Little Grill Collective
| Little Grill Collective | |
|---|---|
South on N. Main Street (Rte 11)
|
|
| Restaurant information | |
| Established | June 2003 |
| Current owner(s) | worker-owned cooperative |
| Food type | healthy home-cooked |
| Street address | 621 North Main Street |
| City | Harrisonburg |
| County | Rockingham |
| State | Virginia |
| Postal/ZIP Code | 22802 |
| Coordinates | 38°27′22″N 78°51′51″W / 38.456147°N 78.864302°W |
| Seating capacity | 48 |
| Website | lilgrill |
Little Grill Collective is a worker-owned cooperative restaurant in Harrisonburg, Virginia in the United States. It was started in June 2003—in a building that has been operating as a restaurant since the 1930s. It is a member of the Downtown Dining Alliance and the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. It is known for its quirky, eclectic, down-home atmosphere, with boxes of old Trivial Pursuit cards on the tables.
The Little Grill has been a restaurant in Harrisonburg, Virginia since the 1930s; before that it was a bathhouse for a nearby swimming pool. In the early 1980s, Christopher Boyer, working for then owner and "master chef" Maria Prytula—a Ukrainian-born artist and poet (d. 2012)—started renting the place out on weekend nights to present rock shows and theater. The restaurant's "hippified" atmosphere began during this period. Chris bought the restaurant in 1985 with blues musician and Little Grill cook, Bob Driver—at which point the diner became a full-service restaurant serving three meals a day, with live entertainment on the weekends. John Eckman bought out Boyer's share of the business in 1986, and he and Driver sold the restaurant to Tom Kildea in 1990. Kildea sold the restaurant to his former employee Ron Copeland in 1992.
Copeland introduced menu changes aimed at appealing to healthy-minded diners and vegetarians. He also removed from sale all products produced by multinational such as Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Miller, Coors, and Folgers from the restaurant.
Copeland's initial contribution was a Free Food For All Soup Kitchen, which served hot, homemade noon meals at the diner without charge to "anyone in the world" every Monday from October 1992 on. This soup kitchen led to the long-term creation of Our Community Place which now exists in a former Salvation Army building across the street.
...
Wikipedia