Milwaukee’s First Pizzeria is Now Behind a Façade of a Café
Caradaro Club’s home since 2010 looks like a place to enjoy lattes
Caradaro Club started serving pizzas in the late 1940s, making it the first pizzeria in Milwaukee. Since its founding, the original Caradaro Club went through multiple changes, expanded to multiple locations, changed ownership, and the original location burned down. A subsequent location also burned down, and most of the other locations closed. Fast forward to today, the Caradaro Club lives on in a residential neighborhood in a different building with an owner unrelated to the founders.
From the outside, the place looks unmistakably like a café. There is an oversized coffee cup and saucer atop, as if it fell from space and wedged itself irreversibly into the roof. Before Caradaro Club moved in, a different pizzeria was in the space, but prior to that, the building used to house a cafe and it was never updated. Caradaro Club took over the space in 2010, and today the coffee cup remains.
I got to sit down and chat for a while with Caradaro Club owner Wally Kutch. He’s an energetic and proud pizzaiolo, excited to tell his slice of the Caradaro Club story.
Kutch was an engineer and pilot, and one of his main gigs was building the iconic popcorn wagons for Koepsell’s. In the early 2000s, Kutch and his girlfriend were at Summerfest, the yearly Milwaukee music festival where attendance exceeds the population of the city. There, he noticed how people queued up for popcorn at the wagons he built. Afterwards they decided to get pizza at one of his favorite places, Caradaro Club, at their final location outside of Milwaukee. He told the owner they just got back from Summerfest and suggested they should be selling pizzas there. “They’d make a killing,” Kutch said. Caradaro Club’s then-owner said it would be too much work to set up at Summerfest. As well, the owner was tired and getting ready to retire. This quickly led to a $1,000 transaction of earnest money towards buying out the business.
After the transaction was finalized, Kutch recalled that “one day in February 2003, the prior owner was behind the counter. The next day it was me. I didn't say nothin’, and I didn’t tell nobody.” The public was apparently unaware the ownership had changed, and he wanted to keep the pizzas and service consistent.
He opened up a second location in 2010, bringing Caradaro Club back to Milwaukee, in the location with the giant coffee cup lodged into on the roof. At the time, he was offering to sell the huge coffee cup and replace it with a giant slice of pizza. That never happened. Almost a decade and a half later, there is no clear signage to indicate it’s a pizzeria. Inside, the place has a mix of old furniture in well-used condition. There were no patrons nor a traditional front of the house, so I legitimately thought they may have been closed when I first walked in.
The pizza itself is actually high-tier traditional thin crust. It has a straightforward cracker-like thin edge that isn't too hard, but not too light where it could fall apart. The red sauce is portioned well so the cheese on top still fuses with the rest. It’s absolutely no frills, but standard-setting. It’s of the best thin crust pizzas I've had in the region, and probably the cheapest.
I asked Kutch if there were any changes to the recipe since he got it, and he confirmed that he hasn’t changed a thing. However, between the original Caradaro Club’s rectangular pies and by the time Kutch took the helm with their circular pizzas, it’s impossible to determine what else, if anything, might have changed. Shape aside, it’s probably as close as you can get to the original first pizza in Milwaukee.
Caradaro Club isn’t serving pizzas at Summerfest as Kutch initially envisioned, but neighbors are lucky to have the standard-barer for local pizza, and a slice of history, within reach.
For further reading on Caradaro Club prior to Kutch’s ownership, Milwaukee journalist Bobby Tanzilo has a well-researched piece on Caradaro Club’s history.
A Cat on the Ozaukee Interurban Trail
I stayed in Brown Deer, Wisconsin for about a month with proximity to the Ozaukee Interurban Trail. It’s a rail-to-trail project that was formerly the Interurban Electric Railway between Milwaukee and Sheboygan. No passenger trains run this route anymore, but the paved trail connects to all of the same towns the train did, and it blends seamlessly with Milwaukee County’s Oak Leaf Trail, an understated name for a trail system of over 135 miles connecting almost anywhere in Milwaukee. Overall, I was able to bike in the region very easily.
On the Ozaukee Interurban Trail, just south of Cedarburg, a cat greeted me. I stopped, and after it realized I was an acceptable human, it showed me its home in the trees.
There were no houses nearby, but it’s clear that this cat has some people regularly providing it food and fresh water. A nice treat to be lured off the trail this way.
Flour Girl & Flame
After enjoying pizza at over a dozen pizzerias in the Milwaukee area, my favorite by a long shot is Flour Girl & Flame in West Allis. After a couple visits, my favorite is their unique take on Detroit style using local ingredients. The dough is made from local Wisconsin wheat, fermented for two days. The tomatoes in the marinara sauce and the basil tasted as if they were picked fresh that morning. Like most Detroit style pizzas, there is an ample amount of Wisconsin brick cheese, but they augment it with fresh mozzarella, cheddar, and provolone making it a bit creamier. The chew is a bit thicker and a bit more dense than a traditional Detroit style pie, and its notably less greasy. It’s probably in the top five Detroit style pizzas I've ever had, and Flour Girl & Flame is certainly one of the top five pizzerias I know of in the state of Wisconsin.
Schedule
From Wisconsin, I went to Chicago, to Minneapolis, to Fort Collins, to Seattle, to the Portland area, to San Francisco, then back to towns in Oregon. I’ll be recapping some of the pizza and cats and other things I visited there soon! Spoiler: Portland is one of the best pizza cities in the world.
Later this week, I’ll be back on the road towards Minnesota where I’ll be until late January 2024. I’ll be in the Boston area all of February and most of March. In April, I’ll be back in Washington, D.C. for at least a month. From there on, my schedule is up in the air!
How are you doing? What’s new? If we’re in the same place in the coming months, lets get pizza!
-Aaron