Paw Paw Brewing Company
929 E. Michigan AvenueWe don’t usually go out to dinner on Friday nights but we had only one kid as L was in Wisconsin with J’s parents on vacation. I got off work a little early and J suggested we do something.
I hate crowds and I hate waiting at restaurants which is why we usually go to dinner before 5:00. I’m not old. I’m just cranky.
I didn’t really have a lot of ideas as anything I really wanted I knew we were going to have to wait. On my drive home, I came up with what I thought was a really good idea. Let’s go to Paw Paw.
Paw Paw Brewing Company is on the east edge of Paw Paw on Michigan Avenue…which becomes Red Arrow Highway when you get out of town. They’ve been in this building for a little over eight years. J has never been there, but back in 2012, J’s mom and I went for a beer and at that time, I was surprised when I got there and found a food menu. Fast forward six years and we’re driving to Paw Paw because of the food menu.
Papa’s Italian Sausage (Battle Creek)
145 W. Columbia AvenueI like Friday’s. I always feel better about eating out when it appears there is extra money in our checking account. I mean, it’s never actually stopped me from eating out but I feel less guilty about it.
My co-worker and I were in Battle Creek last Friday working downtown. I very easily could have grabbed something there but I remembered a long time Kalamazoo business opened a second location and we weren’t too far away.
Papa’s Italian Sausage is near the corner of Capital and Columbia Avenues in a small strip mall alongside some automotive businesses. This small spot has been several carry-out businesses over the year including a Domino’s and, most recently, a soul food place called Pop’s Kitchen & Pasta Bar.
C J’s Pub
1027 Schuster AvenueMany years ago, when I was single and worked first shift, I would stop at a pub on my way home for work, grab a PBR or a Bud and something to eat. When J and I started dating, the pubs still happened occasionally but we would actually find a table and not just sit at the bar.
A lot of that stopped when we moved to Michigan. J worked nights and I was kind of freelancing and kind of not working so I was home and made dinner most nights. She got a dinner break around 6:30 so I would have dinner on the table waiting for her.
When I started working again, I started working second shift….and that lasted for over seven years. I finally got back to a day shift four out of five days last spring but now I rush home to spend time with my kids before they have to go to bed.
Needless to say, stopping at the pub doesn’t happen like it used to.
Earlier this week, J went to a friends house for dinner. It’s a group that gets together regularly so the kids can play and the ladies can have some adult time. She texted me to say she wasn’t going to be home so I was on my own. Last time this happened, I went to O’Duffy’s Pub. This time, I had another pub that I had just heard something surprising about.
C J’s Pub is a place I’ve pasted probably thousands of times. It’s just off Lake Street on Schuster Avenue, but the building is visible from the Business Loop. It’s a pretty large building that looks like it’s been added on to a few times. The parking lot was almost full when I pulled in just before 6:00 on a Tuesday night.
Speedy Chick
802 Michigan AvenueIt’s not very often I go to Marshall for work but I was there twice in two days earlier this week. When I’m not at work and I go to Marshall, I go to Dark Horse Brewing. When I’m at work and can’t drink, I really don’t know my way around the dining options in the city.
The first day we were in town, I headed away from downtown towards I-69. I saw an old sign in front of a small restaurant that snagged my attention. On day two, I made time to stop and pick up something to eat.
Speedy Chick has been in Marshall for about fifty years. The small building sits on the corner of Michigan Avenue and Plum Street west of downtown. There’s not much space between the building and the road so I just pulled my car up as close to the sidewalk as I could get without blocking it.
Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt (Oshtemo)
1700 S. Drake RoadTime to get the little one a little more socialized. J and I have always been pretty lucky that our work schedules mean we don’t need all day daycare. With L, we never needed it. I worked 2nd shift and J worked something between a 3rd and a 1st. I moved to 1st shift four days a week last year so we started doing a nanny for three or four hours a day.
We got L into preschool as soon as we could so she would have some kind of social interaction. We’re getting there with B too. It’s time to find something a couple days a week out of the home and it works out well that our nanny can stay on the other two days.
Monday afternoon was a perfect opportunity to go check a place out. L was gone and we have a few hours in the afternoon where we’re both home.
We took the tour and B is so excited about starting “school” that he didn’t want to leave. We thought maybe bribing him with FroYo would work. It didn’t, but we went to get some anyway.
Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt is one of the new shops at the Corner @ Drake development in Oshtemo Township on the corner of Drake Road and Stadium Drive. It’s tucked back in the strip of stores north of Century Drive near the Firehouse Subs.
Sister Lakes Brewing Company
92500 County Road 690Just the three of us. L is on vacation with J’s parents so it is just J, B, and I for the week.
We were all pretty lazy on Saturday after all having a pretty late night on Friday. J and I were in Grand Rapids for the Sugarland concert and B was up late with Grandma and Aunt V. We didn’t get a whole lot done on Saturday.
Late in the afternoon, I asked J if she wanted to take a road trip for dinner. We haven’t done that in a while and we all just kind of wanted to get out of the house. I had another brewery near Dowagiac on my ever growing list of places I need to eat at so we got in the car and headed west.
Sister Lakes Brewing Company is, well, near the Sister Lakes. It’s on County Road 690 south of M-152 in the unincorporated resort area of Sister Lakes in Keeler Township. The building actually used to be a hardware store before becoming a brewery in 2016.
The People’s Cider Co.
539 Leonard Street NW- Grand Rapids, MI 49504
- (616) 322-7805
- Website
Several month ago, a co-worker told me about a cider place in Grand Rapids he really likes. I didn’t pay much attention because we don’t go to Grand Rapids often and they don’t have food so we’d never take the kids there without something to eat.
We were in Grand Rapids for a concert at Van Andel Arena last week and chose Long Road Distillers as a place to grab a drink and something to eat before the show. The parking lot for Long Road is a few storefronts down so we had to walk about a block. That walk was a blessing in disguise as one of the places we had to walk by was the cider place my co-worker told me about that I didn’t think we’d ever get to.
The People’s Cider Company is on Leonard Street near Gezon Avenue. It’s sandwiched between Long Road Distillers and Chicago Style Gyro. In the past, this part of the building had been bundled together with the space the gyro place now occupies. It was a pizza joint before become Chicago Style Gyro about ten years ago. Read more…
Long Road Distillers
537 Leonard Street NWOne of the first dates J and I ever went on was to see Sugarland at the Illinois State Fair. Since then, we’ve seen Sugarland four more times. The group disbanded for a few years but recently got back together after the whole solo thing didn’t really work out for either of them. They put out a new album which means a new tour and a stop in Grand Rapids gave us an opportunity to see them for the sixth time.
We got my mom and aunt to come to town to watch B. L is in Wisconsin with J’s parents so we were set up for a pretty good night out.
Our original plan was to stop at Four Roses Cafe in Plainwell for dinner on our way to Grand Rapids but we realized they don’t open until 5:00. I had to come up with a Plan B quickly and once again, having a local lifestyle show on TV for white noise gave me a great idea.
Long Road Distillers is the restaurant I chose after seeing a segment on EightWest earlier in the day. I knew Long Road existed but didn’t realize they had a kitchen. I thought we’d do something different and do cocktails before the show instead of a beer flight.
Long Road Distillers is on Grand Rapids northside. The distillery and restaurant sit at the corner of Leonard Street and Quarry Avenue. The building from the 1880’s was a clothing store called Urban Fit for many years before being turned into a distillery but had a long life before that as many different things.
Buddy’s Pizza (Dearborn)
22148 Michigan AvenueMy favorite thing about getting sent to Detroit for work is getting the chance to pick up food that I can’t get on this side of the state.
One of the big ticket items for me is pizza…and not just any pizza of course, but a pizza that is unique to Detroit.
I had known for quite a while that I was going to be spending an evening on the east side of the state and I started looking along my route to see if there was a Buddy’s Pizza close. I don’t mind going out of my way for this delicious Detroit specialty but if there’s one along the way, even better.
The most convenient location for my trip that I found was the store in Dearborn. This location is on Michigan Avenue right next to the Bryant Branch Library The building butts up to the busy street that is also US-12 but there is no entrance to a parking lot anywhere. It’s actually quite confusing to find the lot behind the building. It would have been better had I turned before the restaurant on to Howard Street and used the access road, but I didn’t know that and turned on Mason Street then had to figure out which road went to Buddy’s and which went to the public parking lot.
Big Lake Brewing
13 W. 7th StreetPetoskey to Chicago is a long way.
We set our Petoskey vacation quite a while ago. About two weeks after the reservations were made, we got an invitation for a wedding in Chicago. It was for one of J’s former co-workers and someone she really liked so we decided we would make the trip. Our Petoskey stay was always supposed to end on Friday anyway…we’d just have to make the super long trip from Petoskey to Chicago after we checked out from our cabin.
There was no way we were going to keep the kids cooped up in the car that long. J told me to find someplace along the way to stop and play for a while. I looked at some things north of Grand Rapids since we don’t go that way often, but I kept coming back to the Critter Barn in Zeeland. It was a decent halfway point and the kids love it. We’ve gone pretty much once a year since L was two and this would be the first year B would really know what was going on.
We left Petoskey around nine. It figures the day we wanted to get up and get moving was the day everyone slept in. That put us in Holland around lunch time and I wanted to keep up my string of hitting a brewery every day on this trip. Of course, there’s a brewery in Holland I haven’t been to yet so that’s where we headed for lunch.
Big Lake Brewing is on 7th Street in downtown Holland just east of South River Street. It’s a new location for the brewery which started about less than five years ago on Holland’s north side. This new space was most recently Serafina’s Bar & Grill and Via Maria before that. Big Lake put about a million and a half into the building before opening up late last year.
SW Michigan Dining 