On our trip to Grand Rapids, MI, I was keen to try some of the nearly 5 dozen breweries/brewpubs in the area. I had looked up some in advance and found that a good portion of the breweries served food. Well, on our first night in Grand Rapids, my wife wasn't too whippy about going to a brewpub for dinner. She saw a Cuban restaurant south and east of downtown Grand Rapids that she really wanted to try. I decided to go along with her wishes and we found the restaurant. We parked in the back, went around to the front door and pulled on it. Locked. Closed. According to the sign on their front window, they were supposed to open at 5 p.m. and close at 9. It was well past 5 p.m. when we were there. My wife was crestfallen and wondered if I had a Plan B. I did and it wasn't all that far away. We ended up going over to the Harmony Brewing Company.
Like most brewpubs, the genesis of the business usually starts in someone's home or basement. And that's exactly what happened with brothers Jackson and Barry Van Dyke who started to brew their own beers at home around the start of the millennium. The brothers eventually got into property management and helped develop some old buildings in Grand Rapids in the city's Uptown neighborhood. However, their dream to open their own brewpub was always in the back of their minds.
The brothers found an old building in the Eastown neighborhood of Grand Rapids that had been a liquor store for years before the place went out of the business and the building fell into neglect. The building originally was built in 1928 and when Prohibition ended in 1933, it became a distribution center for Miller beer. When the brothers bought the building in late 2009, they found product on the shelves, as well as bottles of soda pop still in long shut down coolers. The Van Dyke brothers spent the first month of ownership of the building taking garbage and old inventory out of the main floor and the basement.
Over the next two years, the Van Dyke brothers spent $300,000 on the transformation of the old building. They used salvaged doors and floors throughout the place and their first beer vessels were re-purposed dairy tanks they bought on line from a dairy farm in Wisconsin. Renovations took a little longer than they anticipated, mainly because the brothers were doing most of the build-outs themselves. But in February of 2012, the Van Dyke brothers - along with their sister Heather - opened the doors to Harmony Brewing Company.
Business turned out to be brisk and at times demand was so high for both beer and food at the original location that the Van Dyke's knew they needed to expand. Since they were sort of locked in at Harmony Brewing, they found a 100-year-old-plus building on the west side of Grand Rapids that had originally been a sausage factory, but more recently had been a Mexican restaurant. After renovations, the Van Dyke's opened Harmony Hall in 2015.
We found Harmony Brewing Company at the corner of Wealthy St. SE and Lake Drive SE - a sort of convoluted intersection that puts Harmony Brewing inside a triangle. (see map) There's a small parking lot that we were able to get the last parking space when we drove in. Other than that, parking is available on the street near the brewery.
(A quick aside - we were sort of amused and somewhat curious about Wealthy Street and the origin of the name. It's a prominent street on the east side of Grand Rapids and we found ourselves on Wealthy Street a handful of times during our visit as there were a number of restaurants, shops and breweries along the way. It almost sounded like a street on the board game Monopoly, or was named for one of the more well-to-do areas of the city. It turns out that the street was named for the wife of one of Grand Rapids' first merchants and community leaders, Jefferson Morrison, who was also instrumental in platting out the city in the mid-19th century. After losing his first wife to illness, Morrison married Wealthy Davis in 1850 and named one of the streets after his new wife. That's it - the street was named as a loving gesture to Morrison's new wife.)
After getting inside, we entered the bar area and there was a hostess at the stand just inside the door. The small bar featured a few stools and there were a small handful of booths in the bar area. The hostess took us to a booth in the bar and dropped off a couple menus for us.
There was a back dining area in Harmony Brewing that featured booths and tables with garage doors that would open for patio dining. It had been raining and had cooled off after the front came through, so there was no outdoor dining that evening. A small stage was in the corner that has been used for live music in the past, but there was a four-seater table on the stage during our visit.
Our server that day was a young guy by the name of Keely who was a personable and helpful staffer throughout our visit. We sampled a couple of their beers - the Fiddlestix American pale ale and the Pleasant Peninsula India pale ale - to start out. We both liked the flavors of the Fiddlestix over the IPA and ended up getting that. I was sort of surprised that my wife didn't get her usual vodka and cranberry juice as they had a full bar at Harmony Brewing.
The menu is pretty basic at Harmony Brewing. The main emphasis is on their wood-fired pizzas called by some as the best pizza in Grand Rapids. But they also had appetizers such as house-made breadsticks that could be topped with either a pesto or with a balsamic vinegar, sea salt and oregano. They also had pretzel rods with a beer-cheese sauce for appetizers, as well as a roasted red pepper dip served with kettle chips.
My wife felt she needed some greens to start out with, so she ended up ordering a Caesar salad from their salads part of the menu for both of us to share. For a dollar up-charge, she also got anchovies on the salad. The romaine lettuce was cool and crisp with a nice house-made Caesar dressing along with fresh grated parmesan cheese and croutons. Fresh-cracked black pepper was mixed in with the greens and dressing. The salad was big enough for one person to have as a meal.
We ordered our usual sausage, pepperoni and mushroom pizza. It was a Neapolitan-style pizza with a thin hand-tossed crust. It was a good pizza - not the best we'd ever had - but it was still good. I think my wife was not too enamored with the pizza because I think she had her heart set on having Cuban food. But we ended up eating all of the 12" pizza.
I knew we were going to go to Harmony Brewing and get one of their pizzas at some point during our visit to Grand Rapids. Because the Cuban restaurant that my wife wanted to go to was closed for the evening, we ended up going there on our first night in town. We enjoyed their Fiddlestix American pale ale, and my wife really liked the Caesar salad that she had ordered to start off with. And the Neapolitan pizza we both shared was a good pizza. Harmony Brewing's original location was a cozy and funky little joint, and the service we had was fun and friendly. For our first visit to a brewery in Grand Rapids - a city that is known for their numerous breweries - Harmony Brewing was a good choice.
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