Al Johnson's Swedish Restaurant & Butik

Al Johnson opened what became Al Johnson's Swedish Restaurant in Sister Bay in 1949, in a building that had been a grocery store on Bay Shore Drive. The place pivoted toward its current identity in 1973, when Johnson commissioned a log structure built in Norway, shipped across the Atlantic, and reassembled by Norwegian carpenters — sod roof and all. That roof is the story: Johnson's friend Harold "Winkie" Larson gave him a pet goat named Oscar for his birthday and put it up there as a joke. Al kept the bit going. The goats graze on that roof to this day.