If You Don’t Want to Clean Up After Your Family’s Easter Feast, Thunder Bay Grille is a Great Option [REVIEW]

Cuisine type: BRUNCH

Price per entrée: $$

Attire: CASUAL

Reservations: YES

Payment: CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED

On the top of the review, write:

Thunder Bay Grille

N14W24130 Tower Pl, Pewaukee, WI 53072

262-523-4244

11 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Every Easter for the past five or so years, my family decided they didn’t want to bother cooking a feast for our whole clan and instead set up shop at Thunder Bay Grille for their Easter brunch. Nobody needs to cook anything. Nobody needs to clean up afterwards. And there is a champagne fountain with unlimited free refills at the bar. So, overall this has been a pretty stellar annual experience. This year’s brunch was no exception.

Reservations are a must on a holiday like this. The place is absolutely packed with folks of all kinds ready to dig in. The restaurant itself has a folksy vibe to the place. Soft bluegrass music plays over the speakers and the walls are decorated with old-timey posters of log cabins and guys fishing. Considering the price range of the place and the fact that you get your drinks from a literal fountain of champagne, there is an odd contrast between its middle-to-high-end appeal and the rustic look they’re clearly going for.

Once the whole family has arrived, they shuffle us to our table, nestled away in a corner of the restaurant away from the crowds and by a grand window overlooking the pond outside. When the sun glints just right, you can see little schools of minnows swimming about near the surface. My grandfather has trouble walking these days. The staff here made a great effort to accommodate him and make sure he was comfortably seated.

Being a brunch, one has to go up to the chow line and fill their own plates if they ever want to eat anything. But our server made sure our non-champagne drinks were always full and cleared away any used dishes to make room for another round.

I have a routine when I come here. First, I make a straight b-line for the fountain. Now normally, the fountain is surrounded by little coup glasses, the classic glassware for sipping bubbly. But on this occasion, I was fortunate enough to arrive too late. All the tiny coup glasses had been used up. Instead, they had to replace them with old fashioned rocks glasses. These babies hold probably three times the volume, which means three times the champagne per visit. The day started off well.

The first food station I like to visit on my quest is always the omelet bar. Now, the omelet bar can only be considered the gold standard for any respectable brunch. If brunch were a baseball team, the omelet bar would be the ace pitcher or the three-man star hitter. Brunches live and die by the omelet bar.

Normally, I have always found my omelet experience at Thunder Bay to be nothing but excellent. The ingredients always seem fresh and the options are a respectable number. I don’t have much to complain about with my particular experience this time around. But I did find the display of the omelet to be a little sub-par.

Once the chef slid my cheese, mushroom, onion and green pepper omelet out of the skillet and onto my plate, the final result resembled something closer to scrambled eggs than that classic, folded over egg taco I was expecting. That’s not to say it tasted bad. It was actually pretty good. Perhaps they were just a little overwhelmed that day. The cook told me he expected to make somewhere around 1,500 omelets throughout his shift that day.

Of course, brunch is a lot more than omelets and champagne. There was an entire smorgasbord of options to choose from. Thick, crispy bacon. Juicy Roast beef with au jus sauce on the side. They even had a spread of smoked salmon with those little fancy crackers you only ever find at restaurants for some reason. And, of course, they also had waffles and veggies and assorted fruits and pastries. I don’t think any human being could reasonably expect to eat everything there. The options are almost overwhelming.

But what stood out for me well above the rest were the mashed potatoes. They made the mouth-watering chunky version with the skins and a bit of garlic mixed in for good measure. Every bite of them was a straight punch in the face of flavor, in the best possible way.

Thunder Bay knows how to do an Easter Brunch. And they proved they know how to keep it up over the years. I know for a fact my family will be back again next year. I’d give them a rating of four-and-a-half full champagne glasses out of five.