There's No Taste Like Home: Wisconsin's Canoe Bay

My association with wisconsin food is one of tangential affection. A college student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the mid-nineties, I had arrived on campus from my mother's kitchen in St. Paul, Minnesota, with about as much epicurean refinement as the instructions on a package. I had a lot to learn about feeding myself. Fortunately, Madison was a Midwestern version of Berkeley, California. A robust community-supported agricultural movement existed there long before "local" and "organic" became buzzwords, and chef Odessa Piper, something of an Alice Waters of the Midwest, was rigorously committed to working with regional producers at her renowned French-country-style restaurant, L'Etoile.

Madison's farm-to-plate mentality grew out of Saturdays at the Dane County farmers' market, when crowds gathered at the stands around the state capitol for bright red tomatoes on the vine, creamy hunks of Wisconsin cheddar, sweet corn wrapped in the husk and plump berries packed in baskets. I can't say the sight of this bounty had much of an impact on my postadolescent sensibilities, but it no doubt influenced a nascent appreciation of food: those tomatoes tasted better than the supermarket kind; that cheese was out of this world.

I was reminded of all this on the winter afternoon my husband, Casey, and I took Interstate 94 east from St. Paul and saw the sign for Madison, which immediately brought on a bout of nostalgia. We were on our way to Canoe Bay, the Midwest's only claim to Relais & Châteaux fame. A year before, we had stayed at the resort for a one-night getaway following the birth of our first child; on the drive home, well rested, we talked about how that night felt like an entire weekend away. On this second trip, we were curious to sample what the property's new chef, Timothy Fischer, a Midwesterner whose impressive résumé includes the Little Nell, in Aspen, Colorado, and Virginia's Inn at Little Washington, was cooking back in his home territory.

As we drove through northwestern Wisconsin, red barns and shiny-capped silos dotted miles of farmland, proving that a strong agricultural tradition was alive and well in and around Chetek, the town closest to Canoe Bay, about ten miles away. (Indeed, the bulk of produce that enters the resort's kitchen comes from the region.) In a thicket of trees, we saw a small sign for the property, which encompasses 280 acres of hardwood forest carved with hiking trails and three lakes. Guests stay in rooms, cottages or the Edgewood villa (there are twenty-three accommodations), all of which typify Frank Lloyd Wright's Prairie School architecture; angular cedar and stone structures blend in with the landscape and provide floor-to-ceiling views of Lake Wahdoon.

Dan Dobrowolski, who owns the property with his wife, Lisa, fished on the lake as a young boy during visits to his grandfather's neighboring farm. "Canoe Bay is our personal statement," he said, telling us that he purchased the land with Lisa in 1992 in large part because of his attachment to it. "I believe a hotel should speak to its place." As if to illustrate the point, when I was washing my hands in our cottage that first day, I turned around to find a stoic doe and her gangling Bambi studying me through the window fifteen feet away.

Canoe Bay is understated luxury: a wilderness setting with all the amenities anyone could want. If you're like us and revel in its remove, this is a nap-or-two-a-day kind of resort best experienced over a weekend. Every accommodation has a two-person Jacuzzi, a gas fireplace, a DVD player and a refrigerator stocked with complimentary drinks and snacks. The lodge itself is essentially a library, with big armchairs and a well-chosen selection of current books and classics; there's also a small workout room upstairs. In the winter you can borrow a movie or throw on snowshoes to hike the trails; in summer you can head to the boathouse to take a canoe out on the lake. Even if you're staying for only a night, once you're in the cozy cocoon of Canoe Bay, you'll feel the urge to unpack and make yourself at home.

Since canoe bay's infancy as a bed and breakfast, Dobrowolski has applied the same rule to the food that he does to the environment, keeping it as unadulterated as possible. "We've always focused on fresh ingredients from the region because I think what we serve should fit with what you see all around you," he says. Chef Fischer couldn't agree more. The hunter-fisherman enjoys the outdoors with such zeal that he has a spotting scope in his living room (he prefers to look through it instead of watching television). "One of the best meals I've ever had was a trout I caught and a bunch of chanterelles I found in the forest on the way back to my car," the thirty-four-year-old says. Fischer's style -- unpretentious, well-balanced, sophisticated -- is familiar to me; it turns out that he grew up just a few miles from my childhood home in St. Paul, later training at the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York. "I like to keep the food real rather than experimental," he says. "I put the love into it."

At the inn, where Fischer serves his prix-fixe dinner every night except Tuesday, we had a plum spot in the recently renovated dining room -- our window appeared to drop off into the lake, like an infinity pool -- with banquettes lining the walls under low-arched cedar ceilings. We didn't speak through our entire first course, a trio of soups, so consumed were we with dipping into each mini tureen: a roasted-beet puree with a blue cheese garnish, a red-pepper soup spiked with sambuca cream and a savory-sweet apple and root vegetable medley. In my opinion, it's simple dishes like these that so often define a chef; prime ingredients treated with just the right seasoning and restraint can be transcendent. Fischer's lamb entrée embodied the heartiness of winter and did not stray too far from tradition. It was rubbed with thyme-infused sea salt, seared, then slow-cooked and served alongside Brussels sprouts and a sweet-potato gratin layered with cream and Emmentaler cheese. Dabs of juiced carrot and ginger added brightness to the dish.

The following night, we ate in the wine cellar, a private space down the hall from the dining room; it holds part of a 3,500-bottle collection that only a wine geek could cultivate. Dobrowolski is most proud of his obscure finds -- the Harlan Estates, the Screaming Eagles -- which set wine fiends' hearts aflutter; amateurs, like the rest of us, are taken under the wing of Katie Daubner, the sommelier. We enjoyed Fischer's homage to the East Coast in his spin on the Maryland crab cake: he used plump pieces of fresh lake walleye instead, coupling it with vinegar-dressed wild-rice-and-cabbage slaw and an emulsion of Meyer lemons and capers. And we couldn't get over dessert. When it comes to sweets, our tastes are pretty pedestrian -- we're Häagen-Dazs-out-of-a-pint people and suspicious of anything without chocolate in it -- but that night the superlative "wow" slipped out midforkful. Pastry chef Caroline Smith's ice-cream cake was divine: a maple-gingerbread crust topped with sweet-potato ice cream, a swirl of toasted marshmallow and maple-caramel dribbles. It hit on several textures: creamy, crisp and flaky.

The next morning, snow was falling steadily when our doorbell rang, announcing the arrival of breakfast: hot coffee, freshly squeezed orange juice, a bowl of fruit and a basket of blueberry muffins and sugar doughnuts. Canoe Bay doesn't serve a formal midday meal, however, so we decided to order bag lunches: chicken-salad sandwiches, delicious chocolate-chip trail-mix cookies and sparkling sodas. Chetek isn't exactly a big lunch destination, and besides, isn't the point to stay put? Yet we were more than willing to get ourselves organized for a field trip with Fischer to DragSmith Farms, a half hour away. In warm weather he will take guests foraging for edibles on the property (ramps, elderberries, mushrooms); when it's too cold to tramp in the snow, you can join him while he picks up produce at a farm.

"People tease me about being here in the middle of nowhere," Fischer said from behind the wheel of his suv on our way to DragSmith. "They ask me, 'Does the ice ever come off the lake?' But I think when you're from Minnesota or Wisconsin, you start to miss the lakes and the trees. You never lose those roots." When we pulled up to DragSmith Farms, Gail Smith, a proud owner, took us on a tour of her greenhouses, elaborating on all the microgreens, her most coveted items. "This curly cress will spice up your life," she told us. "I want a box of these," Fischer said, leaning over a bed teeming with sweet-pea tendrils as he chewed on one. Later he served them in a caprese salad with four types of heirloom tomatoes, baby basil, fresh mozzarella and balsamic vinegar. My newfound connection to the greens made the salad taste that much better.

Clearly, ten years can change a palate. after a semester abroad in Florence, I'd returned to Madison satiated with hand-cut pasta, Parmesan cheese and good olive oil. I dated a guy who didn't mind spending his last bartending dime on fine dining and wine. And then I moved to New York with Casey, and we ate our way through every unfamiliar ethnic treat, sampling sushi for the first time and soup dumplings in Chinatown.

But Fischer was right: we missed the lakes and the trees. When we moved back to Minneapolis, to our first house, with our first real kitchen, I was finally inspired to turn on the oven and prepare food from a cookbook. I pondered aloud about ingredients: "This creamy organic yolk is far superior to the supermarket kind, don't you think, Case?"

Only a few months after our trip to Canoe Bay, when the snow had finally, mercifully melted, we picked up our first csa (community-supported agriculture) box of organic produce, which came from a farm in -- take a guess -- Wisconsin. Our daughter, Mia, happily unearthed the radishes, broccoli, green garlic and potatoes as I chewed on a piece of kohlrabi, the way Fischer did that sweet-pea tendril, in an attempt to channel his unbridled spontaneity. Then I got cooking. Double rooms from $350, cottages from $440, villa $1,800, including breakfast. RR 3, #28, Chetek; 800-568-1995; canoebay.com.