“Perfection is not attainable,” football coach Vince Lombardi told his Green Bay Packers in 1959, “but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.” Do excellent people, I wonder, know when they’ve come as close as humanly possible to perfection?
Take scholar C.S. Lewis, the moment he finished writing his Christian apologetic novel “The Screwtape Letters” or singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt, the first time he performed his wistful ballad “Pancho and Lefty” from start to finish. Did each virtuoso instinctively know his art was knocking on heaven’s door?
I suspect it won’t be the last time something magical happens at Sister Bay Bowl, a place that, in pursuit of perfection, has caught excellence.
I cannot ask Messrs. Lewis or Van Zandt, who’ve gone on to their eternal reward. But later this summer — and aptly in Lombardi’s adoptive state — I can ask the proprietors of Sister Bay Bowl, a supper club in Door County, Wisconsin.
The throwback business, which, like much of northeastern Wisconsin, is as America was, has remained in the Willems family since 1950. It was opened as a hotel, and in 1958, Earl and Rita Willems replaced their dance hall with a six-lane bowling alley. They added a supper club in 1964.
The hotel no longer operates, and the dining-cum-bowling establishment today is known to many of its devotees simply as “the Bowl.” In a world demanding constant connectivity, the Bowl provides an evening of disconnection from time and place, if only for a few hours.
Over the summer years, my five children learned to bowl there. They did this while my wife, Devin, and I watched them while waiting for our table, a mutually beneficial diversion for kids and reprieve for parents. The bowling tab was always reasonable, and the wait for seating was never too long.
Nobody there, it seems, is ever in possession of a smartphone. To be lost in one at the Bowl would be to miss out on the low-tech vibe — a Milwaukee Brewers game on the bar’s television being the only reminder of modernity — of late-20th-century Americana that’s on offer.
The moon is jokingly said to be a terrible place for a restaurant: great food but no atmosphere. Until I’d been to the Bowl, I never appreciated how much atmosphere matters. This isn’t to deprecate the fare, which, like many diners themselves, had been swimming in Lake Michigan merely hours before.
It’s simply to note that everyone is happy. It’s a rare spot in the cosmos where time seems to stand still and all feel they are where they’re supposed to be. A night at the Bowl hints at the eternal, rich with a sense of what mystical English poet Francis Thompson called “majestic instancy.”
Here, I fell in love with broasted anything — a Wisconsin delicacy — and rediscovered how good peaches and cottage cheese can be. Here, I do not embarrass my kids by asking the waiter to name the heartiest item on the menu. True to its Midwestern roots, everything is hearty at the Bowl.
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Photo by JIM WATSON/AFP via Getty Images
Best of all, years ago, I took Mary Devine, Devin’s grandmother, to dinner there the night I sensed our large family’s dining plan wasn’t taking shape quickly enough. “Nana,” I asked, “would you like to join me at the Bowl?” I can still hear her courtly reply: “Why, Mike, I’d love that.”
As the sun set on Sister Bay, I was treated to hours of conversation with an elegant Southern woman, usually laconic, yet that night, anything but. She never went to college but had more common sense than any person I know. It was an unforgettable night.
Nana died shortly after that dinner. Our evening together turned out to be a wonderful parting gift. I suspect it won’t be the last time something magical happens at Sister Bay Bowl, a place that, in pursuit of perfection, has caught excellence.
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