Open to the public but once a week, worth the trip
Northwest Indiana offers a wide range of dining options, from four-star fine dining restaurants open daily for lunch and dinner to taverns, supper clubs and eateries offering quality food, but with limited menus and days and hours of operation. This is one in a series of reviews of nontraditional area restaurants worth sampling.
The menu isn’t big. In fact, it fits on a three-by-four sheet listing only five entrée choices, all of which are deep-fried, though baked chicken is available upon request in advance.
But on that Wednesday they pack them into Cedar Lake’s After Four Supper Club, a banquet hall and catering operation on the site of a former drive-in theater featuring pornographic films. Why?
Fried chicken.
The After Four Supper Club’s fried chicken is that good, the kind you usually must travel to the Deep South to find, with a crisp and crunchy golden-brown crust and steaming, tender meat inside… No less than Samuel Clemens opined about the deep relationship southerners feel for their fried chicken.
“The art cannot be learned north of the line of Mason and Dixon, nor anywhere in Europe,” Mark Twain wrote.
The After Four Supper Club defies that old axiom.
There is something humble, decent and deeply satisfying about good fried chicken, a plebian dish enjoyed by patricians and everyday people alike, although my cardiologist might recommend otherwise.
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The dinners are served with a tasty coleslaw and french fries. Soft drinks and beer are available by the glass — actually plastic cup — or by the pitcher.
The After Four Supper Club, which is owned by veteran restaurateur Tom McAdams, purchases chicken from an Alabama farm that was pecking at grain on Monday and decorating my plate on Wednesday.
Meals are fried without using transfat oils and arrive on plates without the oily trail that often accompanies fried foods.
The After Four Supper Club is a family kind of place where nepotism abounds.
Our server Amber, who has worked there since she was 16, is joined by her mother, the hostess, and her aunt, the head cook.
…This is a niche restaurant that doesn’t offer a wide selection of beers and wines and only a limited dining menu.
But what it offers is really fine chicken at reasonable prices.
All-you-can-eat chicken dinners are $8.50 for adults and $5.50 for children under 10. The pollack dinner, chicken and fish combo and fantail shrimp dinners are $10.50 and the popcorn shrimp is $6.95. A pitcher of Miller Genuine Draft or Miller Lite is $7.50 and by the glass it’s $2.50. Cocktails are $5.50.
In this economy it’s hard to beat the After Four Supper Club for value, but it’s even harder to find fried chicken of this high quality.
Part of the fun at unconventional eateries like the After Four Supper Club is their approach. McAdams’ staff do not make desserts, rather they’re homemade by the church ladies of the Polish National Catholic Church and included slices of brownies, a tremendous apple walnut cake and carrot cake, all for $1.50 apiece and mighty fine.
The rest of the week this spacious facility operates as Great Oaks Banquets and serves as a rental and catering hall for weddings, receptions and other events.
Adjoining the dining room is a theater, where for $30 ($27 for seniors), diners can see a live show performed by the L’arc en Ciel Theatre Group right after eating dinner. Through Nov. 22 the 44-year-old theater ensemble is performing George S. Kaufman’s “You Can’t Take It With You,” a far cry from the steamy movies the long gone Great Oaks Drive-In Theater played at this same site decades ago.
