The neighborhood ‘Cheers’
Bellevue’s Goal Post Bar serves up Friday fish and friendly faces
BELLEVUE — The first thing you learn when you sit down with Terry Bellin at her Goal Post Bar & Grill is that she doesn’t sit for long.
During a visit one afternoon before the doors open — somewhere after she asks if you’d like to try her homemade split pea soup but before she gets to the ghost stories — she pops up and tells you to follow her to the kitchen.
“This is me,” she says, planting her feet in front of a double-basket deep fryer as if she’s standing at attention. Then she laughs.
That well-worn spot on the floor is her headquarters on Fridays for the Goal Post’s weekly fish fry that packs the place at 3007 Manitowoc Road. She pumps out all the food herself, while Robin O’Neil plates it up with assorted sides, including twice-baked potatoes made from scratch every Friday morning.
On the other side of the wall, two bartenders and a waitress hustle. It’s a fiveperson operation. That’s it.
“So all that Friday fish gets cooked in one fryer and two baskets. People are amazed, but I always say it’s all in the timing,” Bellin said.
She’s not talking about the timer on the fryer; there isn’t one. After years of practice, she just knows. The perch, from Maricque’s Fishing Co. and handbreaded in-house, fries up quick, the haddock takes longer, and if there’s a sudden run on French fries that monopolizes the baskets, then everything else has to wait. It can get tricky and a little intense.
“But we still have fun. We sing,” she said, breaking into “Hey, hey we’re the Monkees ... look at us monkey around.”
If the Goal Post Bar wasn’t fun, Bellin, or the many regulars, wouldn’t still be there. She bought it 29 years ago, back when there was nothing but open fields on what was then known as Old Manitowoc Road.
“We had cows out behind the volleyball court,” she said.
The bar, with living quarters upstairs, had been previously owned by siblings Wayne and Nancy Van Rite for 12 years as the Goal Post Inn in the ’80s and ’90s. For more than two decades before that, it was most famously known as Ray Whipp’s Goal Post Inn.
“When we first came in here, oh my God, if I didn’t hear Ray Whipp’s name 10 times a day,” Bellin said.
She’s tried to track down the building’s history beyond the Whipp days but hasn’t been able to come up with much, except for a remarkable find when she remodeled the bathrooms years ago. There in the wall was a beer bottle with the names of two men written on the side and dated November 1945.
She hung onto it for 25 years. When she posted it on a Facebook group page devoted to Green Bay’s past, she was able to connect with the son of one of the men and give him the bottle. He was moved to tears to have something his dad had once touched nearly 75 years earlier.
“It came full circle. That was just amazing,” Bellin said. “And there was still beer in the bottle.”
Goal posts and meat raffles
The two namesake goal posts out front in the parking lot date to the 1961 Green Bay Packers-New York Giants and 1965 Packers-Cleveland championship games at new City Stadium and Lambeau Field, respectively. Mounted on a wall inside the bar is a small piece cut from the goal post of Super Bowl XXXI when the Packers defeated the New England Patriots at the Louisiana Superdome in 1997.
“In the days when the Packers were winning, we used to have people hanging off those goal posts. They’d climb the goal posts and ‘whooo!’” Bellin said.
In good Packers seasons and not so good, the goal posts remain an unmistakable calling card for a bar now surrounded by homes and in the heart of a neighborhood that has sprung up around it — curb and gutter and all. Many of the familiar faces just walk or bike over when they feel like a beer, a bite to eat or just some company.
“Fish fry, they come from all over.
We’re always busy and we’re always surprised at the new faces and where in the heck did they come from?” Bellin said. “I don’t advertise, so it’s all word of mouth.”
The Goal Post also has a reputation for its homemade pizzas (not served on Fridays) and traditional hand-breaded chicken wings on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays with a choice of nine sauces. The homemade garlic Parmesan is the runaway favorite. It’s mostly a beer bar, but old fashioneds reign supreme on Friday nights.
“It’s the food and the people,” Bellin said of the appeal. “We call it ‘Cheers,’ because you come in here and I’ve got this one bartender, she should be a college professor, because she remembers everybody’s name.”
The Goal Post isn’t fancy — clean, uncluttered, boldly painted walls in Packers and Milwaukee Brewers colors — but it’s friendly. It’s also unapologetically local, which is part of the charm.
With Prince of Peace church not far away, Bellin springs for a free bottle of Champagne for brides and grooms who call in advance to let her know they’re stopping in with their wedding party. American Veterans Post 57 has recognized her with the Golden Eagle Award for years of hosting its meat raffles.
“Because this side of the tracks in Bellevue is so small, there’s not really a hometown little bar that you can hang out and you know everybody that walks in the door,” said O’Neil, who has known Bellin for 25 years, had her wedding reception at the bar in 2009 and lives “just around the corner.”
“(Terry) has a heart of gold and she has a great following, and she’s consistent in her products. Her fish has been around forever and that’s what people come back for.”
Some of the relationships with customers go back decades. Bellin recalls a couple who would come in and set their infant son on the bar in his baby seat. He’s married and an engineer now.
“He went from baby food to pizza in this place,” Bellin said. “Kids grew up here.”
Bellin has been in the bar and restaurant business her whole life, including stints at Lee’s Cantonese House, Re-Pla Lounge and Fat Albert’s Lounge, where she met her husband of 38 years, Larry “Chum” Bellin, who handles maintenance and snowplowing duties at the Goal Post.
Owning her own place just felt like the natural next step, so when she turned 40, she told herself it was now or never.
“I have so much fun with people, even though I’m stuck in the kitchen more than I want to be,” she said. “I’ve always been a hard worker. I think it was just the way I was brought up.”
The Goal Post is closed on Sundays, except for Packers games, and on Mondays, but a true day off is a rarity for Bellin. She and Larry live upstairs, and she is always running back and forth for inventory, ordering or restocking.
The last couple of years have brought their share of challenges for mom-andpop establishments like the Goal Post Bar. With current economic times and the difficulty finding help, staffing is stretched thin. Bellin counts on customers being patient when there are long wait times on busy Friday nights.
“You’ve heard of fast food? Well, this is slow food,” she likes to joke.