Lulu Cafe & Bar Celebrates 25 Years

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Photo Via LuLu Cafe & Bar - Facebook

LuLu Cafe & Bar

Imagine walking through a potential spot for your new restaurant and the landlord tells you the rent is $200.

It was an offer Cameryne Roberts and Sarah Jonas couldn’t refuse. “We figured we could clean it up, paint it, and make it bright and happy for relatively cheap,” Roberts says. “It came with a lot of equipment to get us started.”

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Photo via Lulu Cafe and Bar - Facebook

Lulu Cafe and Bar 25th Anniversary Street Festival flyer

Now, 25 years later Lulu Café & Bar has become a Bay View dining destination. On Saturday, Aug. 29 everyone is invited to Lulu Café & Bar’s 25th Anniversary Street Festival, noon-9 p.m.

The celebration includes food, drinks and music from WMSE Boogie Bang DJs, Book of Johns, Sleepersound, Electricity Kills, The Dirty Sweet and The Wisconsin Space Program; DJs Faux Eyes and Damian will spin between bands.

Roberts and Jonas recently took a tour through the café’s history.

Back in the late ‘90s what made you think Bay View needed a café?

Cameryne Roberts: We were going to other neighborhoods of the city to dine out. There were really only Mexican, Italian or fast and bar food places around here back then—not that there’s anything wrong with that! It’s just to say there wasn’t much variety.

Sarah Jonas: My husband and I were living in Bay view in the mid ‘90s. Growing up there, I watched a steady decline of the downtown businesses in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. A lot of mom-and-pop shops and bakeries were closing. There really wasn't much of a food scene in Bayview, mostly fast food had taken over.

Wasn’t the location previously a George Webb restaurant—did you ever eat there?

CR: It was a George Webb at one time, yes! When we got it, it had been Annie’s Corner Kitchen.

But we still probably cleaned off decades of the old George Webb’s grease. I don’t recall ever eating there, but one of my first jobs was waitressing at a George Webb’s out in Oconomowoc. I feel like I kind of came around full circle!

SJ: I remember eating at George Webb’s as a kid and the free burgers when the Brewers won [12] games in a row.

Then as an adult, eating there late night after seeing a movie at the Avalon theatre or music at Cactus Club or Club Garibaldi. There really weren't many choices for restaurants back then – especially at 2 a.m.!

I recall stopping in shortly after you opened and Bay View was barely creeping up in terms of development. Did you live or spend time in the neighborhood? 

CR: We both lived here at the time. I lived here from ’95 until just recently. Sarah grew up in the neighborhood and still lives here. I don’t think I even knew it existed until I started dating someone who lived over here in 1994!

I remember riding over the Hoan bridge once while in college at UWM and being completely lost.

SJ: I grew up in Bay View in the 1970s. It was a great place to grow up - we had the lake, South Shore Park. It was a little neighborhood with nice parks, schools, and shops on the main drag of Kinnickinnic Avenue.

Everyone that lived here knew it was great while flying pretty much under the radar of the rest of Milwaukee. At one time there were bumper stickers that said “Bay View … Milwaukee’s other East Side”—same lake, just south of Downtown instead of north.

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Photo via Lulu Cafe and Bar - Facebook

Cameryne Roberts and Sarah Jonas - Cafe Lulu

Cameryne Roberts and Sarah Jonas outside the closed Annie's Corner Kitchen which would become Cafe Lulu (2001).

What were your impressions before you opened? Did you consider other locations?

CR: We loved living in Bay View in general even though there wasn’t much in the way of restaurant culture.

Things were kind of starting an upturn – Bill Rouleau, a good friend of mine, [co-owner of Rush-Mor Records and a native Bay Viewer], was really on the vanguard of making the neighborhood a hub of cool events.

He was super psyched when we told him about our plans to open LuLu. In fact, he hyped us non-stop on his WMSE radio show when we first opened which is how so many people found us!

Regarding the restaurant itself—this part of the neighborhood was pretty sketchy back then. In fact, LuLu did get broken into within the first six months and had our safe stolen!

When I first responded to the rental ad, we didn’t even really want to do a walk through until the building owner offered to rent it to us for $200 a month. Hard to say no to that! We figured we could clean it up, paint it, and make it bright and happy for relatively cheap. It came with a lot of equipment to get us started.

We started looking all over town. Up by UWM, in Walker’s Point, Downtown. Nothing was really right for us though.  At the time, we were really mostly looking just for a commercial kitchen from which to cater, which is how we started out working together. We didn’t start with a plan to open a restaurant.

SJ: I don't know if we knew it back then but I think we saw some potential in the fact that lots of young people were buying houses, starting families.

We literally were watching its transformation from retirees my parents’ age to 30-year-old East Siders who were attracted to the cheap rent, to young families with a growing income and household.

We got kinda lucky in that we ended up in the right place at the right time. Many of our friends were here—Rushmor Records, HiFi Café, Cactus Club or moving here.

We got to grow LuLu along with the growth of the neighborhood. It was kind of the wild west in the early ‘00s. Younger people were reshaping the neighborhood into a really fun place to live and we got to be a part of that.

What was the biggest challenge when you started and how does that compare to challenges today?

CR: Money … it’s always money, isn’t it?

We were able to open LuLu with a credit card and a home equity loan from my stepfather (both of which we were lucky to pay off within a year).

Our rent was so cheap too. We honestly don’t know how new restaurants do it these days. That’s got to be a HUGE challenge. We also got lucky (though it didn’t feel that way at the time!) that we had to buy the building six months after opening. That was something we hoped to do down the road but it came at us much faster than we were expecting!

The alderperson at the time was Sue Breier and she was so excited for us that she really cleared the way of any city hurdles. That is one thing that’s definitely gotten tougher—it seems as though the city bureaucracy keeps getting more and more byzantine and expensive as the years go on.  

What advice would you offer to young Sarah and Cameryne if they wanted to open a restaurant today?

CR: Buying the building that your restaurant calls home doesn’t seem like something many owner/operators may even have the option to do, but, regardless, make sure you put a “first right of refusal” in your lease so that if the building owner ever does decide to sell, they’re required to give you the first opportunity to buy it at the price another party is willing to pay.

Owning the LuLu building was probably one of the biggest factors that saved us during COVID.

WE had the say over how much rent the restaurant entity paid to us so, as long as the mortgage, taxes, and the utilities were covered, we could keep that operating expense extra low.

Regular customers take for granted simple things like consistency with meals and good service, and an atmosphere that is relaxed and welcoming.

How do those things work in an on-going equation where you folks juggle more than customers will ever see?

CR: Consistency has always been our #1 goal. You should always get the thing you came for, regardless of which prep cook made the dressing or which line cook grilled and assembled your Sesame Chicken Pita.

Our Asian Slaw and Bleu Sauce are the things people who have moved far away tell us they miss the most! Every new employee who starts here gets the spiel that things get done the LuLu way or they are welcome to move on with no malice—it is the hardest and most important thing to train folks to take to heart.

What are you most proud of for Lulu Café?

CR: The community we’ve built in Bay View and Milwaukee in general. We always wanted LuLu to be a hub where everyone felt welcome and comfortable.

There have been countless first dates and engagements and wakes and graduations and so many other milestone events that have happened here and it brings us so much joy that LuLu is a part of that.

We ourselves have made so many wonderful friendships over the years and many of our employees continue to be in our and each other’s lives even after they’ve left their jobs here. Anytime someone quits, we tell them, “you’ll be back! Just wait and see!” because it’s so true!

Our longest running employee has been with us for 20 years. She quit once—for 3 days!

 I usually ask musicians what album they’d take to a desert island—and you could answer that way—but if you could only take one thing from the menu what would it be?

CR: Probably the Sesame Chicken or Mediterranean Steak Pita. Those are my favorites! Although the Asian Slaw could definitely keep me alive for a very long time!

SJ: I would definitely take the chips and bleu sauce and my favorite sandwich is the East Indian Chicken pita. I love the cilantro onions and definitely could eat that cucumber-yogurt sauce on almost anything.