Booyah!
Long before it was a sports-highlight catchphrase, it was a hearty soup native to the Upper Midwest. It's usually made for large gatherings and there's one place you can get it every Sunday in the fall -- Lambeau Field.
Booyah is just one of the dishes that make the home of the Packers stand out as the best NFL stadium for regional food. Lambeau executive chef Leo Dominguez goes way beyond burgers, dogs and French fries for the Green Bay faithful.
"We try to keep it regional," he says. "This is just a great area with so many food traditions."
The local soup made with tons of vegetables, chicken and sometimes other meats got its name from the large booya kettles it's slowly simmered in. (Somewhere along the way, the folks around Green Bay added the "h" to the end of the name.)
Among the other half-dozen regional items on the Lambeau menu are plenty of brats. They'll sell roughly 38,000 pounds during the course of a season. Lambeau's signature dish, though, has to be that squeaky Wisconsin favorite.
"Our cheese curds are a big hit," says Dominguez, who's now in his fifth year as executive chef of the stadium for Levy Restaurants. "We get the raw cheese curds from a local dairy here in Wisconsin, and we hand bread them. They're just phenomenal."
Cheese plays a prominent role, and no item gets more love at Lambeau than the beer cheese soup. It's served straight-up, turned into a dip or smothered on top of a hamburger.
"The beer cheese burger with bacon served on a pretzel roll is one of our most popular dishes," says chef Dominguez.
His favorite dish, though, has to be the beer cheese mac and cheese. It's also a favorite of many of the 73,000 fans who swarm the stadium each game day. The biggest challenge, though, might not be in serving thousands of pounds of regional food every Sunday, but doing so in the Wisconsin winter.
"When it gets below zero here, which it does for a quarter of our season, everything starts freezing," Dominguez says. "A lot of days they're trying to light Sternos (portable burners) under the beer taps."
No wonder Lambeau has been sold out for every game since 1960. It has the best regional food of any stadium and the coldest beer in the NFL.
