Ope! grab a chair and a plate with J. Ryan Stradal

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Adam Sockel:

You are listening to Passions & Prologues, a literary podcast where each week, I interview an author about a thing they love and how it inspires their work.

I'm your host Adam Sockel, and today's guest is J. Ryan Stradal. We have an absolutely delightful conversation about what is obviously a very large topic, but we dive into it in a very specific manner.

Jay is the author of the new book, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club, an absolutely delightful story about several generations of a family who own a dinner or a supper club, as it is known in the Midwest.

And we get into what that means, having a restaurant and kind of thrust upon you whether you want to have it or not, and the implications of what it means to be a community center and a place that people have come to rely on. It’s a really great conversation. Jay's other novels include Kitchens of the Great Midwest and The Lager Queen of Minnesota.

The discussion topic we focus on at the beginning of this podcast is food. We dive into it in a very specific manner, because as you may have guessed from the names of these stories that he has written, Jay is a Midwesterner just like I am.

We talk about our respective histories with food, what it was like growing up in Midwestern families, we talk about some very specific Midwestern style food and diners and different things.

This was like having a conversation with an old friend even though we had never met before this discussion. In fact, when we got done recording, we came to realize that he often visits my neighborhood from time to time. And we are thinking about going to get dinner at a very specific place when he does come here. So, a lot of fun, I think you’re really going to enjoy it.

Before we dive into that conversation, I want to give you guys a book recommendation. This past weekend I adored Love and Saffron, which has been out since last year. It's by Kim Fay and is described as a novel of friendship, food, and love. It's an epistolary story, which is told in the way that two different women write letters back and forth, and they form a friendship with each other.

Basically, what happens is one of them reaches out to a writer of a specific recurring article in a newspaper that she has come to love, and she basically writes a fan letter. And they talk about the specific food that the writer is getting into, they exchange recipes back and forth, and they form a really delightful friendship.

It's extremely quick, it's so heartfelt. It is probably going to make you cry, but it is a book that just made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, and who doesn't love a cozy little story? So, it's Love and Saffron by Kim Fay.

Also want to thank everyone who has reached out to me via email at [email protected]. I love hearing the things you guys are all passionate about, and it really, really means the world to me to see those things.

And I give away a random bookshop.org gift card to one listener every single month who sends me the things they're passionate about.

I also want to thank the people who have left reviews recently on the podcast page, wherever you listen to your podcast, whether it's Spotify or Apple. Seeing those really does make my day and it helps people find the podcast just a little bit more easily.

And also, one last thank you to everyone who has connected with me on Instagram and TikTok at Passions & Prologues. It's just really lovely hearing from other readers and getting to chat a little bit.

Okay, those are all my thank yous. I really, really appreciate you all. I am so delightfully excited for you to hear this conversation with J, Ryan Stradal, author of Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club, on Passions & Prologues.

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Adam Sockel:

Jay, what is something you are super passionate about that we're going to be discussing today?

J. Ryan Stradal:

Food.

Adam Sockel:

Food, excellent. So, for people who may not know, Jay and I are both Midwesterners, we were just talking about this before we started recording.

So, I'm really hoping that's the route we're going to go to. But can you sort of dive into it, what is your particular thing about food that you love? Is it the cooking it, is it the exploring new stuff? Sort of dive in, let me know what it is all about food that fascinates you.

J. Ryan Stradal:

I grew up in a small town in Southeastern Minnesota, or a series of them really — all generally far enough away from the big city, to make that panoply of options easy. And growing up working class, we didn't eat out a lot. And when we did, it was places that were accessible to our price range. My parents also had undemanding pallets.

I'm not going to say uninteresting, but I didn't get exposed to a wide range of food, but I'd read about it. I knew different cuisines existed because I'd read about them in books and magazines.

And as soon as I could, I got a driver's license, which unfortunately wasn't as soon as I could have got a driver's license. I got on my third try, I was almost 17 when I finally acquired it. But by that point, I had been working for a few years.

I had disposable income as teenagers sometimes do, and I chose to spend it on music and food. I had a list of restaurants I wanted to go to that I couldn't wait to try as soon as I could get to them. My parents weren't going to bring me to them. They weren't against it, they just weren't enthusiastic about it. They're like, “Why would you go there?”

It was baffling to them, it was like me saying, “Hey, I'm going to join a scout band,” they'd be equally puzzled. Perhaps, they would've preferred me being in a scout band, it would've been closer to home more often., the garage might have been louder. But overall, I couldn't wait to eat at restaurants.

I loved eating in restaurants growing up, it was a rare occasion, and I knew there were other kinds of food out there, and I knew I had to take it upon myself to find them. I'm a more enthusiastic diner than chef, I'm an intermediate chef. I enjoy cooking, but I like eating more, I'm an end user. I’m a consumer, just a devoted consumer of food.

And now, I get to live in Los Angeles where there's some of the best Mexican, Korean food in the world, among other things. And had friends in town who were also Midwest natives who now live in Seattle, and we sought out Malaysian food when we were here. We drove out to Alhambra, and it’s just fun doing that kind of stuff.

That's what I think about still when I think about how to schedule a weekend is, “Okay, where are we going to eat and how do we build the rest of the weekend around that?”

It's a little more complex now, being a father of a three-year-old who has food opinions. But luckily, we have a nice list of babysitters, and we go somewhere that will be hostile or uninteresting to a three-year-old, we don't have to bring them along.

It still continues to be more than a preoccupation, just a focus. And certainly, in my writing too, when I sat down to write, I just wanted to write stories in which food was very central, and I would build themes around food and use food as a setting to tell larger stories about themes like legacy in my current book, and family, and other things I'm passionate about and interested in solving and resolving.

But food, to me, has always been one of these things that well, where I'm from, it's one of the few topics that everyone can agree on, people got to eat. They don't always agree on what to eat or what they want on their pizza, but people like pizza, we can start there.

And I find writing about it just makes me happy. I get up from the computer after a day of writing about a restaurant or a chef, and I go, “That was great,” even if this day of writing doesn't end up in the book, I'm happier for having done this.

Adam Sockel:

I love this so much. First off, I was laughing when you first started talking about your parent’s type, the places that you guys might go as a family. Again, for everyone listening, this is going to be a somewhat Midwestern conversation. I so rarely get like a like-minded person who's also from this area. We used to go to Bob Evans.

J. Ryan Stradal:

Oh yeah.

Adam Sockel:

Frequently.

J. Ryan Stradal:

Bob Evans for me was … if you don't mind me interjecting-

Adam Sockel:

Please.

J. Ryan Stradal:

The first place where I ever had a meal that came out directly from under a heat lamp, that wasn't a fast-food restaurant, and I was impressed by this.

I was delighted, I sat down, ordered something, and I got it like in two minutes, like at a sit-down restaurant. I was like, “This place is the future. This place is the only place we should be going.”

We got our food so fast and it met my expectations, but also, at the same point in my life, the pinnacle of fine dining was Red Lobster.

Adam Sockel:

Oh yeah.

J. Ryan Stradal:

We had like a swear jar/chore jar that we'd get to bank money in. And once it was filled, we could go to Red Lobster untouchable.

Adam Sockel:

So, my dad, he owned an insurance agency for the entirety of my life, but before then, he was a manager at a Bob Evans. So, to him, and you talk about pinnacle, like we would go there — I'm the youngest of four children, so all of us would get our various, whether it was the country fried, steak or the open-faced roasted sandwich or ... whatever everyone's getting-

J. Ryan Stradal:

They're all winners.

Adam Sockel:

Yes, the whole time he's just basically commenting on like, “Well, my day we would go around, and this water would be full.” I still sort of this day remember him having these comments.

But our pinnacle, you're talking about going out, when we had a birthday meal, it was like Olive Garden. It didn't have the same Red Lobster, it didn't have the Cheddar Bay biscuits, but it did have the breadsticks still, so it was very similar.

But I'm similar to you in the sense that, once I got out of the house, went to college, and then graduate school and living on my own, like same thing in the sense I started discovering all these new foods I like, and it's not that my parents aren't “adventurous,” they'll try different things.

But like you said, I have come to discover my favorite moments are going to a restaurant, especially in a new town. Like I went to South Charleston in Carolina to do a bunch of oysters or …

J. Ryan Stradal:

Excellent food city.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah, recently I was in San Francisco for work, and my boss is trying …

J. Ryan Stradal:

Legendary.

Adam Sockel:

And you mentioned Malaysian food, we went to a Malaysian restaurant there. And I've been thinking more and more like you were talking about how it connects to storytelling in a sense. We sat down as a team at this Malaysian restaurant, and she ordered for the whole table. Well, she asked if she could do it first.

She's very much like a mom of our team, it's adorable. She ordered all this different stuff and that becomes like an opportunity for everyone to try different food. And I know lots of people have their thoughts on wanting their own meal versus sharing, but the whole time all it did was it sparked these conversations amongst one another. And we started basically telling almost stories of our own experiences.

And so, I totally hear you when you say these ideas of going to a restaurant, spending time, like it really does spark an opportunity to tell stories.

So, for you, when did you first realize like, “Oh, not only do I love this process and this whole idea of going out and trying different food …” when did you realize you also found joy in writing about those experiences?

J. Ryan Stradal:

I'll answer that question, but first, I need to interject with one comment. Knowing where you are in Cleveland, have you been to Pacific East in Cleveland Heights?

Adam Sockel:

Absolutely, yeah.

J. Ryan Stradal:

That's where I eat Malaysian food in Cleveland.

Adam Sockel:

Oh, man.

J. Ryan Stradal:

They've got that whole Malaysian menu in the back; they got the stick menu that's front-loaded with all the Japanese cuisine but keep turning and you end up with the Malaysian cuisine and it's excellent.

Adam Sockel:

When we get done recording, we're going to have a conversation about that in a bit. But yeah, their food is phenomenal. Yeah, no notes.

J. Ryan Stradal:

Yeah, no notes. Yeah, writing about it to me is the second-best thing after eating it, reliving it, and also trying to think of ways to describe it that haven't been done yet, or at least new to me. Trying to describe it through the lens of a character and that character's values and perspective, which will always add novelty to a description if you know the character well enough.

So, yeah, I love the opportunity to write about food and to create characters that have reasons to express opinions about it and have experiences related to food that are deeper than just consuming it. Characters for whom food is a load-bearing wall for them in some aspect, whether emotionally or financially. So, setting a book in a restaurant, which I hadn't done yet, was a lot of fun for me.

And there was no question for me about what kind of restaurant I would choose. I chose supper clubs, which to me are resolutely Midwestern, and have a lot of unique quirks to them. But the only hard part for me was I wrote most of this book during the pandemic where I couldn't actually go to them.

Not only am I marooning in California where there are no supper clubs even if I could have traveled during the Midwest for much of the time I was writing this book; it would've been difficult. I also had just become a father for the first time in December 2019.

Adam Sockel

Wow.

J. Ryan Stradal

So, my partner Brooke was working full-time, and I was the stay-at-home dad caring for an infant while writing a novel.

So, there were a number of reasons I couldn't just get up and go to Minnesota and march in my Supper club of choice.

But that said luckily, I had a lifetime of memories to lie back on my own work experience at a supper club in Wisconsin as a teenager. And doing phone and email interviews with current and former supper club owners, including my former boss at the Steamboat end in Prescott. Remember Mike Rowan?

Adam Sockel:

So, to keep my responses brief so that we don't just get sidetracked in talking about Midwestern food the whole time — for people who may not be familiar, how would you describe a supper club? Because like you said, it's so uniquely Midwestern.

Like you sang it, I can think of this place, like the slow back home and these different places that I am very much familiar with, but for people who may not know, how would you describe a supper club so they can start to understand the area and the environment that they'll be diving into when they read your new book?

J. Ryan Stradal:

To me, they're homey, family-owned, family-run restaurants that make you feel more like a guest in a home than a customer in a transactional relationship.

For starters, most supper clubs, in fact, all should by design and rule — not all do, but many do give you a plate of free food when you sit down called a relish tray. And this relish tray can encompass any number of items based on the owner's whims and tastes.

I've had cheese curds on them, I've had pickled herring, I've had pickled watermelon ride. Quite often you'll get an array of raw vegetables, but nonetheless, you're getting free food just like you would if you go to the house of a polite person that has manners and that knows the protocol and says, “Oh yeah, take a load off here. Would you like anything to drink? Here’s a plate of snacks,” it’s like that.

It's like, “Welcome over, take a seat, take a load off, here's a plate of snacks, can I get you a drink?” And one of the many quirks of supper clubs is the old fashions by default are made with brandy. And you have to ask, if you don't want a brandy old-fashioned, you have to specify that in your order. By default you'll get a brandy old-fashioned.

So, stay warned having lived in California for almost 25 years and become accustomed to whiskey and roil fashions, when I ordered an old-fashioned at a supper club having forgotten this set of protocols, I was a little shocked that someone melted a popsicle. Like wow, what's this sweet concoction? It's not an old-fashioned.

“I ordered an old-fashioned, what's this?” “That's an old-fashioned, you wanted something else, you should ask for something else.” And it's my bad, it’s my fault. And when I developed a taste for brandy old-fashions, and if it's what you expect, they'll satisfy you, I'll put it that way. Like yeah, grasshoppers for dessert.

Quite often, the server will come around and say, “When do you want your grasshoppers?” Not, “Do you?” They're like, “When, how many grasshoppers?” I had one supper club owner say that practice of saying, “When would you like your grasshoppers?” Like, “Hey, can I bring you out your grasshoppers?” Helped to put their kid through college. Like a summer of hard selling grasshoppers to tables.

Adam Sockel:

So, for people just to know, like, it's similar to — it's a much more like homey neighborhood way. Like when you go into Starbucks and you order a cup of coffee and they say, “What else can I get you?” It's not, “Can I get you anything else?” It's, “What else can I get?” It’s like an implication of well of course, you're going to get these grasshoppers, it's just when do you want them to come out? That is such an intelligent way of saying it.

So, now, that you've gone from Midwest to California and when you do get these opportunities to go out, what are the types of restaurants you seek out?

J. Ryan Stradal:

Well, quite often I still seek out things I haven't had yet or things I rarely get exposed to. For example, just last weekend, Jeremy Schmidt, Diana Kaloski, and Brooke and I went to Malaysian cuisine in Alhambra. I hadn't eaten in Alhambra since before the pandemic.

It's a wonderful neighborhood where a lot of the Asian diaspora have settled in the last 20 or 30 years. And as such, there's a wonderful array of beautifully authentic and unique restaurants out there both by and for that community. And it's 20 minutes away from where I live in Burbank.

Here, we're missing out on a few things. We don't have supper clubs, there's a few restaurants kind of like them but no, there's no supper clubs as such in this part of own. I try to play to an area of strengths wherever I am. I don't go to Prague and look for Mexican food. But here on Los Angeles, yeah, or the Los Angeles area, yeah …

I seek out different varieties of Mexican food. I find myself now as the father of a toddler somewhat limited in terms of scope being that there's a third vote and it's usually, it's kind of one that demands the most boring food possible. But that said, we've endeavored to expose him to new things and unlike me, he'll have had the opportunity to try things outside his comfort zone.

I at least want to give him the opportunity to try, he doesn't have to love them. In fact, having a child has taught me a lot about, hey, you just give them the opportunity to shine, you don't tell them how to do it.

Just open the door and they'll decide whether they want to waltz through it or crawl through it or dance through it. So, in terms of food, I'm trying not to impose my values, but I am trying to create opportunity.

Adam Sockel:

I will say, I love what you said about basically not forcing … and this is my PSA to people. Wherever you're going on a vacation or a trip, seek out what the local cuisine is. If you come to Cleveland, I'm going to take you to a little Polish diner and you're going to have pierogi.

Like when I was in San Francisco, I said, we tried all this different food, but our daytime jobs there, we were working in the Castro. So, my boss was like, “What do you want?” I was like, “I want a burrito. I want a San Francisco burrito.”

So, I'm in agreement with you. No matter where you're going, find out what the local, the international flavor is, like the people and the personalities and it's the best way to experience a culture and also, a community.

And so, along those lines, I'm hoping you can kind of give my listeners sort of an introduction to Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club because it is a little bit about community and family and these things that you can discover when you go to restaurants. So, can you introduce my listeners to the new book?

J. Ryan Stradal:

Yeah, it's the story of a supper club through four generations since they're almost always family-owned and operated. It seemed to me the perfect vehicle through which to explore legacy being that that was also a new preoccupation of mine becoming a dad for the first time.

It's the story of this restaurant and how every generation doesn't necessarily enthusiastically accept it as its birthright, and what they do about it. Having interviewed a number of supper club owners, I certainly met quite a few whose children had to work in that restaurant as soon as they could work and didn't want to anymore once they had a choice.

So, yeah, it's a story of a restaurant, but also the people who run it, their lives, what they want out of life, how this restaurant relates to changing trends around it through the years. And it's very rare for any kind of business in America to last 100 years, rarer for a restaurant. But there are supper clubs in the Midwest that are approaching 100-years-old.

And the one in my book is one of them, is the same way and nonetheless, still constantly reckoning with its survival as each new realm of trends come to encounter it from generation to generation.

And each new generation develops its own value system in relation to this place that to be not unfair, stubbornly resist change. One of the things I actually love about supper clubs is how they're kind of out of time, they're anachronistic, and they're throwback restaurants without even trying to be.

Quite often, they haven't either had the wherewithal or the finances to update. And now, it's come to the point where, you know we shouldn't because people are coming here for this milia that hasn't been updated in 30 years or longer.

So, I wanted to talk about that in the book too. So, it's a book about food, it's a book about legacy, it's a book about family, and it's a book about whether or not it's too late to be a good parent to your child. At what point do you get in raising your child, do you realize like, “You know what, I can correct these mistakes.” You always can, at least I believe that.

Adam Sockel:

I love this so much where I grew up in Lorain, Ohio, which is like 45 minutes west of downtown Cleveland. And in the city of Lorain, there is a bakery called Kiedrowskis Bakery. They've literally won best bakery in America through this like, I don’t know if it was Thrillist or one of those random places.

But they are a generational bakery that Mr. Kiedrowski founded it. And he has four sons that I grew up with, and two of them worked there full-time, the other ones help. And it's a situation where they've become well-known for two things.

One is the snoogle, which is this long thin pastry that they made by accident that has been like Bill & Harry has been trying to buy for them for years and they just refuse. And another very Midwestern thing, they make paczki which for anyone who doesn't know, paczki is basically like a traditional Polish donut that you fill with — it's used for right at the beginning of Lent.

So, what they used to do in Poland is like any sweets that were left, they would put into the paczki and on Fat Tuesday they would eat everything so that there were no more sweets in the house, because during Lent you're not supposed to have sweets, if you're Catholic, and they make upwards of like 5 to 6, like 50 to 60,000 paczki every February.

And so, all of the sons come back, and all the family are there and they're making them like this old-fashion away. But at the same time, I've actually been thinking about this for them as like a family. It's like, “Okay, but what happens when Mr. Kiedrowski and Mrs. Kiedrowski retire?” And yes, two of the sons work there but what comes next?

Like this place is an institution, and they make things the old-fashioned away. But like you said, yes, it's like quaint and delightful when you walk and there's polka music, but at the same time, like you can go to a “normal bakery” or like a Dunkin’ Donuts that were there basically just like processing these donuts and they're cheaper and they come out faster.

And I love that you wrote about this in the book, these questions of like, “Okay, well, is it like a family “birth right/expectation” that a son or daughter takes on this supper club? Is it the expectation and birth rate that they need to continue doing it the old-fashioned way?”

There's all these questions that for all of the things that we love about supper clubs and these local bakeries and all these things, all those reasons we love them are also reasons that it does make them very, very hard to keep going, especially today.

J. Ryan Stradal:

Yeah, and I think about that a lot in terms of how restaurants fit into the arc of progress. It's pretty easy to look at a lot of things now that 100 years ago were normal that we now consider to be immoral if not destructive.

Like various medical practices, technologies, the way people treated other people. Progress tends to go in a more humane and thoughtful direction than when it's going well. And sometimes I think about how that'll affect food in restaurants.

Certainly, there's a lot about the way we eat and a lot about the food industry that's destructive to the environment that you can look at and say, “Hey, in 50 years, these things we're nostalgic for, our grandchildren are going to consider to be immoral, if not destructively retrograde.” I mean, who knows, like a hamburger might be looked upon in 80 years the way we look at cigarettes now.

So, thinking about that, I try to put some of those values into the final generation of the book. Julie, my final character, and as she struggles with what this supper club means to her, she's thinking about it from her point of view as someone who's inheriting this world that's, well, quite frankly, going in the wrong direction. And she thinks about herself as its steward and is trying to reconcile where this restaurant fits into her ideology.

I'm not necessarily trying to say that — to take a step back here, it's not the point of the book, but when each generation inherits this restaurant, they make it their own, and Julie is the first generation that comes along that says, “I don't know how to do that.”

And I get to unpack a lot there and also, unpack a lot of my feelings I have as a father where I think I don't expect my son to enthusiastically inherit my legacy. I expect him to take what he needs and get rid of the rest.

I mean, until I had a child, I thought, well, some poor sap is going to have to gather all my belongings after I die and burn them in a pile somewhere. And now, that I have a kid, I'm like, “Oh, well, he might keep two or three things.”

It's up to him to decide what he values out of what I leave behind me because he can very well look back on my life and go, “Boy, that was perfectly retrograde dad, boy, you're a real relic. These things you're nostalgic for are ridiculous.” He'll be right.

But in the meantime, I'm enthusiastic about them and I write about them because I want them to survive. That's the contradiction we live in. Sitting down and writing this book, I felt like I'm capturing a world as it's changing.

Certainly no one is making new supper clubs, or at least they're not doing it in a rate that's exceeding their extinction. Like it's a style of dining that is waning but luckily, still accessible. And one of the messages I did want to get across in the book is, “Hey, if you live within driving distance of a supper club, go while you can,” I help support these places.

Adam Sockel:

Yeah, listen if you're driving through the Midwest, I wholly support Jay’s notion of doing this. It is a unique experience that you're absolutely going to love. We're recording this today before the book comes out, so I want to be respectful for your time.

I know you're doing a lot of things this week. So, I have one last question for you. I always end my podcast by having a recommendation from the author. It can be a book, it can be a recipe, something … I'm guessing I know what your recommendation might be, but what is something you would like to recommend to my listeners as a takeaway from this conversation?

J. Ryan Stradal:

Wow, I'm actually going to recommend two books. I'm going to recommend a book by a fellow Midwestern author named Christie Clancy called Shoulder Season. It's a set at a playboy resort that used to exist outside of Madison, Wisconsin. Which sounds horribly improbable to me, but nonetheless, it existed for a time like in the seventies and eighties, and it's set there among a local woman who gets gainful employment there.

And she did a lot of research and it's very Midwestern. It's like whatever you think about the world of Playboy, to a large extent, it's disabused and examined through a new light in this book. And Christie was a debut author whose first book came out in her fifties, and she teaches at Beloit College and is the Midwesterner to her core, and really captures a lot of great Midwestern personalities in that book.

And the other book I want to recommend is, They’re Going to Love You by Meg Howrey. She's an author I know who not only doesn't have an MFA, she doesn't have a college degree at all. She went straight from an arts high school to becoming a professional ballet dancer in New York. She did that until her mid-thirties.

And this latest book of hers is her fourth, is well set in the world of ballet. So, like Christie Clancy is writing what she knows but does so in a way that is accessible and interesting to anybody.

I think there's enough detail for the ballet freak, but it's nonetheless approachable enough for anyone who doesn't know the first thing about ballet. Because her characters are so well-drawn, there's not a hair out of place in this book. I admire her writing so much.

She just threads that needle, having beautiful writing without being overly dense pros that makes the pages harder to turn or the plot harder to discern. It's a very character-driven plot-driven book that nonetheless has beautifully written. It's just like that magic alchemy of literature when everything works.

So, They're Going to Love You by Meg Howrey and Shoulder Season by Christie Clancy are my recommendations, Adam. Thank you.

Adam Sockel:

I love that. Alright Jay, Saturday Night at the Lakeside Supper Club is amazing. It's wonderful for everyone, but seriously, if you ever have any ounce of Midwesterner in you, you have to check it out. Thank you so much for joining me today.

J. Ryan Stradal:

Well, you're welcome, Adam. Thank you so much for the wonderful conversation. I could talk about Midwestern food with you all day.

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Adam Sockel:

Passions & Prologues is proud to be an Evergreen Podcasts and was created by Adam Sockel. It was produced by Adam Sockel and Sean Rule-Hoffman. And if you are interested in this podcast and any other Evergreen podcasts, you can go to evergreenpodcasts.com to discover all the different stories we have to tell.

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