108 E. State StreetThat ice storm was something, eh.
We spent most of the weekend at J’s parents house in St. Joseph County. We lost power Wednesday night, stayed at a hotel Thursday night, then headed south for the weekend.
We had to make a couple of trips back to Kalamazoo on Saturday. L had ice skating really early in the morning at Lawson Ice Arena. Once she was done, I asked J to check on the house before heading back south. It was a really good thing I told her to check the basement.
We didn’t have pipes burst, but I made a really stupid mistake. I ran water so the pipes wouldn’t freeze…but one of the ones I turned on drained in to the basement sump pump…which needs electricity to pump out…which we didn’t have. By the time J got home, there was about two inches of water in the utility room.
I didn’t want to leave that water on the floor so I headed back to Kalamazoo to clean it up. It’s not easy to pick up that much water without a shop vac but I figured it out with mops and dust pans. I got it all up then headed back to the warmness of my in-laws place.
Getting up early to skate and cleaning up water made us all tired. We had talked about going to South Bend to ice skate but everyone was pretty exhausted.
We needed dinner though. J’s parents are in Florida so there is no food in the house and we didn’t want to mess up the kitchen and dirty dishes.
I suggested a place we haven’t been to yet in nearby Colon. J was on board so we got the kids together and went to an early dinner.
Curly’s Bar & Restaurant is a staple in downtown Colon. The restaurant sits right on the corner of State Street (M-86) and Blackstone. The restaurant has been around for several decades but was rebuilt in 2013 after a fire destroyed Curly’s and Papa Mancino’s pizza. The new restaurant actually expanded with the purchase of another building next to the two destroyed by the fire.
The restaurant is the gathering place in downtown Colon. The layout is really just one wide open high ceiling room with tables and a large bar. The concrete floors and open ceiling make it a little loud but it’s what you expect from a small town bar.
There are tables packed in to the space except for the back part of the room near the bathrooms. There are two pool tables which, surprsingly, my kids didn’t ask to play…..not that either one of them know how to play pool, but it’s still a game and my kids want to play any game.
There’s no menu posted on their website which I found really weird. I knew we’d be ok because I knew they had pizza and I knew it was a bar so there would be options for us. Weird they have a website and no menu though.
Everyone ordered pops to drink except me. It was a rough day. I wanted a beer. I ordered a Two Hearted and the waitress brought me a bottle. Two Hearted always tastes good but it really tasted good on this particular day.
Everyone kind of just wanted pizza so I put in an order for a large pizza with pepperoni on half and just cheese on the other half. The pizza is kind of a standard crust with cheese all the way to the edges. B got a little mad at me because I was cutting his slice up in to smaller pieces but its the kind of pizza where I knew the cheese was going to slide off on the first bite. There’s a lot of cheese on top of a sweet sauce. The pizza was good but I could have gone for a little more sauce with as much cheese as was on it. I had the pepperoni side pretty much to myself. L ordered something else so she wasn’t eating it and J and B stuck to the cheese side. We ended up going home with a couple of slices which I ate later that night as a midnight snack.
L was going to eat pizza but she saw Mac & Cheese on the kids menu. Not just regular ol’ restaurant Mac & Cheese but Kraft Mac & Cheese. You know…the stuff I could make for her at home. She wanted the mac and cheese and she devoured it so no complaints from us.
The kid’s meal came with a side of fries. L ate about half of them. They were pretty simple frozen skin-on restaurant fries. I grabbed a bottle of mustard and finished off what she didn’t eat.
Our bill for dinner was right around $30. That is sooo much cheaper than we have been spending at meals but ordering a pizza for the table really helped.
Curly’s Restaurant & Pub is the type of bar all small towns need. It’s a gathering place for the community…which a lot of small towns have…but it’s one that has tasty food too.