CWIMA Summit & Expo: ‘A new adventure every year’
A lifetime of achievement
April 7, 2025
OSHKOSH – Armed with two decades of experience and two cherished recipes, Steve Gabelbauer opened Gabe’s Wisconsin Kitchen and Tavern – which he said is “kind of a modern take on a supper club,” serving fare made “about 95%” from scratch.
“We’re a little niche restaurant on the west side of Oshkosh,” he said. “Great happy hour, good fish fry, great daily specials.”
Since opening in 2019, Gabelbauer said he’s built the menu up from his father Jim’s beer can chicken and his mother Mary Jo’s (MJ) pot roast, maintaining a down-home sensibility while upping the quality and creativity.
“We try to keep things as simple as we can, but obviously you have to evolve as a restaurant and challenge people’s taste buds a little bit,” he said. “I mean, we’re not (serving) anything too wacky. A lot of our stuff is very basic, but we try to focus it around, ‘Okay, this is our version of this – and we made it here, from scratch.’”
Beyond the savory favorites his parents provided, Gabelbauer said some of the most popular dishes at Gabe’s today include:
- Bacon-wrapped poblano peppers
- Standard, yet high-quality fare like cheese curds, burgers and wraps
- Filet medallions
- Pasta with housemade noodles every Thursday
- Fried bluegill and campfire walleye, and flown-in fish on Fridays
- Saturday and Sunday brunch
For dessert, Gabelbauer said his parents, both retired, travel from Beloit to make MJ’s famous cheesecake.
“The fact that a little old Polish lady comes to the restaurant and makes, from scratch, all of our desserts, literally by hand with my dad – it’s the coolest thing we do,” he said. “It gets my parents involved in the restaurant… So many people tell me they’re the best cheesecakes they’ve ever had.”
Gabelbauer said though both parents put the time and effort into the cheesecakes, “I think my mom has more fun with it than my dad does.”
“My dad always (complains) that my mom gets all the credit, because they’re ‘MJ’s Cheesecakes,’” he laughed.
However, Gabelbauer said his dad does get credit for the restaurant’s name – though by now, that tribute’s also been miscredited.
“His nickname growing up was Gabe,” he said. “No one’s ever called me Gabe until I opened up a restaurant called Gabe’s… and now I feel like everyone calls me Gabe.”
A family affair
When the opportunity arose to open his own restaurant and create his own menu, Gabelbauer said he knew he wanted to feature the two signature recipes from his parents.
“It’s what I ate growing up,” he said. “My parents – they were both very busy people, so the pot roast was a very easy dish for my mom to throw in the oven in the morning, and then we ate it when we got home from school… The beer can chicken was always something that we had up at the cabin.”
Nostalgia or not, Gabelbauer said he enjoyed these dishes well into adulthood.
“Those were staples at our house, especially the chicken we had up at the cabin – it’s a very memorable meal,” he said. “And the pot roast was something where every time I came home to visit my parents, (my mom) always had a pot roast ready for me to take home. I couldn’t even think about creating a restaurant without that involved.”
Now, Gabelbauer said it’s an honor to share his parents’ long-cherished recipes with patrons.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity to carry on a legacy,” he said. “I kind of get goosebumps now thinking about it, but being able to carry something that was so special to my parents growing up is something that I don’t take lightly. It feels great. They’re super proud and they’re super happy.”
Getting Gabe’s going
Since he was 16, Gabelbauer said he’s “been across the board” with the hospitality industry – having worked at hotels, golf courses and both casual and fine dining establishments.
With Gabe’s, he said he’s been able to make good on the skills and wisdom he’s acquired.
“I’ve opened up six different restaurants for other people,” he said, “and this is the first one for me.”
Though he’d always hoped to open a place of his own, Gabelbauer said the opportunity came faster than expected, when in April of 2019, the owner of the building he now occupies (at 1160 N. Westhaven Drive) informed him the space would soon be available.
Though he said the location didn’t immediately appeal to him, “the more and more I thought about it, the better it looked to me.”
“It’s on the west side of Oshkosh, which is a growing side of Oshkosh – there are new roofs popping up over here every day,” he said. “It’s a very populated area. We’re (not) on the beaten path, but just off the beaten path… There’s a lot of action going on, but it’s still kind of tucked away, where you don’t feel like you’re being rushed around.”
With his mind made up, a handshake agreement in place and necessary numbers crunched, Gabelbauer said Gabe’s Wisconsin Kitchen and Tavern became official, and the remodeling began.
“All I really had to do was throw some dirt on the walls,” he laughed.
In reality, Gabelbauer said to complement the existing cherry wood interior, for the restaurant’s walls he bought two sides of a barn from Oconomowoc, with the “quadruple-tone” wood yielding gray from the natural weathering; red and white from the paint; and – after denailing, sanding and planing – brown from the original wood.
Working with determination, Gabelbauer said a mere five months later, Gabe’s held its grand opening – and by design, he’s been a consistent presence ever since.
“I’m a very big owner-operator – I try to be in the restaurant every day in some capacity,” he said. “I try to put my face in there every day, where I know a lot of (owners) hide behind a closed door in the office. I learned from some great people that I worked for in the past that being in front of people is the way you’re successful. People want to see the owner in the building. So, they’ll see me helping out behind the bar, bussing tables, grabbing ice or whatever (is needed) to help the restaurant move.”
It’s not just customers who appreciate his presence, Gabelbauer said, but also the staff.
“When they’re in the weeds, I’m there to help bail them out and help them get through the night, (compared to) when I’ve worked for other people that have just sat on the other side of the bar (and not helped),” he said.
Gabelbauer said from the get-go, Gabe’s has been “extraordinarily blessed with a really good staff.”
“I have this great core staff – pretty much all of them have been with me since a couple months after we opened, which makes things a lot easier on an owner,” he said. “Kudos to them… This is a very high-turnover industry, and for us to build the team with that longevity in an industry like this… it’s hard to find.”
Reflecting on the exceptional retention rate – which he said extends to part-time staff picking up hours over college breaks – Gabelbauer said his leadership style is empathetic, having personally spent so much time in the hospitality trenches.
“I don’t know if this is going to sound weird, but we’ve all been ‘beaten up’ before,” he said. “We’ve all worked in some really good environments and some really bad environments, so all of us have brought a little piece of that to the table, and we understand what’s bothered us at other (places). We’ve made promises to where, we’re not going to do that to each other (here).”
Gabelbauer said he and other staff who thought they had “lost their love for the industry” have, at Gabe’s, been able to rediscover “what made them fall in love in the first place – and that’s serving people.”
“I think we’ve created a pretty good environment there,” he said.
‘Make it Wisconsin’
The service provided by Gabe’s staff, Gabelbauer said, is vital to the restaurant’s endurance, as is its cuisine.
“We’re 95% scratch, so you don’t get a lot of that from-freezer-to-fryer-to-plate type of stuff in our restaurant,” he said. “We have really unique flavors, and really unique concepts. We take a lot of different cuisines and ideas from other cultures and try to make them ‘Wisconsin.’”
Gabelbauer said he and his staff exemplified this approach during Oshkosh Restaurant Week in January, where the menu featured Wisconsin Chilaquiles.
“(Chilaquiles) is a very big Mexican breakfast dish with tortilla chips and salsa with red onions and pico de gallo, and then a fried egg on top,” he said. “But we made that ‘Wisconsin’ by adding cheese curds to it.”
Gabelbauer said he and his staff are always on the lookout for culinary inspiration.
“We find these things when we travel (and think), ‘Well, how do we bring this back and make it Wisconsin? Something that I had in California – how do I make that a Wisconsin thing?’” he said. “And it’s really pretty easy. You add cheese or beer to it, and you’d make it Wisconsin, right?”
Gabelbauer said this homemade/homespun strategy also extends to the tavern side of the establishment.
“Our bar kind of matches our kitchen, to where it’s very scratch and craft-centric,” he said. “We make our own Bloody Mary mix and we make our own margarita mix. We make all of our own purees to flavor our craft cocktails.”
Though Gabelbauer said he applies the highest standards to everything served at Gabe’s, the atmosphere is “very casual, family friendly,” with servers commonly donning jeans and flannel.
“Yeah, you don’t need to wear a jacket inside the restaurant,” he laughed. “It’s a great place for happy hour after work.”
Cooking ahead
Gabelbauer said the establishment’s casual atmosphere corresponds to his lack of formal plans for its future, though he does have hopes.
“I’d love to tell you I have a 10-year plan for it,” he said, “but right now, our location – it serves us well, but eventually the goal will be to get into a place that I can own.”
Expanding into a second location is another possibility, Gabelbauer said, though past experience has shown him the risk of splitting a united team to staff separate locations.
“I feel like we have a really good thing going there,” he said of the current location. “The team and the food… are what’s really made Gabe’s successful where it is.”
Shorter term, Gabelbauer said he looks forward to annual Easter and Mother’s Day brunches, as well as a Kentucky Derby Day event replete with games, pastels and fascinators.
He also said he’s thrilled for Gabe’s to partake in the NFL’s Taste of the Draft event in Green Bay April 23.
“We got selected, along with 20 other supper clubs throughout the State of Wisconsin, to participate and showcase Wisconsin supper club-type meals to what I’m told is ‘a VIP, NFL crowd,’” he said. “We’re excited to get our product in front of some of those people.”
Whether working a high-profile event or an average day at the restaurant, Gabelbauer said no matter who he’s serving, brightening people’s days is endlessly rewarding.
“Everybody that comes in the door is either in a great mood or looking to be in a better mood,” he said. “Seeing smiles on people’s faces and interacting with people – that’s the best part of our industry. That’s what keeps drawing people back.”
Learn more about Gabe’s Wisconsin Kitchen and Tavern at gabeswi.com or on social media.
