Delavan, Wis. — George Ackley is a star on the rise. Moments after the Delavan electrician walked into the Duck Inn supper club on a night in early October, film crews pounced.
“I walked into the damn place and they says, ‘Oh, are you George?’” Ackley said. “I’m looking around — nobody pointed me out! Son of a bitch. Have I got spies or something?”
Ackley’s moment in the spotlight came courtesy of Oatly, an oat milk company based in Malmo, Sweden. Oatly reps had dropped in to the Duck Inn in rural Delavan (population <9,000) to film a cheeky promo video, swapping oat product in place of dairy in clam chowder, creamy pasta and ice cream drinks.
The filming was part of a series called “Will It Swap?” Oatly winkingly calls it “brainwashing.”
The resulting four-minute video gave the world a quick glimpse of Wisconsin supper club culture, punctuated by frank takes, flat accents and goofy antics from the likes of Ackley. Diners’ response to the oat “milk” was predictably Midwestern:
“It’s got a nice shelf life, I guess.” “It’s good, but I wouldn’t order it.” “Tastes perfectly normal, I’d say.”
Film crews from Oatly, an oat milk company based in Sweden, interview musicians brought in to be local color for a promotional video shoot at the Duck Inn.
Oatly chose Wisconsin to be “provocative,” and the supper club knew this little promo had the potential to be contentious. The use of the word “milk” for beverages made from nuts, soy and oats gets a quick rise out of many beleaguered dairy farmers. Some federal legislators, including Sen. Tammy Baldwin, are trying to ban the word “milk” on anything other than dairy.
To help nudge Duck Inn diners in a positive direction, Oatly footed the bill for the samples, and everyone had the option to stick with dairy. Nobody was forced to try salmon with an oat-dill sauce.
“I personally didn’t think we would have people upset over it,” said Duck Inn owner Jeff Karbash. “For the most part, our clientele is very polite and obliging.”
We thought it would be provocative to bring Oatly to Wisconsin—America’s Dairy State—and ask famed supper club The Duck Inn to use our products in its most popular dishes.
Cast of characters
How did Oatly, a 30-year-old Swedish company, end up at a supper club on a rural road 15 miles east of Janesville?
For one, Jeremy Elias, head of global content for Oatly, is a University of Wisconsin-Madison grad. He loves the lively charm of supper clubs. The Duck Inn, owned by Karbash for 29 years, is a classic of the form.
“Visually, this is just an incredible space, right?” said Elias, speaking from Brooklyn a few days after Oatly released the video. “It’s everything you think of with a great Wisconsin supper club, from the lighting to those classic red booths to the décor and the signage outside.”
Another factor was the enthusiasm of Karbash, who was “down for the experiment.”
Musicians sample oat milk "ice cream" at the Duck Inn in Delavan.
“We felt like he was truly, honestly, authentically skeptical and interested in what was going to happen, what the reaction was going to be from some of his regulars,” Elias said.
“He started rattling off people that come in every Friday, every Saturday — ‘Oh my god, they’ve got to try it. You’ve got to spend time talking to them.’”
For two nights of filming over dinner, Oatly encouraged Karbash to invite “characters.” Karbash interpreted this to mean Midwesterners with big personalities who might be hesitant about oats in their grasshopper. (To be fair, the latter includes most of Wisconsin.)
Karbash asked his mother-in-law, who in the film pronounces “crème brulee” with a long “e,” like “cream.” When someone at her table corrects her, she cuts in, “I’m sorry. I speak Wisconsin.”
Bruce Hamilton, a CPA from Janesville, also got an invite. He and his wife Deb come to the Duck Inn a few times a month and thought the promo sounded like fun.
Bruce and Deb Hamilton give their feedback on the oat-swapped pasta at the Duck Inn in Delavan.
“We saw Jeff at the door,” Hamilton said. “Rather than just him greeting us, there was the representative from Oatly and the production crew all right there.
“We normally go in and have a beverage at the bar,” Hamilton said. “While we’re sitting there, we noticed one of the tables had a light diffuser attached. That apparently was the TV table. That’s where we wound up sitting.”
Ackley knew about the shoot too — when he sounds surprised in the video, he’s playing a little dumb for comic effect. (“Oakley? … explain to me what it does,” Ackley says.)
What he genuinely didn’t know is that his good buddy Karbash had already told the film crew to look for a guy who reminded them of Mario, the Super Mario Bros. character. When Ackley showed up wearing a newsboy cap that used to be his dad’s, the crews pegged him right away.
Donna Farley, left, takes an order from George Ackley in a promo video at the Duck Inn made by Oatly.
The cameras loved him. In the video, Ackley refuses to share his oat milk, barks like a dog and waves his fork like a magic wand over a piece of fish. He seems to constantly be laughing about something.
“I’m not paying for it anyway!” he says, his mouth full of food. “I don’t care!”
“If I don’t like something, I say it right out. Or I won’t say nothing at all,” Ackley later told the Cap Times. “I had a good time. They’ve got the camera in my face. I don’t know, I wasn’t ad libbing … I was just kind of being myself.”
Oatly had arranged to have a yodeler in the dining room and some alphorn players and dancers in the parking lot, for a little extra flair. Some diners filmed this. A few complained. The Hamiltons were mildly annoyed that they didn’t get to pick their oat-swapped entrée.
“I can tell you, Deb or I would never order that kind of a dish in a normal course of events,” said Hamilton, who was served the pasta. “I wish we’d been able to try other things.”
Cooking on camera
Donna Farley has worked as a server at the Duck Inn for 11 years.
“I’m not going to lie, I wasn’t too thrilled about the whole idea,” said Farley, who can be seen in the film informing diners about the specials in a flat Wisconsin deadpan.
“We could sign a waiver saying we wouldn’t be on camera, but then they kind of talked us into it,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK, I’ll just go with it.’ … I’m just not one for being in the spotlight.”
The restaurant remained open while film crews were there. One table of regulars asked Farley what the fuss was about.
“I tell them what’s going on, and they’re like, ‘Oh. Good luck with that’ — kind of put off by it,” she said. “But for the most part, everybody was pretty positive about it.”
Even an institution like the Duck Inn has had to adapt to changing tastes and dietary restrictions. Farley said requests for modifications go in phases.
A cook at the Duck Inn prepares a pasta with oat milk instead of dairy during a promo video shot by Oatly.
“The last five years or so, there’s a lot of people who right away say they’re gluten free or dairy intolerant,” she said. “My daughters, when they go to have their coffee at Starbucks, they’ll have oat milk as a substitute instead of regular milk.”
Chef Damian Jaramillo at the Duck Inn is himself lactose intolerant. Prepping for the Oatly shoot was a big lift on top of the rest of his prep, but he was more nervous about the cameras than the cooking.
“I thought it should still work like a dairy product,” Jaramillo said. “The crème brulee was challenging, because the consistency was different than the heavy cream. I had to cook it longer than normal.”
At first, the Oatly reps wanted the Duck Inn kitchen to “swap” dairy out of crab-stuffed mushrooms, angler’s pasta (shrimp, scallops and crab with a white wine sauce and hollandaise) and the rotolo primavera, spinach ricotta stuffed pasta with alfredo sauce.
All of these have cheese. Which was a problem.
“So then we’re scrambling to come up with a pasta dish,” Karbash said. “We got there with a mix of angel hair pasta and mushroom cream sauce. It turned out really good.”
Diners at the Duck Inn in Delavan sample dishes made with oat milk on camera, including a grasshopper. Duck Inn owner Jeff Karbash was surprised to find he could add even more alcohol than he usually does to the ice cream drink.
What surprised Karbash the most were the ice cream drinks. At Duck Inn, these are foot-high affairs, towers of gravity-defying ice cream and booze.
“We’ve always stacked our grasshoppers,” Karbash said. “Like one of the guys in the commercial says, ‘I don’t think it’s going to be as creamy,’ and that was my fear too. If I put too much liquor in the regular ice cream drinks, the ice cream breaks down. I was thinking this could be really hard to work with.
“Actually, getting the product it was the opposite. I could load a lot of liquor in there. The structure of it was different — it would stand up with even more liquor in it.”
Critical reception
Elias declined to share how much it cost Oatly to make the Duck Inn video. It was likely more expensive than previous such shoots, where film crews went into individual homes.
“We wanted to make sure that if we were going to be guests within Jeff’s space … that we weren’t in any way negatively affecting the economics of his business,” Elias said. “So we made sure to cover people’s tabs. We made sure that we were being fair to Jeff. That led to him being more involved with the experiment, helping us find the right people to talk to.”
In Karbash’s own circles, response to the video has been positive. Well, mostly positive.
“My daughter shared it on Snapchat and we had a ton of great comments,” Karbash said. “We put it on Facebook and the backlash started. Vile, vulgar, rude comments. I had to take the post down.”
The Duck Inn is located in Delavan and has been owned by Jeff Karbash for 29 years.
Commenters thought the Duck Inn was supporting a company that was taking away from dairy farmers, Karbash said, which baffled him. The restaurant didn’t stock oat milk before this, and doesn’t now.
“Yeah, there’s milk alternatives … but what hurt the dairy farmers more so is these large farms having 5,000 herds,” he said. “If you’re a small dairy farmer, Oatly isn’t hurting you. It’s corporate America that is killing you.”
Karbash ended up taking the video down from Facebook. The restaurant business is competitive enough as it is, with costs of goods and labor continuing to rise. He’ll bring in a dairy substitute if someone requests it, but there just isn’t much call for them.
“We don’t use Oatly product. I don’t even know a grocery store close by where we can get it,” Karbash said. “But I did have one lady down from Lauderdale Lakes who’s very allergic to dairy. She was tickled pink … she hadn’t had a Brandy Alexander for 20 years until she came in that evening. She was ecstatic about it.”
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