Seinfeld walks into a bar … here

[Garibaldi]

No, Mark Kampa insists. There was no temptation to make Jerry Seinfeld’s cheeseburger bigger or better than the usual burgers he grills up at the Village Bar.

The comedian, who did two shows Friday night at the Overture Center, stopped in the west side bar that afternoon for a cheeseburger, fries and a Diet Coke.

“I’m not a person that gets star-struck at all. But it was pretty weird, pretty surreal, seeing the guy in the corner of the bar, eating a burger,” Kampa said Monday.

“You kind of expect them to be so high on themselves,” he said about celebrities, “and he really wasn’t. It was just like talking to anybody else.”

Kampa was at the grill Friday some time after 2 p.m., when bartender Linda Draeger came over and told him that Seinfeld had just walked in the door.

“He said, ‘No it’s not.’ I said, ‘Yes it is.’ ‘No it’s not,’ ‘Yes it is.’ We kind of went back and forth and then he said, ‘It is!’ ” said Draeger, who retired as a Madison police detective earlier this year and tends bar part-time at the Village Bar.

“It just didn’t faze me all that much. But that’s just because it’s me. I used to be a cop. I just thought it was important to respect his privacy,” she said.

Draeger hadn’t known Seinfeld was scheduled to perform in town that night but still recognized him – hat, sunglasses and all – as soon as he walked in the door.

“Because of what I used to do, I pick out faces,” she said.

The comedian was accompanied by two other men and she asked the one who paid the check if they had been golfing across the street at Glenway Golf Course, but discovered they had seen a movie instead.

Draeger then checked if it was OK to ask the comedian for an autograph.

Kampa wound up getting his autograph and chatting with him for a couple of minutes. Seinfeld told Kampa he’d been here several times and that he loved Madison.

“He said he loved my joint. He shook my hand and signed a menu and that was about it,” said Kampa, who bought the bar nearly seven years ago.

There were about a dozen other people in the bar at the time. No one went over and pestered Seinfeld. They just let him eat his meal, Kampa said.

It was the limo driver who steered Seinfeld to the Village Bar when the comedian’s group asked where they could get a good cheeseburger. The driver, however, stayed in the car.

“He was in there for probably an hour,” Kampa said. “Real nice guy. Real down to earth. Didn’t seem pretentious at all.”

Seinfeld made a few local references during his first show Friday night.

“The Overture Center,” he teased at one point. “Oh isn’t this classy?”

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