Festival season has arrived, which means Steve Sazama's nickname -- not to mention his pork sandwiches, cheese curds, mozzarella marina and sour cream and chive fries -- will be on the lips of thousands of Milwaukeeans for the next several months.

For 30 years, the outgoing Sazama -- known to friends and festival-goers simply as "Saz" -- has operated Saz's State House, a popular rib restaurant located at 5539 W. State St.

His food is available at Summerfest, the Wisconsin State Fair, numerous other festivals, at your corner grocery store and soon through his Web site www.sazs.com. How did a former bartender / copy machine salesman build an empire out of ribs and mozzarella sticks? That's what we wanted to know when we had Saz sit down at a booth in his restaurant for a Milwaukee Talks interview.

OnMilwaukee.com: You are celebrating your 30th anniversary this year. Some restaurants don't last 30 days. Could you have envisioned 30 years ago that you would be where you are today?

Steve "Saz" Sazama: It's been a good ride. We knew we had the right-sized place. It wasn't much of a nut to crack. It's just been an unbelievable ride, what this place has led to.

OMC: When you first opened, weren't you more of a bar first and a restaurant second?

Saz: That's right. The reason we're in the restaurant business is that the city was cracking down on the number of people you could have in the restaurant. That's why I built my first addition back in 1979. Back then, interest rates were about 18 percent. I almost went out of business because of that. I did (the addition) for more capacity, and I had to get in the food business. I was thinking "This whiskey stuff isn't going to last forever." When we started out, I used to be 30 percent food and 70 percent bar. Now, we're just about the opposite. In fact, it might be 75 percent food and 25 percent bar. I think when you concentrate on food, you have a lot more headaches but you also have more longevity.

OMC: One of the more interesting parts of your success is that thousands of people who have eaten your food at Summerfest, church festivals or from the grocery store have never been in the restaurant. Some people might not even be aware that you have a restaurant. How did that part of the business evolve?

Saz: One of my original customers' nieces was Tracy Spoerl, who was the food and beverage manager at Summerfest. She introduced me to some people from Miller, and that's pretty much how we got into Summerfest.

It just grew from there. The mozzarella marinara came out. We didn't know what we were going to serve at Summerfest, and I had an idea that you needed something you could eat with your fingers, because you'd have a beer in one hand and eat it with your other hand.

I thought if we could do a pan-fried mozzarella marinara that you could eat with your fingers, we would have a winner. One night, my chef went out drinking with a Chinese chef and they're talking about it and the Chinese chef said, "Cheese egg roll." That's how it started.

OMC: A star was born, huh?

Saz: Yes. It was the mozzarella marinara. Tracy and I are still trying to figure it out. We were only in business three or four years at the restaurant at that time. We were selling them as fast as we could roll them. From that, we came up with some other lucky products.

OMC: Like what?

Saz: We were doing a rib thing at the first Winterfest, which they held on Wisconsin Avenue where the old Midland Bank was. Remember that place? They had the best-looking tellers. They used to advertise that they had the best looking tellers. They did, too.

Anyway, they put a dome up there and we were doing ribs and we couldn't sell them worth a damn. No one would buy them. There were limited places to sit down, so we pulled the meat off the bones and made a pork sandwich out of them. That's how we came up with the pork sandwich. We literally pulled the ribs off the bone and put them in a bun. Now, we use a shoulder. I can't tell you how many tons we go through. That's how we came up with that.

OMC: Sounds like necessity was the mother of invention. Were there any other "lucky" breaks?

Saz: Well, one thing about our products is that we are gluten-free. I'm one of the last guys who uses real sugar in the sauce. Now, about one out of every 135 Americans have some form of wheat intolerance. You see in some grocery stores, they have gluten-free sections. Even some waffle house I saw now has some breakfast stuff that is gluten free. The pork and chicken we use are also gluten free, along with the sauce. We didn't plan on doing that, but it turns out the vinegar in our barbecue sauce doesn't have wheat in it. That was a lucky break.

The last lucky product we came up with was the sour cream and chive French fry. That happened because of the health department. We were making our chips with fresh potatoes, so we always had a lot of water on the floor of the kitchen. We had to rinse these fresh potatoes with our oxidant. Water got all over the floor. For safety reasons, the health inspector said, "Can you possibly come up with a frozen French fry?" I said, "My customers are used to my homemade chips. I can't give them a commercial French fry."

I had to do something, so I started looking into it and that was the year that one of the companies came up with their sour cream and chive French fries. Now, we go through four semi-trailers full in a summer.

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