A Trip to Watertown and a Search For Food Therein

Leaving Homestead Animal Farm, I decided that we should grab a bite to eat on the way home and I ended up choosing Watertown. Since it is not in Dane county, I don't know how it got its name exactly. While I'd driven by the Watertown exit many a time, I had never actually been there. I have a stepaunt who lives there and she seems to like it so it felt like the right time to check out the town.

Driving into the city limits, I was surprised that it has a population of over 23,000. I just always thought it was somewhere in the area of 8,000 or 9,000 people. Flying past a lengthy stretch of ugly strip malls, I recalled the speech by Peter Singer that I had attended in which he explained that Watertown was ground zero for modern veal raising methods in America. A company called Provimi had adopted the practice of keeping the calves virtually immobile in a pen from the Dutch and it spread throughout the country from right here in Southern Wisconsin. I have since found out that the Miller Brewing Company owns the Watertown Hops Company which produces hop extracts for most of their breweries.

Driving down Highway 26, we decided to follow the signs to the Octagon House.



Unfortunately we couldn't tour it but it looked really neat. Indeed, the town was full of old houses that looked spectacular. I must be old now if checking out historic sites and 19th century homes is something I consider to be fun. So we took a look and then found our way back to 26 and, from there, downtown. And what a beautiful downtown it was. Some kind of festival had wrapped up in Main Street so tents were being pulled down and tables put away. Most of the buildings looked to be from the 19th century. Gorgeous brick structures with a lot of nice detail missing from today's buildings. And there weren't a lot of vacant storefronts either. We eagerly sought a place to eat and settled on The Elias Inn.



We walked in and found the interior was really nice with a lot of dark wood. I started drooling like a Pavlovian dog when I read the words "Prime rib" on the specials placard. The hostess asked if we had a reservation and I replied that we did not. In a friendly tone she informed us that the next table would be open in two hours. With our tails between our legs we walked out and instead made our way to this joint:



It was a none-too-fancy pizza joint and we ordered the Palace Special which was a pizza with most of the varieties of meat they had on-hand and it included gyros meat as you can see.



Discounting the fact that I was famished, the pie was pretty decent and much better than one would expect from a small town in Wisconsin. The crust was nice'n'thin and, while the sauce was a bit bland, at least it wasn't sweet. After making gluttons of ourselves, The D and I took the long route back to the car. We discovered some more nice buildings and three churches within about a block radius. There were, according to one poster, 23 or 24 churches in town. Plus we saw a handbill advertising a cooking show taped in Watertown called Augie's Elite Cuisine.

With full bellies, our last stop of the night was the Tyranena Brewery which had earlier held their Oktoberfest Bike Ride. The D's friend Jen was bartending that night and I got to meet her for the first time. For a nightcap we each had a Headless Man Amber Alt which we drank out on the back 40 under the stars.