The Coop

• 10001 Bluemound Road
• Milwaukee, WI 53226
• (414) 771-3040
• Website
• Menu

Eating at the zoo is never on the top of my list of lunch choices.  The food is usually served cafeteria style and while that’s fine, there are a lot of other places in the cities we visit that I want to eat.

We got up Thursday morning and drove from J’s parents house in the south Chicago suburbs straight to the Milwaukee County Zoo.  I didn’t want to get there really early because we couldn’t get in to our hotel until 3:00 PM.  If we get to the zoo early, we get done early, then we have no place to go.

We got to the zoo around 11:00.  That’s lunch time for us on East Coast time and it’s pushing nap time for B.   We didn’t want to start out day in the cafe so we started walking hoping the excitement of seeing some animals would hold the kids off for a while.

When we got through the Aquatic and Reptile Center, we started to hit a meltdown point.  We quickly looked at the map to find a restroom and something to eat.  I read the  map wrong and we started heading towards Lakeview Place…which wasn’t open, but there was a better option right in front of it.

The Coop is a food truck operated by the zoo’s concession contractor Service Systems Associates near Lake Evinrude.  It really looks like a food truck you’d see out on the street.  I actually thought they had brought it in for the day until I started trying to find information on it later in the day.

The Coop services up fried chicken and french fries.  There is an order kiosk at the back of the truck.  J ordered me a Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich which came with fries.  She also got an order of three tenders for her and the kids to share.  She upgraded her fries to cheese fries.  The total cost was a little under $25.

The kids and I went into Lakeview Place to find a place to sit so we weren’t out in the sun.  J came in a few minutes later with two boxes of chicken, some ranch, and a whole bunch of napkins.

I started in on my sandwich first.  The sandwich was a delicious fried chicken breast that had a little bit of a kick but nothing overpoweringly spicy.  There were pickles and some kind of sauce on the bun.  The sandwich was pretty hearty so it could have been a meal on it’s own if it needed to be.

The chicken tenders were nice big, meaty, juicy pieces of white meat.  They tasted like they were probably frozen, but they were definitely better than the typical flat frozen tenders.  One tender was enough for everybody at this point in the day.

The fries were skin-on, but like the tenders, I have a pretty strong suspicious they came out of a bag.  My box of fries were delicious on their own with just a little bit of salt.  The cheese for J’s fries came in a little cup for dipping.  The cheese was pretty much a nacho cheese style of cheese.  It made the fries just a little more tasty than they already were.  I finished off the cup when J was done with hers.

The Coop is definitely better than most of the food you typically get at zoos and amusement parts but it wouldn’t hold up well on the street since most of it seems to come out of a bag.  I was still grateful we ran in to this place so we weren’t eating the frozen hamburger and heat lamp pizza we get at a lot of zoos.