Brewster’s Smokehouse
1420 M-89L and I went to Allegan Event over Winter Break and oh, boy did she love it. She has been begging to go back and even got B into the “Can we go, dad” thing by telling him there’s a smaller area for him.
We woke up Saturday morning and figured we’d go to a park or something. How often is it almost 50 degrees in January? But the kids really wanted to go to the “Ninja Warrior” place.
We gave in and decided to take them but told them we were going to eat lunch first. I just figured we’d find a pub in Allegan or something but along the way, I remembered a BBQ place in Otsego. I asked J if BBQ was ok…like I really needed to ask.
Brewster’s Smokehouse is between Otsego and Plainwell on M-89 just to the west of Otsego proper. The location was Upper Crust Pizza for 36 years before closing in 2016. Brewster’s Smokehouse, part of the larger group of Brewster’s restaurants in Southwest Michigan, moved in not long after.
The layout of the restaurant isn’t all that different. The dining room has been redecorated to bring out the smokehouse theme. There’s a lot of wood with sawcuts of trees used as wall decoration. The vibe is a little dark with dark carpet, dark furniture and wood with very little natural light coming in. It’s a cozy dark though.
The small bar is still in the back corner of the space. There’s not a lot of room but they have a full selection of beer and cocktails if you prefer that space when dining. We didn’t even look at a drink menu since we were just eating lunch and going to play “Ninja Warrior.”
We were met at the door by one of the two servers. He took us to a table in the middle of the dining room with one side of regular chairs and one side was a wooden bench. The kids both wanted to sit on the bench side so we let them sit together. The waiter gave each of them a place mat to color which doubled as the kids menu.
There was no salad on the menu for L so she had to pick from the kids menu items. She picked the Mini Chicken Quesadilla but asked if she could get it with just cheese. The tortilla is folded over quite a bit of cheese and grilled until the outside is crispy. She picked fries as her side choice.
B picked the chicken strips. he got two big frozen chicken strips that were incredibly hot when they came out. I broke one in to smaller pieces and asked for a cup of ranch for him to dip it in. He took maybe two bites of the chicken and used a fry to eat ranch out of the cup. I took the other strip and dipped in some delicious sweet BBQ sauce that was already on the table.
J picked the Applewood Smoke Pulled Pork nachos. This big plate meant as an appetizer piled with tortilla chips, pulled pork, colby jack cheese, scallions, tomatoes, jalapenos (J left the last three off) and a house made sweet golden BBQ sauce. The pork on the nachos was incredible. It was smokey. It was tender. It was pretty spot on. J likes sweet BBQ sauce better so she used quite a bit of that off the table. She ate about half then we asked for a box to take the rest home for another meal.
My selection was the Smoked Beef Brisket Sandwich. The sourdough roll was bursting at the seams with, tender, peppery, juicy brisket. No sauce needed on this sandwich. The beef had such a great flavor all on it’s own. The only thing I used sauce for was to dip the fries which were pretty run of the mill frozen french fries.
Our bill before tip was a little over $35. Brewster’s Smokehouse is like a lot of the other Brewster’s locations. The food is solid. We had a delicious lunch before spending the afternoon pretending we were “Ninja Warriors.”
SW Michigan Dining 