Zenda Tap

I am an almost native of unincorporated Zenda.  Grew up less than a mile away.  For some reason, I did not step foot in the place until I returned home a few years ago.  

This is a quirky place that has been around forever.  Oddly nice for a cinder block building.

One of our neighbors used to ride his horse there, so he could ride home without fear of blood alcohol levels.  And many people snowmobile in.

If you visit the LG (Lake Geneva) you should swing by the ZT as my family calls it.  You still will run into a lot of Flatlanders, but it is not a touristy place catering to the lake crowd.

Oh here is a bit of trivia for ya, next door Buddy Melges (a Zenda native) stores boats.  He was the skipper for America's Cup and all around is sort of a big deal in the sailing world.

My buddies and I were venturing out on our annual Rural Holiday Townie Bar Crawl (RHTBC) and the heralded Zenda Tap was high on an already-crowded list of places to stop.

We rolled in around 7:30 p.m. on a Saturday night, fully expecting everything to stop the moment we opened the door, perhaps going down a little something like this:

*We open door, 10 guys walk in
*Bartender looks up and gawks
*2 patrons seated at bar look up and gawk
*2 patrons playing pool look up, flex muscles (undoubtedly sculpted by years of tossing 150 lb hay bales into the back of pickup trucks)
*Lights flicker
*Music on jukebox screeches to halt
*One or more of our crew gets arrested by the local deputy after a fight ensues, started by the 2 patrons at the pool table who wield cues, striking out at will, running us out of the bar after Taylor makes an unsuccessful pass at what we later determine to be Hick # 1's 'girlfriend' (whether or not she was actually female is largely up for debate).

Well, the above scenario actually didn't happen, to our amazement.

After we made our entrance, we were immediately overwhelmed by a decent crowd of mostly good looking girls, loud music, and friendly waves.

"Hey, the studs have arrived!" yelled one woman. Another asked us how much we "love sluts" to our instant reply of "absolutely!"

The next three hours were a booze-induced whirlwind, consisting of drinking card games, (one called "Connections" where if you matched the person's suit next to you at the table, you had to mimick the pose of the scantily-clad woman on the card, which these sexy local girls were *very* good at, might I add) dancing, and being repeatedly introduced to the afore-mentioned "sluts" who were there. Kudos to Jenny, Constance, Jenny # 2, Kendra, and Eileen for being such great sports.

Notably, Jenny and Constance, both Chicago residents, were exceptionally friendly, inviting us to join them down in Bucktown for some karaoke and heavy drinking the next time we found ourselves in the Windy City. Jenny ended up winning a c-note on a pulltab lottery ticket (which was re-enacted drunkenly on a camcorder several times) and we all celebrated with a couple more rounds of champagne (Miller High Life to the layperson) courtesy of the bartender.

We closed the night by lyp-synching to Journey's "Don't Stop Believin" and multiple ABBA songs, our group of out-of-towners mingling quite closely with the locals in a seductive dance, fueled by hormones and malt liquor.

This was not a bad start for a trip into the backwoods on a chilly Wisconsin Winter night.

Personally, I wasn't expecting to have this much fun at a bar in the middle of absolutely nowhere.

We'll definately start the RHTBC '07 here, that's for sure.

I have only set force in this place during the dark of night -- and for some reason, that is so apropos.

Zenda is a hodgepodge of modest homes a post office and remains like many other Southeastern Wisconsin rural villages, a collection of well-to do people and beyond the city limits, a horizon of corn rows, silos and farms.

When driving into Zenda, you can barely make out the tiny sign of the Zenda Tap which features a retro 1980s design of a burger and a frothy and overflowing mug of domestic beer. I can tell because it is yellow in color and well, the beers inside are mostly domestic. You wont find Guinness on tap here but you will almost certainly find the cheapest damn domestics here. A beer will set you back about a buck and a quarter. I have yet to experience the food; burgers, fries, and other fried Midwestern delicacies, but I must say they were so cheap it took me by surprise. You literally can, as my mom and dad used to say from their youth, buy a beer and dinner here and still get change back from a Lincoln spot.

Known as a biker hangout from as far away as Milwaukee and Chicago, this middle of the nowhere "tap" is about as rural as you can get, and while that may scare some big city types, the crowd inside will be nothing but friendly. On a trip back home last Christmas, they were having a holiday party and offered us homemade food stewing in crock pots on a foldout table covered in a cheesy holiday-motif cloth. Dart board in the back, casino-style one arm bandits, a pool table and well-stocked juke.

Cheers for the Zenda Tap!