I've been wanting to go to the Big Grove Brewery in Solon, IA for quite sometime. They have been getting rave reviews not for their beers - I especially like their Easy Eddie Hazy IPA - but their food was supposed to be very good, as well. My wife and I went on an extended drive on back roads on Sunday afternoon and we found ourselves not too far from Solon. Instead of heading back toward the Quad Cities, we took a right and headed west toward Solon.
Matt Swift literally grew up in the restaurant business. His mother, Faye, was the owner of Slugger's, a sports bar/restaurant that was located on the strip in Coralville, IA. Swift started out bussing tables and washing dishes, but eventually he moved up the ladder to work as a cook and eventually became the manager of the restaurant.
In 2007, Faye and Matt Swift opened Blackstone, a bistro-style restaurant on Iowa City's east side. (I've eaten at Blackstone a handful of times over the years and I'm sort of surprised I don't have a Road Tips entry on the place.) But a year later, the Swift's faced a major crossroads with their Coralville restaurant.
The historic flood of 2008 inundated the Coralville strip and it wiped out Sluggers. Rather than rebuilding, Faye Swift decided to close up for good and the Swifts opened a new restaurant in North Liberty called Red's Alehouse. The success the Swift's had at Red's prompted Matt Swift to look for new opportunities in other start-up restaurants in the area.
Doug Goettsch was a native of the Calamus/Wheatland area of eastern Iowa who first got into the restaurant field working as a dishwasher while he was going to junior college in Clinton, IA. After graduating with a food service degree from the now-closed Marycrest College in Davenport, IA. Goettsch worked as a representative for an eastern Iowa food distributor before heading out to California to study at the Culinary Institute of America. He became a certified chef de cuisine from the C.I.A. and he eventually became the director of corporate relations for the school.
While he was in California working at the C.I.A., Goettsch came back to Iowa in 2012 and he started to look up some of his former accounts in the Iowa City area to catch up. Goettsch called on Faye Swift 20 years earlier when she owned Slugger's in Coralville and he went up to Red's Alehouse to see her and her son. Matt Swift was telling Goettsch that he and the beer specialist at Red's Alehouse - an old Swift family friend by the name of Bill Heinrich - were thinking about opening a brew pub somewhere in the area. Heinrich had cut his teeth in the brewing trade first at the Millstream Brewery in the Amana Colonies before moving out to Reno, NV to be the head brewer at a microbrewery there.
When Matt Swift had hired Heinrich to come back to Iowa to be in charge of beers at Red's Ale House, Heinrich stopped off in Colorado and picked up a small brewing system that he had packed into a rental trailer. Heinrich had been experimenting with different types of beers at this home before he and Swift started to come up with an idea for their own brewpub. Telling Goettsch about the potential brew pub, Goettsch got excited about the possibilities of partnering with the Swift's and Heinrich in the venture.
It was less than a year later when Goettsch decided to move back to Iowa to help open the brew pub. The group found a location in Solon, IA and began to renovate the space into a brewery and a gastropub. The building used to house Joensy's which was famous for their large pork tenderloin sandwiches. Faye Swift's brother, George Pappageorge, was an architect in Chicago and he was called in to design the space that had become available after Joensy's closed in 2012.
They knew they needed a quality chef to head up the kitchen and Goettsch and the Swift's knew just the guy - Benjamin Smart. After Smart had graduated from culinary school at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, the Swift's hired him to work in the kitchen at Slugger's in Coralville. Smart quickly outgrew the sports bar food served at Slugger's and eventually became the executive chef at The Herbfarm, a celebrated and award-winning farm-to-fork restaurant in the Seattle area. It was sort of serendipitous when Goettsch - who also knew Smart - reached out to him to see if he would be interested in coming back to Iowa to head up the kitchen in their new venture. Smart and his wife had been thinking about moving back to Iowa to raise their young children. Seeing this as the perfect opportunity, Smart immediately signed up as the head chef at the new brew pub. With everything in place, Big Grove Brewery opened in February of 2014.
Big Grove quickly became a destination restaurant for their food and their beers started to gain status among beer connoisseurs in east central Iowa. By 2016, it became apparent that they were running out of space to brew their beers. Goettsch, the Swift's, and Smart partnered with former NFL and Iowa football player Nate Kaeding - who also owned Short's Burger and Shine - to develop an Iowa City location that would allow Big Grove to brew up to 20,000 barrels annually, along with a large pub space for people to eat and drink. The Iowa City Big Grove location opened in March of 2017.
(The Swift's and Goettsch are also involved in Pullman Bar & Diner, a bistro in Iowa City; while Matt Swift, Goettsch, Smart and Kaeding are behind St. Burch Tavern, an upscale bistro that opened in downtown Iowa City in April of 2017. Matt Swift is also involved with others in 30hop, a burger/craftbrew-centric restaurant with locations in Coralville, Cedar Rapids and Des Moines. Click here to see the Road Tips entry on 30hop.)
We pulled into Solon around 1:30 p.m. and parked catty-cornered from Big Grove on the street. (see map) We entered and found a place that had been significantly transformed from what was a dingy, small-town bar during the days of Joensy's into an impressive modern-rustic style brew pub. High ceilings with wooden trusses crossed over both the bar area and the dining room. A mix of contemporary and antique-style lighting hung from the trusses. A brick wall back-bar with liquor shelves and flat-screen televisions were the focal point in the bar, while a large fireplace in the middle of a wall of reclaimed barn board was the center feature of the dining room.
That particular Sunday, the weather was sort of all over the place. It was warm, but the fluffy cumulus clouds were billowing up and spotty showers would break out at any time. We thought about sitting outside in Big Grove's beautiful patio area, but we didn't want to risk getting rained on during one of those pop-up showers. We ended up taking a booth near the fireplace in the dining room.
Our server that day, a nice young guy by the name of Tiber, came over to drop off a couple of menus. My wife wasn't all that familiar with their beers, so I suggested we get a sampler flight of beers. As I said, I was familiar with their Easy Eddie Hazy IPA and I suggested getting one of those in the flight. We also got the BGB India pale ale to try, the Red-headed Stranger - an American red pale ale, and the Boomtown Premium, Big Grove's golden ale beer. After giving them all a try, she decided upon the BGB IPA while I stayed with the Easy Eddie Hazy IPA.
The food served at the Big Grove location in Solon is not like your normal brew pub/tavern fare. Ben Smart has put together an eclectic mix of locally-grown Midwestern favorites, pasta specialties, interesting flat-bread pizzas, and some interesting shared plates such as crispy salmon spring rolls, braised pork shoulder with pickled onions and mustard seeds, and a burrata cheese and tomatoes appetizer that features roasted garlic, summer squash, and zucchini confit with herbed focaccia bread. Smart's reputation for having interesting foods at Big Grove led to him being named as one of the 30 top chefs to watch in the U.S. by Plate magazine in 2016, and two years later he was named Iowa Restaurateur of the Year by the Iowa Restaurant Association.
We weren't looking for a lot of food, but just needed something to tide us over until dinner later that evening. My wife went on the light side with the Korean salmon salad they had as a special that day. It featured a small piece of grilled salmon with vegetables, Korean noodles and what appeared to be smoked hard-boiled egg. She said it was simply delicious and was more than happy she ordered that.
I wasn't too certain what I wanted to get. I was hungry, but not THAT hungry. I thought about getting the Big Grove burger made with locally-raised black angus beef, or the prime rib French dip that was topped with a creamed Wisconsin white cheddar cheese and horseradish aioli. But I kept going back to the pastrami sandwich they had on the menu.
And that's what I got. It featured thick slices of house-smoked pastrami topped with Swiss cheese, house-made sauerkraut and Thousand Island dressing. The sandwich came on lightly toasted rye bread. A side of battered French fries came with the sandwich. I thought the meat tasted more like a traditional brisket than a seasoned smoked pastrami. But that's a very minor quibble as the meat was tender and had great flavor. The house-made sauerkraut gave each bite a nice kick and the Swiss cheese wasn't overpowering. Even the battered fries were very good. My wife and I shared nearly the whole pile of fries and that was remarkable because we generally never eat many - if any - fries if they're served as a side.
Now that we finally made it to Big Grove Brewery in Solon, we're sort of kicking ourselves for not getting there sooner. The food was top-notch compared to many other brew pubs I've visited in my travels. And the beers served at Big Grove is well worth the visit on their own. The pastrami sandwich I had was very good - as were the fries served on the side - and my wife simply loved her Korean-style grilled salmon salad. The service was friendly and efficient, and the decor was a wonderful mix of modern Americana. We were sorry we didn't sit on the beautiful patio as it turned out that it didn't rain while we were there, but there's always next summer.
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