Photo: Old Town Serbian Gourmet House
Old Town Serbian Gourmet House
Old Town Serbian Gourmet House
My cousin Natanael Martinez takes a picture of the bowling ball mosaic on the side of 522 W. Lincoln Avenue as I meet him. “This place used to be a bowling alley,” he tells me, pointing up.
We are greeted by Natalia Radicevich, the current owner of that building which long since became Old Town Serbian Gourmet House, one of two restaurants that serve Serbian food in Milwaukee (the other is Three Brothers in Bay View). “My father used to take the bus all up and down this avenue, delivering beer to all the pubs,” she tells me, motioning towards the stained-glass windows in the main dining room that overlook Lincoln.
The restaurant is closed during our chat, and we sit at a table under a framed black and white picture of Natalia’s father, Alexander Radicevich, the visionary behind Old Town and one of the Three Brothers that bears the restaurant’s namesake. Old Town Gourmet House opened in 1971 in Milwaukee’s Lincoln Village, in the shadow of St. Jospahat’s Basilica.
“Fifth and Lincoln is the hub for Milwaukee’s immigrant history. Some of the most important contributions have taken place within a radius of this intersection,” Natalia says. Don Lucho’s sits across the street, inside a building that housed one of Milwaukee’s only supper clubs. A block away is El Salvador restaurant, where food from that country is the main course. The neighborhood was founded by Polish immigrants and the Grutzka block still has the architecture to show it. “In those times, people designed the houses the way they did in Europe. It was considered a lot more effective to live where you worked, which is why so many of the businesses on this block have apartments upstairs,” Natalia says.
By 1971 when Old Town began, the Lincoln Village neighborhood had already been part of history. The fair housing marches of 1968, led by Vel Phillips and Father James Groppi, came to a head at Kosciuszko Park just three years earlier. Old Town Gourmet house made its debut after Alexander had left Three Brothers, wanting to start something new. The recipes at Old Town are centuries old, thus the name. Line cooks, some who have been at the restaurant for years, adhere to a strict code which not only ensures consistency, but keeps Alexander’s philosophy alive.
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“We will never ‘update’ or ‘modernize’ the cuisine here. It is the way it is because it worked for this long and will continue to do so,” Natalia says. This rule is not only applied to the cuisine but to the decor and overall feeling of the restaurant. It is something like stepping back in time to an old Milwaukee, while sitting in a Balkan cafe, eyes from the oil portraits looking down on the lamps that light your table. “My father was very nostalgic, and always wanted to do his part to maintain history and show respect. That is why there is still wood from the bowling alley in the walls here. Tradition was not something that he took lightly,” Natalia says.
Truly, he was a man that kept his word and always remembered a favor. Natalia took over the restaurant in 2007, but accompanied her father on a trip to France, shortly before he passed. Alexander had fled Yugoslavia long before the ‘90s civil war tore up the region. Alexander was a refugee of war and stayed in an attic above a woman’s house who provided sanctuary. Alexander came to Milwaukee and became a success story, contributing to the history of the city. The trip Natalia accompanied him on was to visit the old woman who had helped him all those years ago. She had become indigent and was in dire straits. Alexander paid her rent for the rest of her life and gave her a monthly stipend.
Why is that story important? Because it is that story and many other instances that are embedded into the stone walls, in the curtains and the air at Old Town Gourmet house. It is a place that has survived recessions, a pandemic and has maintained its soul. It has earned its place not only in the annals of Milwaukee history, but amongst the invaluable contributions of immigrants in this country.
