The Club Car Grille and Dave's Bar

KALAMAZOO COUNTY, MI — “If you didn’t leave here full, fat and happy we didn’t do our job,” said Brian Carter, co-owner of The Club Car Grille.

The restaurant, located at 6225 W. D Ave. in Alamo Township, just north of Kalamazoo, prides itself on serving hearty, affordable meals for breakfast, lunch and dinner. That, and treating guests like family.

A popular spot with regular customers coming in morning, day and night, The Club Car Grille, built seamlessly into an old retired Denver Rio Grande railroad club car, also attracts train buffs from near and far.

The dining car, manufactured by the Pullman Railroad Company in 1910, is filled with numerous original features from the brass light fixtures, to brass window pulls and fully-intact original window glass.

“It has a long history of where it started, where it went and how it ended up here,” Carter said. “But it’s been sitting here since the early 90s.”

That history began with the car riding the rails in Colorado for 50-plus years. In the mid-60s it became part of the Canadian Excursion Service and then later traversed the rails in Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula before servicing the Kalamazoo Lakeshore & Chicago Railway and later coming to its final stop along Kalamazoo County’s D Avenue.

The train car first opened at its new home, as a fine dining restaurant, in the mid-90s.

Carter, 40, and his mother, Penny Spencer, 62, purchased the train car and restaurant in September 2016. Vacant for about a half dozen years, Spencer said it took four months to clean it up and get it ready to reopen.

The décor, heavy on all things rail, continues to be a work in progress, and about half of what adorns the walls of the train car and the adjoining structure has been a gift from one of the many regulars who consider the restaurant a second home, Spencer said.

“It’s nice, because you get to come in and you see something brought, that was from you,” Carter said. “It’s like having a piece of you hanging in the restaurant.”

And for Carter and Spencer, it’s a reminder of how much they love their guests.

Having just celebrated their fifth anniversary since opening, the restaurant — which survived a fire downstairs in 2018 that prompted a nine-month closure, and a pandemic — will soon add a new family-owned establishment, Dave’s Bar, in the space below the restaurant.

The bar, not named after any specific person, is pulling its name from nearby D Avenue, abbreviated on street signs as “D Ave.” While it will, no doubt, cater to a bit of a different crowd than the upstairs restaurant, it will be a bar for everyone, Carter said.

Expected to open in mid-February, the bar will feature its own kitchen and menu, vintage games such as an old-school Detroit Pistons pop-a-shot and Ms. Pacman, and a couple brand new pool tables. There will also be space for live music both inside and on the lawn out back, where cornhole tournaments and other activities will take place in the summer months, Carter said.

Affordability will again be central to the concept. And while bar guests while enjoy a simple menu of pizza, burgers, wings and other fried bar foods, nothing’s changing upstairs in the Club Car Grille, he said.

The five-year-old, family-friendly establishment is well known in the northern parts of the county for its breakfast plates that start at $3.99. And just about everything checks in at under $10 with favorites including the four-egg omelets, chicken-n-waffles, corned beef hash-n-eggs and skillets such as the train wreck, the latter of which consists of scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon, ham, sausage, cheese and toast.

Another house specialty is the country eggs benny, which features a sliced buttermilk biscuit as its base and is topped with sausage patties, two eggs, smothered in sausage gravy and served with salsa and sour cream.

Moving beyond breakfast, diners routinely come in for burgers, Reubens made with in-house, beer-braised corned beef, massive club sandwiches, enormous country fried steak and nightly scratch specials. Appetizers also include wings, poutine, cheese curds and frickles — that’s fried pickles in case you’re wondering.

“When you walk in, you think old style train,” Carter said. “We couldn’t think of anything else to come up with other than old-style, comfort food — things that match our local area but make you feel good too.”

There’s all-you-can-eat fish fries on Fridays and breakfast buffets on Sundays. The grill, which offers a full bar menu morning, day and night, also offers up a salad bar on Fridays and Saturdays.

Traditions such as turning the train car into the Polar Express at Christmas time had to hit the pause button due to the pandemic, but Carter hopes that things will be back to normal soon.

The spacious restaurant, which also boasts a 40-person private banquet room with a fireplace, is open from 10 a.m. - 8 p.m. Wednesday-Friday, 8 a.m. - 8 p.m. Saturdays and 8 a.m. - 2 p.m. on Sundays. For more information, visit theclubcargrille.com or call 269-775-1267.

For more information on Dave’s Bar, likely to be open by mid-February, go to drinkatdaves.com.

Seeing empty grocery store shelves again? Here’s why.

Report: Michigan worried Jim Harbaugh would take Raiders job

Last known surviving Gibson ‘Gal’ honored by Kalamazoo leaders prior to her 100th birthday

Michigan’s Best Local Eats: WL Social House offers new menu, look and live music in Kalamazoo

Kalamazoo water bills could go up $100 per year as city tries to ‘catch up’ on infrastructure work

Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission.

Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement, Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement, and Your California Privacy Rights (User Agreement updated 1/1/21. Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement updated 5/1/2021).

© 2022 Advance Local Media LLC. All rights reserved (About Us). The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Advance Local.

Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site.