Restaurants

The Cookery started thirty-five years ago when my parents, Dick and Carol Skare, honeymooned in Door County. It was May of 1977 and they found Fish Creek to be a sleepy lakeside town. One shopkeeper, Hazel Elliott, took the time to find out that Dick and Carol were aspiring restaurateurs who met while working side by side at a supper club near Minneapolis. She arranged for them to look at a small, twenty seat restaurant in downtown Fish Creek. “Door County is growing,” she told them, “get in now before the rush.” They took her advice and put in an offer. Two short months later, on the weekend of July 4, 1977, my parents opened the doors of The Cookery.

Carol and Diana (Carol’s sister and General Manager at The Cookery) grew up on a farm in central Minnesota that was fully self-sufficient. The farm supported and fed their eleven person family from their gardens, crops, and animals that they raised. It was on her mother’s apron strings that Carol learned how to cook, bake, and can, as well as the various cuts of a cow - basically the ins and outs of “farm to table” cooking before there was terminology for such a thing!

Thanks to Carol’s roots, we have incorporated many local ingredients (e.g., cherries, whitefish, apples, wine) into our menu for years. Over the last few years we have begun to take our commitment to farm to table one step further. The more we learned about the impact mass produced food has on our environment and economy, both nationally and in Door County, the more we realized how important it is to incorporate as many local products into our restaurant as we can. You will now see many additional local items from Door County and Wisconsin farms, orchards and businesses on our menu as well as items made by local artisans in our lobby and on our restaurant walls.  

We incorporate locally raised and produced food into our menu in many ways. For example, we try to purchase locally raised meats and fish whenever possible. In the meat department, we purchase whole cows that are organically raised in Jacksonport that we then have made into our hamburger meat for our burgers and sliders. We are able to specify both the grind of the meat as well as what goes in – all the choice cuts - which allows for a better tasting burger. We also use local produce throughout menu when it’s growing season. During lettuce season all of our salads are made with local lettuce. When tomatoes are peaking, we use them throughout our menu – in salads, on flatbreads, on burgers – as well as freeze large quantities to roast and use when the growing season is over. We have also added a kitchen garden behind the restaurant where we plant cherry tomatoes, fresh herbs, and rhubarb among other things. The rhubarb comes from a cut of Carol and Diana’s family farm. Many of the herbs we use in our menu come right from our backyard.



The Cookery Garden


From 1977 until now, we have continued to maintain our original values at The Cookery - to incorporate fresh ingredients focusing on local products from Door County and Wisconsin on our menu and to bring delicious, homemade food to our customers.

Courtney Holdmann Skare

Courtney Holdmann Skare moved back to Fish Creek in 2007 with her husband and brought with her an emphasis on sustainability, a practice that has been central to the business since the beginning, in all aspects of the restaurant, from the new building itself to the locality of ingredients used in menu items.