Miro's Charcoal House Little Europe

As Milwaukee begins to wan in my taste memory, I need to get an even older experience to blog. Otherwise, Miro's Charcoal House Little Europe in Wisconsin will be one blur of schnitzel, sausage and garlic flavored toast. Actually, do I need to say more about Miro's that schnitzel, sausage and garlic flavored toast?

The VI family visited Miro's three times already. Each visit included, if not schnitzel, certainly lots of sausage. Miro's menu goes three pages deep, but like a pizza parlor with an extended list, a lot of the choices are combination plates. It is possible to avoid schnitzel or sausage, but be somewhat forewarned. Twice, the Condiment Queen strayed. Once to fish and once to a beef tenderloin/shrimp combo plate; neither time did she walk away as happy and stuffed as the rest of the table.Avoiding stuffedness at Miro's is quite hard. It is hard first of all, to resist one of the five or so German and Czech beers on tap including a schwarzbier or black beer. And if you come on a Saturday night, as we have, you may have to wait a while for a table. Peckish, you will need to order the small potato pancakes, latkes, served with a sauce somewhere between ranch dressing and garlic butter. With the edge off, you can enjoy your soup. With the soup eat a slice or two of thick Wisconsin rye, either toasted and soaked with salty garlic butter or plain (plain?). Liver dumpling soup stays daily, a fine introduction to this soup, dumplings more fluffy than livery, while your alternative soup rotates. Needless to say, this being Wisconsin, the alternative probably includes cream and butter. One time, we had cream of chicken. It arrived thick yet unusually yellow in color. Guess what made it so yellow (hint, Wisconsin). The soup and garlic toast could sate. Luckily, Miro's serves enormous platters of food. Order a sausage plate, and you get four sausages about sixteen inches long. A schnitzel plate includes three giant swatches of breaded meat. Of course there are sides including long fingers of potatoes, roasted and then fried, showered with lemon pepper and combo plates of spatzle and bread dumplings. Finally, everyone gets dessert. Dessert of the day, but I doubt it ever changes from the dessert we got on each of three occasions, a fresh crepe filled with sweetened thin farmer's cheese.

As I noted above, if you stick with the basics, it seems hard to go wrong at Miro's. They make four kinda sausage in house, a plump Polish, a taut and spicy Bohemian, a meaty knockwurst and a brat heavy on the nutmeg, and then they grill them perfectly. We went to Miro's twice during recent debate on Hot Doug's, and it is hard to really appreciate Hot Doug's sourced sausages after having Miro's terrific handmade stuff. Aside from the CQ's misadventure in slightly frou-frou food, the only other thing less than delicious I tried was, amazingly, the gravy for the bread dumplings and spatzle. Stagnant and underspiced, it did no help. And the spatzle needed help especially, a little too plain. Since the potato wedges are so good, it is not really a problem in the long run.

Miro and his family, who escaped communist Czechoslovakia in 1981 dominate the dining room. It is easy to do. Miro's Charcoal House is highly visible from the expressway, I-94. There are two buildings, plain in nature, but decorated with effort to look as mitteleuropean as possible. So much so, that it looks almost too cutesy, like Apple Holler, which is an exit or two north. When you get there, you find that one building, housing a classic Wisconsin tavern, remains reserved for parties. Everyone gets crammed into the other room. It reminds me a bit of the famous Marx Brothers scene on the steamship. There is a u-shaped bar with Mrs. Miro, chatting, smoking and pouring large glasses of beer. There is a small showcase cooking area, where Miro with his floppy chef hat, makes his daily specials, and there are typically, at dinner, people waiting for tables. The spectacle though, is all part of the appeal.

Miro's Charcoal House Little Europe
6613 120th
Kenosha, WI
262-857-9073
(You will see Miro's going north on I-94 from Chicago. It is on the east side of the highway, your right. You then exit the expressway and double back on the frontage road to get to Miro's.)