by David Brierley
“Welcome to Seymour, home of the hamburger,” a sign proclaims as you enter the small town, located just west of Green Bay. This claim to fame dates back to the invention of the hamburger at a Seymour town fair back in 1885.
But this town has a lot more to offer than just burgers. To find out, stop downtown at the huge, two-story, brick corner building with a turret. You’ve arrived at the Hotel Seymour.
When you walk in the main door under the dark red awning, you’ll find yourself in the barroom. The room is breathtakingly historic, with hardwood floors, wood paneled walls, and a tin ceiling framed in wood. Ornate chandeliers hang above the bar, which is shaped like a squared-off oval.
One wall of the barroom is mostly taken up by a huge mural painted in the 1960s. It depicts people from the supper club’s history.
You’ll want to go past the bar first, just into the next room where you’ll find the host station. Here, you can check in with your reservation if you have one. It’s typically a busy place, so if you come without a reservation you may have to wait a bit – not that that’s necessarily a bad thing.
Head back to the bar to grab yourself a cocktail (the old fashioneds are quite tasty). Then, if you can’t find seats in the main barroom, you can head back past the host station to the lounge area. This spot offers more high top bar tables and stools, plus a more comfy area with couches and chairs, and even another, smaller cash-only bar.
The whole point of a supper club is to relax and enjoy your time, and so far, Hotel Seymour is doing everything exactly right.
While you enjoy your cocktails and your company, you can also check out the menu, which is blown up in large print on two walls of the lounge.
Hotel Seymour has much of the standard fare you’d expect at a supper club, and some unique choices, too.
Appetizers, for example, include battered sweet onions (onion rings), battered brick cheese cubes (cheese curds), panko chicken tenders, shrimp cocktail, and bruschetta. But you can also get something a little different, like crab and spinach dip, sriracha steak bites, meatballs marinara, loaded baked potato chips, and bang bang shrimp.
Next up on the menu are homemade pasta dishes, and there are plenty to choose from. Chicken alfredo, tenderloin bolognese, spaghetti and meatballs, tenderloin trottole, cheese ravioli, sauteed shrimp alfredo, and chicken parmesan. Whew, that’s quite a selection.
The next section on the menu is Hotel Seymour Favorites, which is comprised of steaks, ribs, chicken. Steaks include a choice tenderloin, bits a pieces (a mixture of tenderloin, NY strip, and ribeye bits, sauteed with onions and fresh mushrooms), a choice New York strip, tenderloin medallions, choice ribeye, and tenderloin oscar.
Also in the Favorites section are a homemade chicken cordon bleu, baby back ribs, and chicken oscar.
Next up are sandwiches and flatbreads. Being located in the home of the hamburger, of course Hotel Seymour offers a tasty pub burger. There’s also a pub steak sandwich, crispy chicken club flatbread, Philly beef, pub chicken sandwich, a meatball sub, the hotel rodeo burger, southern pulled pork, and chicken alfredo flatbread pizza.
And finally, we come to the seafood section, where the supper club continues to impress. Choose from a center cut cod loin, hand breaded lake perch, cod oscar, cod supreme (topped with shrimp, crab meat, and a creamy white sauce), jumbo scallops, garlic roasted walleye, broiled or chargrilled salmon, fresh shrimp, a seafood combo platter, alaskan king crab legs, or broiled cold water lobster.
That is one extensive menu with something for basically anyone. Most meals include the soup and salad bar, and the favorites and seafood sections include a choice of side as well. As you may have guessed, there are a bunch of options for sides, too: Battered wedge fries, french fries, American fries, hash browns, baked potato, loaded baked potato, twice baked, steamed veggies, or fettuccini alfredo.
As if that wasn’t enough to choose from, there are also nightly specials to consider, depending on the day of the week you’re there.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, you can take your special someone or a foodie friend and enjoy dinner for two, which includes two entrees and an appetizer or dessert. It’s hard to go wrong there.
Fridays are, naturally, for the fish fry. But, you can choose the traditional fish fry, or a steak and seafood combo. Prime rib is available on Saturdays and Sundays, but on Saturday you can also get the steak and seafood combo.
So, with all that in mind, you have your work cut out for you deciding what to eat. You may just have to come back often to try it all.
When your table is ready, you can make your way to the dining room, just around the corner from the host station and past the salad bar. With yellow walls, dim wall sconces, and tables with heavy tablecloths and padded chairs, it provides the quintessential supper club vibe.
Your waitress will be right over with menus and waters, welcoming you with friendly professionalism. It’s easy to see most – or all – of the staff has been here a long time. Everyone seems to know exactly what they’re doing and it all runs like a well-oiled machine. To me, this is telling of good management.
Now that you’re at the table, you can take another look at the menu if you didn’t decide while sipping your drinks in the lounge, and place your order once you’re ready. Here comes the real fun: Time for a trip to the salad bar.
The salad bar at Hotel Seymour has just about everything you could ask for. Fresh, crisp lettuce, every topping and dressing (including hot bacon dressing), and some tasty pasta salads and jello salads.
Around the corner, you’ll find the soups and a food warmer full of the most delicious breadsticks ever. It’s pretty difficult not to fill up on all the delicious salad bar items before your entrees even arrive.
Once you’ve had your fill of food, you can sit back, relax, and contemplate whether or not you could possibly have a few bites of dessert. With homemade options like apple crisp, carrot cake, hot fudge lava cake, a chocolate chip cookie skillet, cheesecake, and Andes mint cream pie, it’s going to be hard to say no. Plus, Hotel Seymour claims to make some top-notch ice cream drinks, and you can never go wrong with those.
But once your food does arrive, you’ll get hungry all over again. With quality cuts of meat, tender and flaky seafood, and the multitude of potato options, you’ll be ready to dig in.
Be sure to check out Hotel Seymour’s website for more history, information, and menus. And follow them on Facebook to keep up with the latest specials and events.
Interview with Brady Jackson, manager of Hotel Seymour Supper Club
O&AW: How long has your family owned the supper club?
BJ: Since 2004.
O&AW: How did you come to own it?
BJ: My dad has been in the restaurant industry since he was 14. He managed Tanner’s [Grill & Bar] in Kimberly for 20 plus years, almost. Then he decided that he wanted [a restaurant] of his own. He was actually flipping a house in Seymour with his dad at the time, and down the road, he saw the For Sale sign [at Hotel Seymour], and he inquired about it and made it happen.
O&AW: What’s the history of this building?
BJ: It was built in 1898 by George Falck. It was a full hotel at that time. They had, I think, upwards of 30 rooms, and just one community bathroom up there. So it was pretty much just a room with a bed back then. They had community showers down in the basement and a barber shop down there at one point. In the 1950s there was a fire that ended up gutting out half of the upstairs hotel rooms. The apartments and the hotel rooms that are up there are on the side of the building that didn’t have the fire.
And, as far as I know, it was always a bar and they have always had food here. When it became a supper club, I couldn’t really tell you. I want to say it was closer to the 70s or 80s.
O&AW: Did your family do any renovations or updates?
BJ: The entire bar was completely redone. It did not have a salad bar, so my dad built that big wall and the entire salad bar. He built the host station and the back bar that’s by the lounge area. And the whole kitchen has been completely redone, too.
The only thing that hasn’t really been touched is the upstairs. The hotel rooms, although he hasn’t done work to them, were in pretty good shape when we bought the building. We still rent them out.
O&AW: Do you get a lot of guests in the hotel rooms?
BJ: We get people calling all the time thinking that it’s a hotel because it’s called Hotel Seymour. We have to explain to them that it’s actually a supper club. We only have two rooms available. As far as them getting rented out, it’s mostly people that work around here, or Packer games. We always have them booked for Packer games because we’re only 15 minutes from Lambeau.
O&AW: Have you worked in the supper club since you were young?
BJ: In 2004, when [my dad] bought it, I was 12 years old. I was kind of forced, but not forced, to come in and do dishes every night [laughs]. So I started out like that and I worked all through high school. Then, when I was about 16, he actually started his other restaurant (Jackson Point at Crystal Springs Golf Course) in town, so I was up there cooking a lot, too.
O&AW: Do you do any of the cooking at Hotel Seymour?
BJ: I do almost all the cooking and prepping.
O&AW: Did you have any formal training, or did you learn to cook from experience?
BJ: I pretty much just kind of learned as I went. When I turned 20, I went to college in Whitewater and I got my foot in the door at a restaurant down there, and I learned a lot more yet. And then when I came back home is when I kind of stepped in and took over to manage [Hotel Seymour]. So that’s going on seven years now.
But that was kind of one of those things, growing up. At 12, 13, 14, 15 years old, I never really gave my dad the time of day. He would want to cook with me and stuff, but you don’t want to do that and hang out with your dad [at that age]. So when I went to college, I actually learned a lot about food and all about that stuff, and the passion kind of kept growing from there.
O&AW: What are some of your more popular menu items?
BJ: Well, if you’re looking to get a good steak, our tenderloins are second to none. I mean, I know people that drive 50 miles just to come and get it. Most of our clientele is actually not [from] Seymour, it’s Green Bay and Appleton. People usually make that drive to come here, and most of them order our steaks, our tenderloins and ribeyes.
[Other best sellers are] some of our featured items you can’t really get anywhere else. We have chicken cordon bleu that is not like anywhere else. All of our pastas use homemade sauces, so those are very, very popular.
O&AW: What do you do that sets your supper club apart from other restaurants?
BJ: Consistency is a big thing. Why does McDonald’s do so well, and they have for years? Because every time you go, you know exactly what you’re gonna get. I feel like consistency is a major thing with restaurants. We’ve kind of gotten lucky in that way, it’s just been me and one other person throughout the years doing all the cooking.
And it’s the same with our servers. We’ve had the same waitresses for the last 12 years, all of them. It makes a big difference. You know, they all know what’s going on. They all know what to do.
Quality is also what really sets us apart. We’re not getting any kind of select meat, we’re always getting choice or higher, sometimes prime. We’re spending money on the food to get that extra quality.
O&AW: Everyone has a different definition of a supper club. What’s yours?
BJ: Tradition is the first word that comes to mind. It was always a place you would go out and, back then, you would leave the kids at home. You and your wife and maybe a small group of people, you’d go out and get a Friday fish fry. And even sometimes the next night, you’d go out and get prime rib.
And, to me, it’s a little bit more of an upscale kind of experience, that you’re able to enjoy your night, have a few cocktails, have some after dinner drinks, and just enjoy the ambiance. Enjoy the people around you, and just have a good time.
O&AW: Anything else you’d like to add?
BJ: We actually did just win the [2023 Community’s Choice Awards] Best of the Bay in the “supper club” and “salad bar” categories.
If you haven’t already, don’t forget to join our Supper Club VIP group; you’ll be entered in our monthly drawing for a $50 gift card to an area supper club. You can also check out our past articles, as well as an interactive map that shows the supper clubs we’ve visited to find one near you. And, as always, there will be plenty more supper club fun to come.
Where in Wisconsin is this supper club?
Address: 210 S Main St., Seymour, WI 54165
Nearby landmarks: Located in downtown Seymour. About 20 minutes west of Green Bay and 25 minutes north of Appleton.
Website: https://hotelseymour.com/
Three can’t-miss features:
1. History dating back to the 1800s
2. Beautiful, well-preserved interior
3. Still an actual hotel (partially)