The Mars Cheese Castle

On the side of the road in Kenosha, Wisconsin, is a castle. It is surrounded by the moat of an enormous carpark, and is the destination for thousands of American travellers on a spiritual pilgrimage. It has turrets, presumably so it can be defended from siege. It looms imposingly on the barren midwestern landscape, asserting political dominance upon all the serfs of the kingdom. A neon sign announces the house name: The Mars Cheese Castle.

On our first American tour, I spotted it. We flew past it in our van, so fast it seemed like a trick of the light. Those of us who were awake and caught a glimpse looked at each other and said, ‘what the fuck was that’.

The next time we came back to America, this time on a much longer and more stressful tour, we convinced the bus driver to make a stop there. We were taking a lot of powerful (and legal!) cannabis edibles at the time, and also binge drinking. Everyone got a parasite in Mexico City. All this is to say, I was feeling psychologically and physically fragile, and my sanity hung in the balance of a trip to the Mars Cheese Castle. It turned from interest to obsession, a psycho-drama between myself and a gift shop in Wisconsin.

I was wide awake and had been for hours when we finally arrived. My insomnia isn’t aided by sleeping on a moving bus, weirdly. And honestly, the anticipation of arriving at the Mars Cheese Castle had made it hard to sleep. Some of us had stayed up all night reading Google reviews describing the internal tavern’s award-winning signature Bloody Mary and we were EXCITED. It was 9am when we arrived, bang on opening hour. When I looked out the window of the bus, expecting our vehicle to be the only one parked outside, at doors, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The carpark was full of people, getting out of SUVs and half-running into the castle like the more nervous peasants in a medieval uprising. I peered down the corridor where the band and crew slept. No signs of life. I softly said, ‘cheese’, to my sleeping friends, and sure enough, one by one, they emerged, softly chanting ‘cheese, cheese, cheese, cheese’. We all piled out of the tour bus in various states of presentability. I wonder if a tour bus has ever parked there. Had anyone from Sydney ever sought refuge in those castle walls? Lizzie took a photo of me, sprinting full-pelt towards the castle in my pyjamas, overtaking a family of four. I was ready to overthrow the King.

On the Google overview, the Mars Cheese Castle describes itself as a ‘cheese shop & bakery with an assortment of meats & spreads, plus a small souvenir store’. That sounds nice! Now take the cheese shop in your mind, inject it with a powerful bovine growth hormone and fire it into the sun. This isn’t Stoke Newington, this is fucking serious.

I cannot explain the sheer scale of it. There is no shop in the UK as big as this, except possibly that Asian supermarket Wing Yip in Croydon. There was merch as far as the eye could see, everything from tracksuit sets to baby shoes and knives. Everything else I saw came from the American Food Generator machine: pb&j deli meat, chocolate flavoured cheese, pickle…beer. Virtually none of it looked appealing which was incredible considering the variety.

I went looking for the tavern. I want you to understand that my psyche was truly held together by photos of an award-winning signature Bloody Mary. I found the tavern. There was a chain across the doorway. The tavern does not open at 9am. The tavern opens at 11. A mechanical talking cow named Isabel reeled off some cheese facts as if begging me to enter psychosis.

Disappointed beyond belief, I sampled some ‘cheese curds’ out of both anthropological curiosity and sick twisted desire. Cheese curds are a huge thing in Wisconsin and Canada and basically nowhere else. They are little thumb-sized nubs of curdled milk, vacuum sealed into a plastic bag and suspended in a little bit of something wet. I suppose this is ‘whey’. People go crazy for them and I think that’s because it’s one step of ettiequte up from just gnawing on a block of cheddar, which is what man truly wants. In a one-star review I found of the Mars Cheese Castle, ‘local guide’ Eric Nielsen describes having made the pilgrimage for ‘fresh curds’ many times over the years, but TWICE recently, the curds have had ‘no squeak’. And no squeak equals bad, old curds. Curious, I went straight to the source, store manager Michael, who explained in an interview that ‘when the curds are made, they have a high moisture content. Curds can rapidly lose their moisture, making them rubbery. So, a truly fresh curd will squeak. This is the freshest cheddar you can buy. Ideally, you’re consuming the curds just hours after they’re made’. The ‘squeak’ reminds me of a book I read about hot dogs recently, where I learned that hot dog fans (hotdoggers) are on the lookout for a dog with the perfect ‘snap’. I like these off-putting descriptive words, the onomatopoeia that makes a food sound like a creature in peril. The Mars Cheese Castle makes their curds in house, daily, which I think is good and impressive. I had about four different samples and they may have squeaked or they may have been ancient but either way, there’s no way around the fact that you are just eating damp cheddar from a bag.

The Mars Cheese Castle is an American dynasty, which means it opened in the fifties and caught on fire a few times. Second generation Italian immigrants Mar-io and Mar-tha Ventura combined their names to make MARS, so I learned it was not referencing the ancient God of War - it was actually quite sweet. Now, their three grandchildren run the place. I wonder if this went down King Lear style, each of them taking a different department. Maybe there’s a fourth, disenfranchised Cordelia-adjacent grandchild who refused to declare how much she loved cheese. It’s kind of an emblem of the American dream, the inverse of who gets to own a castle in Europe. If you’ve got cheese to sell then well, you can be King of Kenosha.

We piled back onto the bus, arms heavy with cheese merchandise. I bought a t-shirt that just says ‘I <3 Day Drinking’, and someone else bought a hat in the shape of a giant wedge of cheese. We took turns wearing it and laughing. We also got twelve pre-mixed bloody marys and drank them at 9:30am, so my dream still kind of came true. There are thousands of roadside attractions along these highways, all equally surreal and wholesome and the independent brainchild of some plucky upstarts with a crazy dream. Long Live House Mars, I say! As I looked at my weird mates and watched as the Mars Cheese Castle disappeared into the distance, I was content and I was free. Someone cracked open a bag of curds and passed them down to me, and every damn one of them squeaked between my teeth.