Yesterday I received an e-mail from a reader of this blog informing be that the Great Northern BBQ restaurant has closed. That is some really crappy news. I think they had the best BBQ in the area. Better than Speed Queen or Famous Dave’s. Better than Saz’s, or Pitch’s too. I loved their ribs and brisket and their Friday Catfish fry was spectacular. Dennis Getto loved their food so much he lavished them with 3.5 stars, just a half star short of his highest possible rating. That put it in rarefied air in the Milwaukee dining scene. I went there on occasion but in hindsight I feel like I should have gone more often, but I am a realist and know that probably wouldn’t have made much of a difference.
Its always sad when a independent restaurant, or any other independent business, fails because people put their heart and soul into the place. Anyone who went to the Great Northern BBQ restaurant could see how much the owner Mike Killey cared about his business. Often times you would see him working the register, the kitchen and the bar all at once.
I am not sure what killed the restaurant. I don’t think the location was the greatest, but you would think the proximity to the freeway and GE Medical would have been a huge benefit. I had wished they would have located downtown Waukesha instead but I don’t know if that would have helped either. Killey’s bbq team partner Scott McGlinchey had two similar restaurants called Q (which were also awesome) in Bay View and West Allis. Both of those locations closed too. When Q in Bay View first opened there were lines out the door. Maybe people don’t appreciate real BBQ in the area preferring fall-off-the-bone oven roasted ribs that you find at many supper clubs. Maybe people didn’t like paying comparable prices to Famous Dave’s for counter service food. Maybe people just don’t like good food and prefer to eat at dime-a-dozen chains.
This need to be a wake up call for anyone (like myself) who is begging for nice places to eat in Downtown Waukesha. We need to put our money where their mouth is. We all need to get down there and patronize these places on a regular basis after they open. If you like them, tell a friend. Instead of going out to a chain restaurant, try the local independent ones. Instead of making the trek to Delafield, Brookfield, or Milwaukee, check out restaurants in your own City. As with many businesses downtown they cannot solely depend on the occasional visit from people outside Waukesha, they need to attract Waukesha residents who will become regulars. The most successful businesses downtown have regulars.
I am not telling you to patronize places that are terrible. I had the highest hopes for Passport Point (which is now the home of El Ranchito) but the food was so overpriced and bad that I couldn’t see spending another dime there. But we all should check out the new places as they open and if they are good try to patronize them as much as possible and better yet, encourage our friends, family, and neighbors to do so too.
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I agree that this is a big loss for Waukesha, but I can proudly claim I patronized it quite a bit. I have smaller children and it was a kid-friendly place where the dad could nonetheless enjoy not only the food, but also a beer and the game (not neglecting the precious child for one second, mind you).
I also noticed this week that the SuperAmigo grocery on Racine has also apparently closed. I expected this.
All of the above plus the chance for your kids to see free live music. Too bad. It will be missed. But I don’t think that location helped him. Big nut, no walk-up traffic like a downtown spot might give you.
This response is pretty late, but I thought I’d add something to this discussion. I went to GNBBQ with my sister and brother-in-law in late June of last year and it was one of the worst restaurant experiences we ever had. For starters, believe it or not they were OUT of ribs around dinner time on a Saturday. Then we ordered the pulled pork nachos, which Dennis Getto recommended, and they were terrible. Tortilla chips out of a bag slathered in canned cheese sauce from Sam’s and about 1/4 ounce of pulled pork, all for $8.00! No thanks…
And because of their fast casual dining environment, the appetizer came with our entrees. My sister had brisket, which was cold. I had BBQ chicken made from the world’s scrawniest chicken and it was cold too. The cheesy corn was a laugh… canned corn with canned cheese sauce. Mashed potatoes had a good taste, but they were cold as well.
To be fair, my brother-in-law ordered a grilled chicken sandwich and it was very good. It came with great fries and at least it was hot, which was more than could be said for the other 2 entrees. At any rate, this terrible dinner cost almost $60 for 3 of us. Better than Famous Dave’s? I’d have gone there in a heartbeat rather than get ripped off for lousy food again at GNBBQ.
We sent 2 e-mails and 1 letter describing our experience and all were completely ignored by management. As bad as the other problems were, this was the cardinal sin. So we have the grand slam of a bad restaurant… bad food, bad service, high prices and indifference toward customer satisfaction. I kept waiting for it to close, because based on my experience, I thought it was inevitable. I drove by there late on a Saturday afternoon and saw that the place looked dark. I drove in and saw that it had closed and I was ecstatic. They definitely got what they deserved, in my opinion.
My family and I were convinced that one of two things happened with Dennis Getto… either the owners of GNBBQ had pictures of him in a compromising position, or Getto changed his rating system to 1-10 stars and forgot to mention it.
No loss whatsover, as far as I’m concerned.
Thanks for commenting on this post about the closing of Great Northern BBQ. While I think that your experience was not the norm at the place, unfortunately one bad trip to a restaurant will typically ruin it for me too. Why go back when your only experience was so crappy? Why patronize a BBQ restaurant that runs out of ribs? I just wish you would have had a better experience, like the several good ones I had.
As someone who has eaten at GNBBQ upwards of 10 times I only had one bad experience there and it was still pretty minor. I had some ribs that seemed like they weren’t cooked long enough. They were a tad tough and had some extra fat that normally would have rendered out during the long, slow smoke.
Otherwise, the food was always excellent. The ribs were hands down the best in the area and the brisket and shoulder were good as well (shoulder at Speed Queen is better though). Getto gave them a good review because they truly deserved it. I gave them a great review over at EatWisconsin.com too. They had no idea who I was or that I wrote a food blog. I just came in and ate, like everyone else. The guy didn’t win all of those BBQ awards because he made crappy BBQ.
I guess what bothered me about your comment was the venom towards the owners. “I drove in and saw that it had closed and I was ecstatic. They definitely got what they deserved, in my opinion.” Come on. To be happy that some genuinely nice, hard working people poured their heart and soul into a restaurant and you are ecstatic that they closed? This isn’t some corporation like Famous Dave’s or McDonalds where if they close the employees and managers can just go to another store. This was a locally owned business that likley cost the owners their life savings (and probably put them into a great amount of debt. Its one thing to say “I could see why they closed because the food and service were no good” but to actually take plesure in the closure is another.
BTW, I loved that cheesy corn, whether it came from canned stuff or not.
Thanks for your comments. After the experience that I had, I felt completely justified in not returning.
We clearly have completely different viewpoints regarding the merits of the owners. The satisfaction that I took about their closing had everything to do with the indifferent attitude towards their customers that was demonstrated when we complained about our bad experience. If they were “genuinely nice, hard working owners”, they would absolutely NOT completely ignore 3 (yes, 3) separate complaints about their food and service. People who “poured their heart and soul into a restaurant” would certainly have cared when some of their customers had a very bad experience and would have bent over backwards to rectify it. But that was obviously not the case here. I was highly offended by their refusal to even acknowledge my complaints, much less address them, so I’m sorry if I don’t have anywhere near as high an opinion of them as you do.
If they lost their life savings, they have no one to blame but themselves. If one opens a restaurant and expects to be a success, good food and good service are a must. They failed me and the rest of my group on both of those counts. But the biggest sin of all was to demonstrate that they didn’t care that they had disappointed us so greatly by their lack of response to our complaints. From my point of view, that’s a level of arrogance on their part that was inexcusable. And that’s not the kind of behavior that I would expect from people that you describe in such glowing terms. It’s that level of arrogance that lead to my satisfaction when I saw that they had closed.
As for whether or not they deserved the good reviews, I’ll reiterate that my experience was very different from yours and, based on mine, they didn’t “truly deserve it”. All the good reviews and awards in the world don’t make a hill of beans when your actual experience is as bad as ours. We weren’t eating good reviews and awards, we were eating bad food, bad to the degree that it belied the accolades represented by those reviews and awards. At any rate, the marketplace has spoken. You may be sad at their closing, but I won’t apologize for the fact that I don’t feel the same way. Or for feeling that these people who demonstrated indifference and arrogance towards their customers reaped what they sowed.
One clarification. I was responding to some of the points you made in your response to me, including the “life savings’ comment. In retrospect, I should have left that comment drop. My response to it comes across far more callous than I intended it to. Let me be clear in saying that, despite the fact that I remain very offended by the inexcusably shabby treatment that me and my group were given by the owners, I’m in no way relishing the thought of dire financial straits for them (or wishing such duress on them) due to the failure of the business. While the closing of the restaurant comes as no surprise to me for the reasons I described earlier, I hope that they have enough resources left to recover and move on to a new venture.