IN the era of the eyedropper-wielding cocktail artiste, I take pleasure in the fact that there are still guys like Tom Kelly around. Mr. Kelly, the longtime bartender at the Al-Gen Dinner Club in Rhinelander, Wis., has a neatly trimmed gray mustache, wears a shamrock tie pin and makes what I will unreservedly call the perfect gin martini. It is served limpid and glacially cold with two plump olives (or, if you’re feeling particularly old-school, two pickled mushrooms) and a minimum of conversation. “I’m just part of the real estate,” he said genially when asked how long he’s been at the job.

About that real estate: The Al-Gen occupies a tamarack-log cabin that was built as a restaurant in the 1930s by a couple named Al and Genevieve Nelson and was updated only once, and minimally, in the late 1950s. On the roof, the establishment’s name glows in green neon letters that illuminate the towering fir trees surrounding the gravel parking lot. There are no windows in the Al-Gen’s cozy lounge and red-carpeted dining room, which are adorned with all manner of taxidermy, from fish to megafauna.

Imbibed in this north woods sanctum, Tom Kelly’s cocktails are a potent tonic for body and spirit alike. It helps, perhaps, if you’ve spent the day hiking amid the magnificent birches and pines of the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest, which extends in a vast patchwork across this lake-studded swath of northern Wisconsin. It also helps to know that a thick slice of prime rib is waiting for you at the end of that drink. You know this because the hostess, dressed in a prim black waitress uniform with white piping, has already appeared alongside you at the bar unbidden, pen poised over order pad, asking what you’d like for dinner and informing you that your table will be ready whenever you happen to be — no sooner, no later.

That is how a Saturday night gets started at a proper Wisconsin supper club, a curious genre of old-fashioned fine-dining establishment that is particular to the state and had its heyday in the middle decades of the 20th century. Growing up in Chicago, I spent my summers in Wisconsin, weaned on the iceberg salads, cold relish trays, char-broiled steaks and Friday-night perch dinners that constitute the bill of fare at a typical supper club. I fell in love with these restaurants long before I’d ordered my first cocktail, and for good reason: the food was always tasty — supper clubs were doing custom-cut dry-aged steaks long before the practice became an urban fetish — and the vibe was always pure Wisconsin gemütlichkeit, leavened by a lively mix of locals and vacationing families.