has a classic, 1950s layout—a long, one-story line of rooms with a central, check-in structure. There are nine rooms, priced under $100 a night. The currently owner renovated the place about five years ago. I don't know exactly how old the place is, but judging by the classic sign, I'd say it's at least 50 or 60 years old.

Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: Totero's

Like most of the best bars and restaurants in Wisconsin, Totero's in Racine looks like somebody's house,  except it has a sign on it. You enter on the Mead Street side of the corner place, through a little breakfront. Surrounding the building are the bleak, bereft streets of the once-industrial, southern Racine neighborhood of Lakeside.

There is often a line, for this 72-year-old, family-run restaurant is only open Tuesday through Friday, and even then for just two hours, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. The peculiar schedule harkens back to Totero's roots as a lunch place serving the working men in the area. There used to be dinner hours, but they were eliminated a number of years back. Despite—or maybe because of—the limited window of opportunity, Totero's packs them in. People take the time to visit in the middle of the day, queue up and load up on homemade, hearty Italian fare.

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Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: George Webb's

I was recently returning from a late evening in Milwaukee and feeling a bit peckish when, passing a George Webb's restaurant, I remembered that every branch of the southeastern Wisconsin diner chain is open 24 hours.

I swung my car into the strip mall that contained the diner and took a seat at the long counter. There were eight other people there at that late hour, half of them stuffing solid food into their booze-filled bellies. This is not to say the atmosphere was unsavory. While some Webb's might have fallen into the "greasy spoon" categories in years past, and the chain has a reputation of sorts as a haven for undesirables, today the chain is mostly clean and respectable.

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Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: Wilmar Chocolates

For whatever reason—most likely, the heavy late-19th-early-20th-cenutry influx of German, Dutch, Belgian and other immigrants in the area—there are a high proportion of old-fashioned, quality, family chocolate shops in the towns of the Fox River Valley, nestled around Lake Winnebago in central-eastern Wisconsin.

Among there are Seroogy's in De Pere; Beernsten's, a wonderful old soda fountain in Manitowoc where you can also sit in a booth and enjoy a cheap lunch of bratwurst and chips; Oaks, a century-old candy shop in downtown Oshkosh; and Hughes Chocolates, an unfathomably quaint chocolate factory situated in a white clapboard family home on a suburban street.  (The New York Times called it "a figment of Wisconsin's imagination.) You walk through a side door down to the basement, where you can buy plain white boxes of bulked chocolates (no fancy individual wrappers) from a small counter in a room so cramped you have no choice but to leave immediately after you make your purchase. Hughes chocolates have been a Christmas tradition in my family for decades.

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Lost City: Milwaukee Version: Karl Ratzsch's

Karl Ratzsch's Restaurant loomed large in my Milwaukee childhood. The old German downtown restaurant was where you went for special occasions. It's name evoked the kind of awe in a kid's mind that perhaps The Four Seasons and the "21" Club still do in New York. I remember going only seldomly, and being jealous when I heard of others going. In particular, my wealthy aunt and uncle's family's habit of going to Ratzsch's every Christmas day before coming to our house—and not inviting us to join them—was an annual source of frustration and anger to my mother.

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Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: Kewpee Hamburgers Revisted

Four years ago, I went well out of my way to visit Kewpee Hamburgers in Racine, Wisconsin. I went because the fast food restaurant is one of only six franchises left in what was once a considerable Midwestern chain, and the only one left in Wisconsin. And the obscure inspired me. But I visited on a Sunday and, Racine apparently being a pious burg, everything was shut up tighter than a drum.

It took me until this month to find a second opportunity to visit Kewpee, a hamburger joint that reportedly inspired Dave Thomas to found Wendy's. This time I got in. It was a Thursday afternoon and there were few people about, inside or out. Racine's one of those mid-sized American cities whose downtown heart stopped beating sometime in the 1970s and has never quite sprung back to life. The sidewalks are deserted.

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Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: A Good Sign: Red Room

In Sturgeon Bay, WI. It says Midwestern bar to me.

Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: Two Rivers, the Perfect Town

Two Rivers, Wisconsin, is a town that entrances me. It looks like something Hollywood would dream up to represent early-20th-century small-town America. It's entire commercial life runs along Main Street. It has a village square with a gazebo, and right on the square are the town's courthouse, library, a church and its most important store, an independent, family-owned department stored called Schroeder's (pronounced "Shray-ders"), which has been there since 1891. On the outskirts, as you leave town, are a Dairy Queen and an actual drive-in diner, the kind with two facing rows of parking spots and a cement divider running down the middle.


If none of this seems wholesome enough, consider that Two Rivers claims it is the birthplace of the ice cream sundae. As the story goes, in 1881, a soda jerk named Ed Berners heeded customer George Hallauer's outlandish wish for some chocolate sauce on top of his dish of ice cream. A food fad was born. Of course, these claims have to be taken with a grain of salt. Ithica also claims the sundae as its own. But H.L. Menken once studied the issue and sided with Two Rivers, and that's good enough for me. Menken was no sucker.



The tavern where the sundae was invented is gone, but the "historic Washington House" has taken up the banner. You can get ice cream in this former inn, and roam around a makeshift, but surprisingly interesting museum of Two Rivers history, included an excellent representation of Berners' ice cream parlor (which looks like a bar). Go upstairs and you'll find a well-preserved ballroom with hand-painted murals that looks like something out of one of Dawn Powell's rural novels.




Those wondering why Wisconsinites called water fountains "bubblers" should walk into Schroeder's. In the middle of the store is an intact, working, ancient fountain. Twist the metal knob and the water doesn't stream out in an arc, but bubbled up from the top. Hence "bubbler."



Schroeder's is what you expect from a independent department store—a breed that is nearly extinct in America, but once could be found in every city, big and small. It's not flashy, the fixtures are old and the product lines are third-rate. (There's something fascinatingly melancholy about the atmosphere in small-town retail outlets.) Judging from the clothes and shoes available, Schroeder's buys with farmers in mind. But there's an old-world charm and you can find bargains.


Two Rivers has a lot of great old restaurants with great old signs. I love this sign for Arvy's Home Cooking (unfortunately now closed). Next to it is the Golden Nugget Supper Club, for which you're instructed to use the side entrance. Kurtz's Pub & Deli, a German haunt with a good selection of beers, has been there for more than a century. There's one Chinese take-out place called China Wok, with a magnificent fading ad above it for Bubble Up soda. There's also on of the most beautifully situated McDonald's I've ever seen, set on a sliver of land between Lake Michigan and one of Two Rivers' two rivers.

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Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: A Good Sign: Jumes Restaurant

This beaut of a sign is right in the center of downtown Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where they love their bratwurst and all good folks vote Republican. It calls itself the oldest continually operating restaurant in the city. How old? 1929 old. (Don't you just love businesses that were formed right before the Crash, and yet somehow survived? And Jumes opened its doors on Oct. 1—just days before Wall Street tumbled!)

George and Ted Jumes were Greeks; George came over to America when he was merely 14. Their first Sheboygan restaurant was called the Coney Island Restaurant, for some reason. It was renamed Jumes when it moved in 1951 to its present location. As far as I can tell, the second generation of the family is still in charge now. The menu is pretty standard. And yes, they serve bratwurst. Also, uh, homemade dog treats, at $1.50 a bag.

It's best to just stand outside and admire the sign. Inside is a riot of unpleasant pink that would even be too much for Paris Hilton

Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: The Land of Vacuum Repair

One of the hallmarks of small city living, I've become convinced, is an unwillingness to throw away old vacuum cleaners. These frugal folk do not rush for the nearest Target when the dust-sucker goes on the blink. They bring the appliance to the vacuum repair shop.

"The what, now?" you ask. You heard me right. The vacuum repair shop. Such stores are difficult to locate in Gotham, where a malfunctioning vacuum is a dead vacuum. Like most sorts of repair places, they've gone the way of the Dodo in this disposable society. But not in Wisconsin, where you'll find a vacuum repair dude not just in every small city, but smack dab on the Main Street.

The one about is in Sturgeon Bay. Below is a shop in Algoma. And far below one in Two Rivers. None of these cities has a population over 15,000. And yet there are enough vacuum owners to support these businessman. It's rather awe-inspiring.

Lost City: Wisconsin Edition: Beerntsen's Candy

As much as I am a New York City person, I get a certain shiver of excitement when I go on a trip that I know will cause me to pass through a mid-to-small-sized city—the kind of city that was founded 100 to 150 years ago and was once driven by a significant industry of two, since died away. Because such cities have not thrived as centers of commerce for 40 or 50 years, they tend to sit in a state of suspended animation. Their main streets and downtown retain the architecture and cultural flavor they have in the early 20th century. Thus, these cities are goldmines of Americana.

Wisconsin is a state replete with such cities. Beloit. Lacrosse. Eau Claire. Fond du Lac. Oshkosh. Green Bay. Etc., etc. Another in Manitowoc, a former shipbuilding center that sits on the shore of Lake Michigan, about an hour and a half north of Milwaukee. Driving down the main drag of North 8th Street, you'll pass a little storefront with a red-and-white-striped awning. This is Beerntsen's, a candy shop and luncheonette that's been here since 1932. Inside, time has not touched this place. The dark wood counters and cabinets are as they were. So is the back room of wooden booths, festooned with coat hooks, sconces and mirrors. A clock hangs from an archway separating the two sections of the store. Ceiling fans twirl.

I bought some chocolate and had dinner here. The help consists of young blonde girls who are Wisconsin-nice and placid. The menu is a shocker. Of the various sandwich selections, I don't think a single item was over $5. I did a triple take. My "bratwurst plate" (bratwurst, potato salad, chips, pickle) was $4.95. You can also order phosphates of all flavors.

The place was founded by Joe Beerntsen. He learned his trade in nearby Green Bay, undergoing a four-year apprenticeship at the Brenner Candy Company. He then opened a series of candy shops in a set of increasingly smaller cities: first Chicago, then Milwaukee, then finally Manitowoc, where he stayed. Three generations of Beerntsens ran the place until 200e, when new owners Dean and Chrissy Schadrie took over. Dean grew up making chocolates in another local family business, Pine River Pre-Pack, Inc of Newton, Wisconsin.