Comstock Dollar & Discount

• 5922 King Highway
• Kalamazoo, MI 49048
• (269) 459-6550
• No Known Website
• Menu

I can be lured in with a sign.  If I’m driving by a place and I see a sign for hot food at a place there shouldn’t be hot food, I’m typically going to do a U-Turn to get back to that place.

When we lived in Lansing, I found the best taco shop inside a hardware store and I keep hoping to recreate that magic.

I was driving back into downtown Kalamazoo from Augusta the other day and decided to take M-96 back.  I needed to stop at Speedway on the corner of King Highway and River Street.  As I was doing that, a flashing sign across the street caught my eye.

The sign was attached to a small yellow building and was advertising food.  I was just going to grab a burger from Speedway but I decided to get adventerous.

That building is Comstock Dollar and Discount.  It’s on the east side of River Street right at the King Highway intersection.  There is a row of business alongside it with a small parking lot out front. 

The store is a little bit of everything.  They sell groceries.  They sell party supplies.  They sell t-shirts….

Past the motor oil and wacky t-shirts they have a small counter serving up hot, made to order food.

I really didn’t know what I wanted when I walked in so the lone employee pointed me towards one of their specials.  They do a brown bag lunch for $5 and one of the options was a burger, a can of pop, a bag of chips, and a snack cake.  That sounded right up my alley so that’s what I got.

The “kitchen” isn’t much more than two electric griddles on a counter top.  It took her a little over ten minutes to cook up my burger and bag it up.  Once that was taken care of, she followed me over to the cash register where I paid a little over $5 for the meal with cash.

The burger was pretty simple.  It’s a large frozen patty topped with American cheese on a brioche bun.  There was the option for lettuce tomato onion, ketchup, and mustard but I asked to leave all that off.  I don’t really like it and I was going to be eating in the car.  The burger was pretty filling and while it had the hard compact properties of a frozen burger, it was nice and tender.  The brioche bun was a nice change of pace from the cheap white bread bun that I was expecting.

The Brown Bag Special typically includes snack cakes but I was offered a fresh, home made muffin so I took that.  It wasn’t very big…just a little over a bite and a half but it was warm, crumbly and delicious.

The small cafe inside Comstock Dollar & Discount isn’t something you need to go out of your way for but it is a nice option if you’re in the area.  A lot of the food is going to be processed stuff but the people are friendly and there aren’t a lot of options to grab a burger in the immediate area.