Modern Forage: Green Bay, WI
Booyah is both a dish and an event format: the Belgian-immigrant communal stew is cooked in enormous kettles for fundraising gatherings called 'booyahs'. The word and the practice are unknown outside northeastern Wisconsin and adjacent Upper Peninsula and Iron Range Minnesota.
Green Bay and northeastern Wisconsin anchor the booyah tradition: a Belgian-immigrant long-simmered chicken-and-vegetable stew cooked in enormous kettles for community fundraisers. The dish is inseparable from the event format; “a booyah” is both the meal and the gathering.
This list is almost certainly incomplete; Green Bay and northeastern Wisconsin hold further hyper-local dishes that have not yet surfaced in the survey.
A note on the Where-to-eat blocks. Every entry below carries a list of restaurants and, where available, star ratings as of the date this post was published. These are a snapshot. Verify hours and addresses before driving anywhere.
Booyah — Wisconsin / Upper Midwest
A thick, long-simmered stew (usually chicken, vegetables, tomatoes) cooked in enormous kettles for community gatherings. The events themselves are called “booyahs.” Probably Belgian in origin, concentrated in northeastern Wisconsin, parts of Minnesota, and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Recipes are as numerous as the cooks, and the social dimension (large-batch communal cooking) is inseparable from the dish itself. The word and the practice are unknown outside the upper Great Lakes.
Sources: Cheapism; multiple Midwestern food roundups.
Where to eat: Community event food, not served in restaurants. Watch for booyah fundraisers in northeastern Wisconsin churches and VFW halls (Brown County, Door County, Kewaunee County). Most parish festivals during summer and fall include a booyah.
More from the series
Browse the rest of the Modern Forage survey.
Research & primary sources
Methodology, validation logs, and the entries that didn’t make this post are in the modern_forage/ on GitHub. Every entry here passed a 2+ independent-source check; the citations under each dish list them.