While we were on vacation in Grand Rapids earlier this year, my wife and I visited a number of breweries in the area. One evening, my wife was in the mood for Indian food, but I was still sort of in the brewpub mode thinking of a good place to get a meal with a good locally-brewed beer. To the wishes of my wife, I looked up all the Indian restaurants in the area on my computer. One immediately popped out at me - it was a combination Indian restaurant/brewery. I said, "I think I found one that we'll both like!" Later that evening, we headed over to Bombay Cuisine - East West Brewing Company for food and beer.
Now, I like brewpubs and I like Indian food and there is only one other place that I have ever encountered that had that combination and that was Jaipur Brew House in Omaha. (Click here to read the Road Tips entry on Jaipur Brew House.) And the food and beer were both very good at Jaipur. So, I had high hopes that Bombay Cuisine/East West Brewing would be a winning combination.
About 22 years ago, Balwinder Bal opened the doors to his Indian restaurant, Bombay Cuisine. He was soon joined in the business by his daughter, Monica. The elder Bal became enamored with the burgeoning craft brewing industry in Grand Rapids and about 15 years ago he began to brew his own beers at home. He figured that being a chef was similar to being a brewmaster - it was mixing ingredients to make things taste good.
Pictured at right - Balwinder Bal. Photo courtesy Grand Rapids Now.
Bombay Cuisine had a space next door where Balwinder Bal put in an English-style ale house/sports bar - Queen's Pub - in 2009. That concept lasted for about 3 years until Bal brought in a young chef by the name of Jayson Leek to come up with a Southern-inspired restaurant by the name of Radix Tavern. However, less than a year after Radix opened, Leek decided to head on and Bal sought another person to come in to run a restaurant in the space.
Longtime local chef Dan Chudik stepped in to open Trattoria di Stagione in June of 2013. Chudik was well known for his own Italian restaurant Tuscan located on the southeast side of Grand Rapids that closed a few years before he teamed with Bal to open the new Italian cafe. Things went well for three years before Chudik parted company and took over a nostalgic 50's-style Fodero diner back on Grand Rapids' southeast side. (COVID-19 and 2020 wasn't kind to Chudik and he was forced to close his diner. However, it's been reported that he is moving the diner - all 20 tons of it - to Muskegon about 45 miles northwest of Grand Rapids.)
Faced with another space that he had to figure out what to do with, Balwinder Bal decided to take his love for homebrewing to the next level and he announced that he was going to put in a brewpub. Bal had an affinity for pale ales, but he also used spices that he cooked his Indian specialties for some of his homemade brews. And he felt that bit of differentiation would make his new brewery unique in the face of an ever increasing market for craft breweries in Grand Rapids.
First of all, Bal had Bombay Cuisine switch places with the space the other restaurants had been in and turned the old Indian restaurant into the brewpub. Bal next hired a consultant to help him get his brewery up and running, procuring his stainless steel brewing tanks from a local Michigan company.
Through a mutual friend, Bal was introduced to Teo Watson-Ahlbrandt, a brewery consultant based out of Ann Arbor. Watson-Ahlbrandt - who consulted with a handful of start-up breweries before opening his own nano-cannery Edelbrau Brewing Company in 2019 - was intrigued with Bal's approach to combining culinary spices with craft beer brewing. The two collaborated on some of the brews that Bal would later incorporate into his line-up of beers when he was getting close to opening his brewpub. With beers in place and a bar manager hired, East West Brewing Company opened in December of 2016.
Bombay Cuisine and East West Brewing Company are located in the Eastown neighborhood near the corner of Lake Drive SE and Robinson Road SE. (see map) We drove around the block and found parking on Richard Terrace SE and took a short walk to the restaurant/brewery.
The combo Indian restaurant/microbrewery is a small and cozy place. Bamboo light shades hung from the ceiling in the dining area that also had exposed duct work. My wife especially liked the plant wall near our table as it gave the restaurant a bit of vibrancy, not that it needed it.
We were seated at a table in the dining room near the bar. The young lady who seated us was also our server that evening. She gave us both a food menu and a beer menu to look through. We both tried a sample of their Calipur IPA and we decided we liked it. We ordered a couple of pints for us to enjoy while we looked through the menu.
When East West Brewing Company first opened, there was a separate menu for the brewpub versus the Indian restaurant. However, it all changed over to Bombay Cuisine's full Indian menu not long after East West opened. Most of the items on the menu were typical of what you'd find in most Indian restaurants - lamb, chicken, and seafood dishes as well as a slew of vegetarian selections. Bombay Cuisine also had tandoori items on the menu, as well as biryani dishes.
Probably one of the more interesting items found on their menu was their melding of Indian and Quebecois dishes - Indian pub poutine. They had four dishes that featured fresh cut fries topped with a choice of chicken tikka masala, butter chicken, a mushroom mutter sauce, and a chana pindi poutine with garbanzo beans mixed in a spicy tamarind sauce. All of the Indian poutine dishes are topped with melted cheese. The Indian pub poutine selections made me pause for a moment as I really thought about getting one just to see what it was like.
We started out by ordering some Samosa, but we were informed moments later that they were out of them. My wife decided to get the vegetable pakoras for an appetizer instead, but we never did get them. I don't know if she forgot to place the order for them or what the deal was. They weren't listed on our final bill.
My wife selected the murg methi, a combination of two of her favorite sauces - butter chicken and tikka masala. The murg methi intrigued me enough that we ended up sharing it family style. We had also ordered up some garlic naan to go with our meal.
The combination of the tikka masala and butter chicken was interesting. It was a mild-plus sauce with a bit of a peppery taste on the back end. The chicken was tender and cooked perfectly. I complemented my wife on her choice of food.
I was torn between the lamb rogan josh and the lamb saag in a spinach sauce. And I have to say that I was still somewhat interested in the butter chicken poutine. I wavered back and forth a moment before I finally pulled the trigger on the rogan josh.
The lamb rogan josh was equally as wonderful as the murg methi. It featured a slightly spicy curry sauce with cubes of tender lamb. The spices and flavor were just outstanding. And the Calipur IPA was a nice complement to the meal. It was a lot of food, but since we didn't get either the samosa or the pakora for appetizers, I finished most of the rogan josh.
Indian food is our comfort food and my wife felt she needed a hearty meal while I was still looking for good brewpubs to try in the greater Grand Rapids area. It turned out Bombay Cuisine and East West Brewing Company was the perfect combination of what both of us wanted that evening. The Indian food we both had was excellent and the house-brewed IPA they had on tap was a great complement to the Indian food. The service was a little choppy - we had ordered an appetizer that we never received - but that was fine as the food we had more than satisfied our appetites. I don't know if we'll make it back to Bombay Cuisine/East West Brewing Company, but if we do I really want to try the butter chicken poutine.