Mequon's Last Chancery Just Closed. A Few Miles North, Dinner Now Comes With a Hockey Rink.

Sometime in the past several weeks, the doors at 11046 N. Port Washington Road stopped opening for dinner. No press release, no farewell post, just a quiet closing that the city of Mequon confirmed to local reporters without offering a reason. That building had been the Chancery since 1991, the last one standing anywhere in southeastern Wisconsin after a run that once included eight locations under the Wauwatosa-based DeRosa Corporation. Thirty-five years of woodfire dinners, patio seating, and the kind of reservation-required dining room that defined a certain era of North Shore date nights, gone.

A few miles away on Donges Bay Road, something almost opposite just opened. Steny's North Shore serves its Friday fish fry inside a building where the bar itself is shaped like a hockey rink.

The two events aren't connected in any corporate sense. But taken together, they tell you something specific about how Mequon eats and gathers right now, and it's not the story either closing or opening would tell on its own.

What the Chancery actually was

For anyone who moved to the North Shore after, say, 2010, the Chancery on Port Washington Road was simply a fixture: a supper club with a full bar, patio dining, and a menu built around woodfired cooking. It opened in 1991 as the sixth Chancery in a regional chain that, at its peak, ran eight locations across Wisconsin. By the time it closed this year, it was the only one left.

The city confirmed the closing to local reporters but hasn't said what happens to the building next. For now it just sits there, a 35-year run with no stated successor.

That absence matters more than it might seem. The Chancery occupied a specific niche in Mequon's dining scene: the place you booked for an anniversary, the spot with a bar program serious enough to linger at after the meal. Losing it doesn't just remove a restaurant. It removes a category.

What opened to fill the gap, sort of

Steny's North Shore opened its doors on March 14, 2026, inside the former home of Libby Montana Bar & Grill, which had run the space for 24 years before closing in 2024. The building itself goes back further than either of them. In 1911 it started life as Gruenwald's Resort, a rooming house next to the railroad tracks.

This is the third Steny's location, and the family behind it has been in the Milwaukee bar business since 1985, when the original opened in Walker's Point. A second location, Steny's Lake Country, opened in Pewaukee about a year before Mequon came together. For owners Ryan and Brittney Steny, the North Shore project marked two firsts: the first location without Ryan's father Jerry involved, and the first time the family partnered with an outside investor to make it happen.

What makes this location different from its siblings is what's attached to it. Mequon's Plan Commission approved converting the site's former sand volleyball courts into a mini hockey rink, now known as the District 5 Ice Barn, used for youth hockey, high school practice, and adult four-on-four and five-on-five leagues. The restaurant was built around that fact, not next to it.

"The bar is inspired by the hockey rink," owner Ryan Steny told OnMilwaukee, describing the oval-shaped bar wrapped in white subway tile with blue stripes and finished with tap handles fashioned from hockey pucks and sticks.

There's also a LiveBarn video feed piped into the dining room, so a parent can order a beer and keep an eye on their kid's practice on the ice next door without leaving the table. That single detail tells you who this restaurant was actually designed for.

The menu leans toward the same crowd: wings, burgers, pizza, sandwiches, wraps, and salads, plus a Friday fish fry built around beer-battered Atlantic cod with coleslaw, tartar sauce, and rye bread. The one dish that breaks from typical Wisconsin bar fare is a Banh Mi Taco, pickled jalapeños and carrots with cilantro, cucumber, and Thai chili aioli on a soft flour tortilla, served with cilantro-lime rice.

A few things worth knowing if you haven't been yet:

• The location sits close enough to the Ozaukee Interurban Trail that Steny's has added bike racks, with plans for more as the patio fills in over summer.
• A shuttle service to Milwaukee Brewers games is in the works, according to the family's social media updates.
• The restaurant launched with six days of service a week, closed Mondays, with ownership saying they hope to expand to seven days as the location settles in.

Two openings, one shift

Put the two side by side and the pattern is hard to miss.

This isn't a story about one restaurant replacing another. It's a story about what kind of restaurant Mequon has more room for right now. The supper club model, built on reservations and a slower evening, lost its last local anchor this summer. What's expanding instead is the model built around a kid's practice schedule, a patio that doubles as a bike stop on the Interurban Trail, and a bar that treats a Tuesday night rec league game as reason enough to be busy.

That doesn't mean formal dining disappeared from the North Shore. Renard's, the fine-dining room at The Annex at Foxtown on Mequon Road, and Mr. B's Bartolotta Steakhouse are both still doing exactly what they've always done for a reservation-first crowd. What's missing is the category the Chancery occupied in between: the accessible, no-frills-but-still-a-bar-program supper club that didn't require a special occasion to justify a woodfire dinner and a cocktail.

If you already live here

If you've been driving past the old Libby Montana building wondering what's going on with the rink, now you know. If you've been meaning to try the Chancery again and found the lights off, that one's not coming back, at least not under that name, and nobody at City Hall is saying yet what will take its place.

What this really tells you, if you've lived in Mequon long enough to remember when the Chancery was the place you took your parents when they visited, is that the neighborhood's rhythm has shifted toward family and recreation-first spots without losing its higher-end anchors entirely. It's less a changing of the guard and more a redrawing of the map, with one old category emptied out and a new one filling in a few miles up the road.

Whether that's a trend that keeps going or a one-off pairing of a closure and an opening that happened to land in the same year, only time will tell. For now, the fish fry has moved from a wood-paneled dining room to a bar shaped like a hockey rink, and the Interurban Trail crowd has a new place to lock up their bikes.

If you're weighing what a shift like this means for property values or timing a move on the North Shore, that's a longer conversation, and it's one Realty Officials has been having with Mequon families for years. Request a complimentary market valuation and we'll walk through what's actually changing in this neighborhood, not just what's on the menu.