undercover in milwaukee
In our quest to find dinner on our first night in Milwaukee, we were wandering around downtown and happened upon a total gem of a bookstore–three stories of used, new and vintage copies. The endless shelves and rooms and genres happily entertained four road travelers in need of new reading material. The night however, was quickly getting away from us and we were afraid we wouldn’t find an open restaurant. Turning down a side alley in hopes of the lights on the other side, we made a fateful and spur-of-the-moment decision as we saw a suspicious door on the left that looked like it could house a run down Italian restaurant. Boy were we wrong.
While the story so far reads like a thriller from the third floor of that bookstore, the next sequence will surprise you. Little did we know that we had stumbled upon one of the Nation’s best spy-themed restaurants called the Safe House. We still had yet to figure this out before we were asked for a password, and after three incorrect guesses (“swordfish,” “Capone,” and “bananas” do not work, by the way), we had to prove we weren’t double agents. By dancing. Without music.
Once allowed entrance we had a great night exploring hidden passageways, lurking behind one-way mirrors and checking out the spy memorabilia. By our luck it was karaoke night and Dave introduced himself to the early crowd singing an old opera tune, “nessun dorma.” An hour later “Dave and the Ahas” returned to the floor with “Build Me Up Buttercup” and the rest is history.
