The supper club is one of the few restaurant forms that Minnesota can claim as something close to its own, and Duluth in particular has a complicated relationship to it. The form arrived from Wisconsin in the postwar decades, traveled along Highway 61 and the iron mining corridor, and settled into permanent versions along the North Shore that have been continuously operating since the Eisenhower administration. Aerial Lift Supper Club is not one of those permanent versions. It opened last summer in the back half of a Canal Park building that used to be a maritime supply store, and what it is doing is something more interesting than reviving the form. It is treating the supper club as a living grammar — something that can be rewritten in the present tense without losing what made it work in the first place.
The relish tray is the test. Every supper club has one, and most of them serve the same six items they have been serving for forty years: carrot sticks, celery, radishes, a pickle, a cheese spread, and crackers. The Aerial Lift relish tray arrives with the form correct but the contents adjusted: foraged ramps pickled in-house, lake herring cured and smoked then pickled in a Riesling-and-mustard brine, three kinds of root vegetables prepared as fermented and acid-pickled variations of the same thing, a smoked whitefish spread that has more body than the standard cream-cheese-and-canned-fish version of the dish, and crackers baked in the kitchen. This is not nostalgia. The form is being held while the contents are being rebuilt from scratch using what the North Shore actually produces in the present.
The lake trout is smoked in-house in a smoker visible through a service window from the dining room. The smoke is alder, not the more aggressive hardwoods that some smokehouses use, and the temperature is held low enough that the fish keeps its texture instead of collapsing into a flaked spread. It arrives at the table plated simply: a portion of trout, a smear of horseradish-and-crème-fraîche, a few slices of cucumber pickled in caraway brine, and a piece of rye bread baked in the kitchen that morning. The plating is restrained because the fish does not need help. This is the kind of confidence that comes from having a smokehouse and using it daily.
The Form in Practice
The dining room is the second test. A supper club's dining room has a specific feel: heavy wood, dim lighting, leather banquettes, sound dampened to the point that conversation does not carry between tables. Aerial Lift has all of these elements in updated form. The banquettes are leather but the leather is in the right wear pattern for a room that opened recently; someone made the decision to acquire it pre-aged rather than waiting fifteen years for it to develop on its own. The lighting is from converted maritime fixtures that came out of the building's previous life. The wood paneling is original and has been left alone, which is the correct decision. The foghorn from the harbor entrance is audible inside the room when the wind is right, and on the evening of the visit it sounded twice during the meal. The room leaned into it both times. No one looked surprised.
The supper club menu structure has been preserved. There are six entrées, each in the seven-to-eight-ounce protein range, served with a starch and a vegetable that the kitchen chooses. The brandy old fashioned is on the menu because the supper club brandy old fashioned is non-negotiable, and the kitchen has done what an updated kitchen should do with it: built a version that uses a Wisconsin brandy aged longer than the standard, a Door County cherry preserved in syrup made at the bar rather than purchased, and a sugar cube soaked in Angostura and stirred properly. It tastes like a brandy old fashioned. It also tastes like one that someone made on purpose rather than out of obligation. This is not a small distinction.
The walleye preparation is the strongest entrée. The fish is sourced from Lake Superior commercial fishing operations out of Knife River and Grand Marais, breaded in a flour-and-cornmeal coating that holds up better than the standard restaurant breading, and pan-fried in clarified butter. It is served with a wild rice pilaf that uses rice from a Mille Lacs source and includes dried cranberries and toasted hazelnuts, and a small portion of braised greens. The plate is not complicated. The execution is correct at every step. This is what the supper club form was actually for: a complete meal that demonstrates the kitchen's relationship to the region without requiring a tasting menu to communicate it.
What Duluth Does With Its Inheritance
The interesting question about Aerial Lift is not whether it executes the form. The execution is consistent and the kitchen is plainly more ambitious than the standard supper club kitchen. The interesting question is what it means for Duluth to have a restaurant doing this work right now. Duluth's food culture has been quietly maturing for the last decade in a way that has not received much national attention. The brewery scene is real. The fish-house tradition along the North Shore has been pulling more serious cooking into its orbit. The cocktail bars in the harbor district are doing work that would register in any second-tier American city. Aerial Lift fits into this trajectory as a specific argument: that the supper club, treated as a living form rather than a museum piece, is the right vessel for what a Duluth kitchen has to say about Lake Superior, the foraged ingredients of the North Shore woods, and the postwar dining tradition that made the form possible in the first place.
The room is full on a Saturday evening in October. The wait at seven is forty-five minutes without a reservation. The guests at the surrounding tables are a mix of Canal Park visitors and Duluth residents in roughly equal proportion, which suggests that the kitchen has succeeded in being interesting to both audiences without pandering to either. The bar is two-deep. The brandy old fashioneds are being ordered in roughly the proportion that they should be ordered at a supper club, which is to say frequently. This is what a successful supper club looks like operationally. The work in the kitchen is what makes it more than that. Fictional for illustration.
