Seventy-five years on Pipestone

Nineteen fifty. That's the year on the sign, and it's the year we've been counting from ever since. Businesses in this town have come and gone in that time, a lot of them, and Grand Crossing has stayed put on Pipestone Street, pouring beer and putting burgers on deli paper for three generations of Benton Harbor.

It has been a family business the whole way through, though not always the same family. We bought it from the Zerbels, who had it twenty-one years. What gets handed over each time is the thing itself: the recipes, the grill, the room. Nobody has ever taken this place on wanting to reinvent it.

Home of the Roxy Burger

If you grew up here in the sixties or seventies, this needs no explaining. For everyone else: the Roxy Burger is a Benton Harbor and St. Joseph institution, and people have spent sixty years arguing about where to get a real one. Often imitated, seldom duplicated.

There were Roxys around St. Joseph and Benton Harbor for fifty years. The drive-in out on M-139. The one on Cleveland Avenue, which closed in 2017 and is a yoga studio now. They went out one at a time. Grand Crossing is what's left.

We bought this bar because otherwise it was going to shut, and that would have been a shame. The recipe came with it, along with the one thing you can't buy: the grill.

It's seasoned. Decades of juices from thousands of burgers, cooked clean by the heat and worked into the steel, and that is where the flavour actually lives. Put the same beef on a new grill tomorrow and you don't have the same burger. So the grill isn't going anywhere.

It holds twelve to sixteen at a time. That's the entire capacity of this operation. It's why the phone starts ringing at half past ten and doesn't stop, and why on a Friday you might wait. We're not fixing either of those. Fixing them is how you lose it.

About the word "dive"

Read our Google reviews and you'll hit the phrase pretty quickly. People call Grand Crossing a dive bar, and then, almost every time, they give it four or five stars. One recent visitor put it about as plainly as it can be put: the food is amazing, it definitely qualifies as a dive bar, and don't come expecting an upscale experience.

That's fair, and we'd rather own it than argue with it. This is a neighborhood bar. The lighting is what it is. The stools are red vinyl and they've been sat on. Nothing arrives on a slate board. What you get instead is a room that hasn't been redesigned to look like somewhere else, a bartender who'll remember you the second time, and a kitchen that has been making the same handful of things properly for decades. "Dive bar" in a town like this is shorthand for real, and we'll take it.

The perch

We're a few minutes from Lake Michigan, and the food reflects that more than anything else on the menu does. Yellow lake perch is the local signature: Cajun beer-battered, served as a basket, a bigger platter, or stuffed into a po'boy with lettuce, tomato, pickle and our own tartar sauce on a French roll. When the chalkboard by the bar gets rewritten, the perch is usually still on it.

The rest is honest bar-and-grill cooking: burgers ground fresh and stacked single, double or triple; wings bone-in, battered or boneless; philly sandwiches with peppers and onions; a Chicago dog dragged through the garden. Fries, tots, onion rings, cheese balls. Chili when it's cold out.

The room

Walk in and it's knotty pine on the walls, a long varnished bartop, and a shelf of liquor behind it that goes all the way up. Past the bar there's a dining room of high-tops and tables, and past that a pool table sitting under two green lamps, with the gaming machines and the jukebox along the wall.

TVs run through the whole place, which matters most in the fall. Football Sundays fill the room and stay loud until the late game ends. There's lottery at the bar. There's a pool table that's usually in use. And on a Tuesday afternoon in February there's a handful of regulars and a lot of quiet, which is its own kind of good.

We're closed Mondays. Every other day we open at eleven, noon on Sunday, and the grill shuts down before the bar does, so if you're coming late for food, call ahead.

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