Entrepreneurial spirit at heart of Better Than State Fair Cheese Curds

“Failure is not an option for me, I knew it was going to work.”

Bill Dinges is a risk-taker. Its a gift passed on to him by his father, and his father’s father. But more than that, they also passed to him another unique trait; the ability to strategize. The combination of the two characteristics has given Dinges a distinctive upper hand, especially when it comes to his Better Than “State Fair” Curds.

Dinges creates his curds out of Ed and Sharon’s Restaurant and Catering in Merrill, the bar his family purchased in 1984. Prior to that his dad had a snowplow business and did some construction in Kenosha where he and his mother raised Bill, who was 10 at the time of the move, and his two older brothers.

But Ed Dinges, blessed with foresight and unafraid of a challenge, knew that change was coming, and he was ready to relocate his family to a more rural area.

“Dad saw the writing on the wall with living in a big city,” said Dinges.

They purchased the bar without any restaurant management experience. Their specialty was broasted chicken, and while they worked to build up the business Ed was known to make special treats for his employees. He made them cheese curds.

On Fridays Ed Dinges would stop at Bletsoe’s cheese store and grab a couple of bags. He took them back to the restaurant and battered them with a recipe of his own creation. The employees enjoyed them so much that they pushed Ed to sell the curds, but they didn’t have the kitchen space to run the batches necessary to be successful.

“He never sold them to the customers because they were a pain in the butt to make,” said Dinges. “It wasn’t practical.”

Ed Dinges passed away unexpectedly in 2003 during a routine hip surgery. Sharon Dinges maintained the bar and restaurant and Bill came on board shortly after. He officially purchased the bar in 2006.

“I’ve been running this place longer than he did,” said Bill Dinges of his dad.

Dinges, inheriting his father’s entrepreneurial spirit, eventually opened a food trailer. His wife, Marianne, questioned why they weren’t making his father’s cheese curds. But Dinges knew that he had to streamline the process before he could be successful with curds. The problem was keeping them fresh, so he used his dad’s recipe and froze the curds on sheet racks, ensuring high quality with each serving.

For the first two years Dinges and his team did everything by hand. He tested his batches out on his friends, and once they demolished them he knew he had something big.

In July of 2017, when he sensed that the banquet hall wasn’t going to be a longterm part of his operation he didn’t wait until he was in trouble before transforming it, eventually using it to house a state-of-the-art curd system.

In 2018 Dinges took out a loan to purchase his curd battering machine complete with liquid nitrogen freeze tunnel. The curds, purchased from Nasonville in Marshfield, go into the batter machine fresh. From there they drop into the freezer for about four minutes at -135 degrees Fahrenheit. He and his team once produced 3,000 pounds by hand, but it took them 24 hours.

“By the 16th hour you start hallucinating,” Dinges said.

His current system goes through roughly 3,600 pounds of cheese curds in three hours. There’s no other bar and grill in Wisconsin that utilizes this setup.

And of course Dinges wasn’t satisfied with food trucks and trailers alone. He was sure that he could sell them to bars and restaurants as well.

“I had a little white school bus and put a little presto pot fry daddy in it, with hot grease, and I’d fry an order and walk into a business and ask who was in charge of purchasing food,” Dinges said. He fried the curds right in their parking lot, leaving a business card and a flyer with the fresh cheese curds. Dinges states that he never went to college and just made it work, pounding the pavement and doing guerrilla marketing to get his name out there.

“It like punched them in the face,” Dinges recalled of businesses trying his cheese curds for the first time. He lets the product speak for itself.

The curd business really started to take off in 2019.

“Mom thought I was crazy just like my dad, taking big risks and big payoffs,” Dinges said. “When I bought the bar from her I told her ‘I can always erase your name on the sign out there,’” he laughed. “My mom and dad built the foundation and put the walls up, and I ended up putting the roof on the place,” he said, fully understanding that while his parents made it happen, his out-of-the-box thinking helped Ed and Sharon’s flourish.

That is until COVID-19 blindsided Dinges along with everyone else. “My sales dropped like a rock,” he said. The account that typically took 100lbs of curds each week plummeted down to just 16lbs, and his top-tier equipment came with top-tier payments.

“My dad used to be a golden glove boxer back in the 60's and if you fall down and get hit in the face, you get back up and punch them back,” Dinges said. And that’s exactly what he did.

Though his bank offered for Dinges to strictly make payments towards the interest balance that just wasn’t in his nature. Instead, he vowed to pay it off early. While the bank president knew that Dinges was determined, he was skeptical about an early payoff and told Dinges that if he paid off his loan early, the president would be his “teller girl.”

Dinges recalls robbing Peter to pay Paul just to keep the business operating. He went two months without producing curds while making those payments, taking a loss on both product and liquid nitrogen which evaporates rapidly.

Regardless, Dinges paid off that loan early, and true to form commissioned a trumpeter and found a briefcase for just the occasion. He even had cookies custom made.

“When I wrote that check it was like the weight of the world was off of me, this product was the biggest risk I ever took on. I told people it was literally jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and landing on both of your feet alive,” Dinges said.

Dinges and his crew are still in Ed and Sharon’s slinging chicken and cheese curds. He could have a bigger curd operation if he collaborated with a distributor, but Dinges likes to keep it small.

“They always say ‘find a hobby and get paid for it,’ that’s the way I look at it, life’s all about perspective,” he said.

Dinges and his brothers lost their mother in 2023. Though she’s no longer sitting on her stool and the place has seen quite a few upgrades, the restaurant hasn’t lost its old-school charm. In fact, Ed and Sharon’s celebrated 41 years of business this May.

You’ll find Dinges in his food truck this summer in downtown Merrill each Thursday between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., rain or shine. He’ll also be bringing the flavor at events like the Merrill rodeo.

Or you can check out Ed and Sharon’s Restaurant and Catering. You can’t miss it, it’s the place with the giant chicken standing at attention in the parking lot and holding a mug of root beer.

The chicken’s name is Eddie.