21 | February | 2009 | Mid-Michigan Dining

Dispatch Sports Pub & Grill

21 02 2009

3004 W. Main Street
Lansing, MI 48917
(517) 484-7940
No Known Website
Menu

The Dispatch Sports Pub & Grill on Main Street in Lansing.

Saturday nights are usually relaxed nights for us. After being lazy all afternoon and watching the NASCAR truck race, we decided to go out for dinner again. We still haven’t been to the grocery store since getting back to Michigan so there’s not a lot of food in the house yet and since shopping hungry is a bad idea, we just found a bar. Quite a while ago, someone suggested the Dispatch Sports Pub & Grill.

The Dispatch Sports Pub & Grill is on Main Street near I-496. It’s kind of out there by itself. There’s not a whole lot in the area yet the parking lot was packed even though it was a crappy, snowy night. We trekked through the snow only to be confused again. There were two doors. Neither were marked. Neither gave any indication that it was the entrance. One of them was a little fancier than the other so that’s the one I chose. I peeked in through the window and it looked right so we went in. Good thing I chose that one. The other one would have led to the kitchen.

The inside is a typical sports pub. There are at least three pretty good size dining areas. The bar is the first thing you run into. From there, there are two dining areas off to the side. I took a second to look around and didn’t really see anything other than tables for large groups. Then I noticed some booths at the far end of the bar. The decor is all beer company freebies. It’s a comfortable, familiar setting.

The Dispatch near I-496 on Main Street in Lansing

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Tags: Lansing, Michigan, Restaurant, Reviews, Sandwiches, Sports Bar
Categories : Lansing, Michigan, Pub, Restaurant, Reviews, Sandwiches, Sports Bar

Quality Dairy – E. Jolly Rd.

21 02 2009

2625 E. Jolly Road
Lansing, MI 48910
(517) 272-1628
Website

This coming Tuesday is Fat Tuesday….and everyone knows what that means! Paczki’s! Alright, I’ll admit it. Up until about a year ago, I had never heard of a paczki. J grew up on the south side of Chicago which has a fairly large Polish population, so the Fat Tuesday treat was something she grew up with. Last year on the Monday before Lent, J and I took my mom to Chicago and while we were eating lunch downtown, J started talking about paczki’s. My mom likes sweets so we found a Polish bakery on the north side of town and brought home a dozen. This past weekend, I was at a mega mart with my mom and grandma when I saw a box of paczki’s….of course, we had to buy them.

In the last couple days, we had seen commercials for Quality Dairy and L & L Food Centers advertising that they both had the pastry in their stores. After eating lunch and a quick shopping trip, we needed dessert, so it was off to the Quality Dairy.

We chose the Quality Dairy on East Jolly Road at Dunkel Road because it was on the way home. This location is bigger than the other QD’s we’ve been to. Not only does it have all of the great Quality Dairy baked goods, but it also has a gas station and a laundromat. How great of an idea is that. You can throw a load of laundry in then go next door and get a doughnut. I’m usually happy if the laundromat has a pop machine so I can get a Pepsi while my clothes are washing. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Lansing, Michigan, paczki, Quality Dairy, Review
Categories : Bakery, Chains, Lansing, Michigan, Reviews

RiverHouse Inn

21 02 2009

310 W. Grand River Avenue
Williamston, MI 48895
(517) 655-4300
No Known Website
Menu

The Riverhouse Inn on Grand River Avenue in Williamston

Back in January, I made reservations for Valentine’s Day at the RiverHouse Inn in Williamston. It’s a place that I have been wanting to eat at since it opened late last summer. It just looked like a neat place. Our Valentine’s plans changed a couple times and we ended up back in Chicago after having to cancel a trip to Dayton. I told J as we were heading to Hot Chocolate (review HERE) on Chicago’s north side that I actually had reservations for a place in Michigan that I canceled. It worked out for the best. We loved our dinner in Chicago and the lunch menu at RiverHouse Inn was actually more our style, so our first weekend back in Lansing in quite some time, we decided to brave a snow storm and head to Williamston for lunch.

The RiverHouse Inn is a gorgeous old house that sits on the banks of the Red Cedar River on the west side of Williamston. The building was actually built in 1929 and for 77 years, it was a private residence. The current owners of the building planned to remodel the place into a bed and breakfast, but that never really happened. Instead, they opened a restaurant. The inside of the building still looks like a house. When you walk through the front door, you come to a hostess station in a hallway between two rooms. The sign said “please seat yourself” so we started looking for the best place to sit. There were no people in the two rooms you can see when you walk in, but I could kind of see a staircase that led down to a bar area. I figured that was the best place to go since there would at least be a bartender who could see we were there.

We headed through what was probably an old living room or dining room that had just a couple tables in it on our way to the bar. Every table in the house is in a pretty intimate setting. It’s really hard to describe the ambiance. It looks like they used the existing layout instead of trying to open everything up and only keep load bearing walls. The place just had a charm that you can’t get from a new building. Read the rest of this entry »