Grumpy's Is the Best Bar in the Twin Cities

You might be drinking with Macaulay Culkin—or with George, Jimmy, Bud, and Howie.

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The blue-gray stucco building on the corner of 4th Street NE and 22nd Avenue has housed a bar continuously since 1906, when blue-collar Poles and Croats came in to drink Schlitz. It functioned as a cop bar called Zurbey’s until Russian New Year’s (that is, mid-January) in 1998, when two guys in their early 30s, Pat Dwyer and Tom Hazelmyer, assumed the contract for deed to the bar and renamed it Grumpy’s. 

They didn’t make any drastic changes to the room. Same terrazzo floors, same cheap wood paneling. The flocked wallpaper has hung behind the bar since the ’70s, when the funeral parlor on Johnson and 29th gave Zurbey’s its leftovers. 

But over the past 20 years, an inevitable accumulation of stuff has come to define the Grumpy’s aesthetic. For instance, one of the bar’s regulars bequeathed a State Fair seed-art portrait of Sasha the Hamm’s bear (it didn’t come with a blue ribbon). And Dwyer collects antique beer ephemera, like vintage Schmidt cans, Grain Belt wall sconces, and Guinness posters. One of Grumpy’s original bar staff, Tony Zaccardi—now owner of Palmer’s Bar on the West Bank—was a garage-sale maven, and he left another Hamm’s bear for posterity.

Dwyer and Hazelmyer’s most notable design legacy may be the no-slip stainless steel diamond plate that lines the bathrooms from floor to ceiling and protects the front of the bar. Dwyer praises the surface material—usually found on construction-site ramps or custom toolboxes—for being easy to clean. Specifically, punk-rock stickers don’t stick to it. There is a smooth stainless rubbish bin attached to the bar that looks sticker-friendly, but it’s almost completely covered with union stickers already, and Dwyer says that if some punk overlays a band sticker on top a union sticker, “the band will answer personally to me.” 

This is a good time to point out that before buying into Grumpy’s, Hazelmyer owned the punk-rock record label Amphetamine Reptile. (The name is a wacko mondegreen of an old Motörhead lyric.) Hazelmyer, in fact, still runs the label out of the office upstairs from the bar. But the typical Grumpy’s patron has always been more flannel/black jeans than chartreuse mohawk/safety-pin septum ring. Hazelmyer curated his band roster to reflect his catholic tastes in profane noise bands—if bands like Gay Witch Abortion and Lubricated Goat can even briefly exist in the same sentence as the word catholic. And in a similar way, the crowd and vibe at Grumpy’s reflects Dwyer and his staff’s shared ethos. 

And yes, that means some night you might be lucky enough to belly up in front of a bona fide local rock-and-roll local legend, like Dillinger Four’s Patrick Costello—he bartends a few nights a week—or Sean “Har Mar Superstar” Tillmann. (Hazelmyer signed Tillmann, then fronting a hardcore band called Calvin Krime, to his first record contract when he was a teenager.) And you might see one of Tillmann’s celebrity buddies: He brought in Macaulay Culkin for a drink one Christmastime.

But who needs the stars when you’re drinking during daylight hours? From shift to shift and year to year, Grumpy’s favors the regulars who’ve been sitting there for decades. 

Nick Schenk, the Columbia Heights grad who wrote Gran Torino, based Clint Eastwood’s character on Grumpy’s regulars George, Jimmy, Bud, and Howie. 

We tend to romanticize blue-collar dive bars, but a lot of us work desk jobs. And at Grumpy’s, you don’t have to pretend either way. In fact, while plenty of customers drop in after work, they’re probably not talking about work. “I own a bar where everybody’s welcome,” Dwyer says, “whether you’re wearing tattoos or a golf shirt.” 

Twenty years in, there’s a circadian rhythm to Grumpy’s: The wizened daydrinkers yield to a middle-aged happy hour before it gets all witchy and millennial after midnight.

In the middle of all the comings and goings stands Dwyer, the pugnacious owner dude who moved up from Chicago to go to college at St. John’s in the ’80s, largely because he loved Hüsker Dü. Through his early years in Minneapolis, Dwyer day-jobbed at record stores and bike shops before going to work at AmRep. But these days, he looks and acts like he’s always been a bar owner. His fleshy face gets a little flushed after a few beers, and you can tell he’s having a blast spinning hardcore records at a volume that’s just polite enough to accommodate a  passionate discussion of enrollment numbers at Chinese immersion schools. 

He’s still in the bar all the time. During most Friday happy hours, Dwyer can be found at the patio grill, flipping harissa sausages or some such, in order to put out a free lunch. And through Dwyer, Grumpy’s is constantly throwing an impromptu fundraiser for somebody down on their luck. For two decades now, they’ve sponsored a softball team, the Mudpuppies. And they donate the proceeds from their scrap aluminum (think of all those tallboys) to the Russian Orthodox church down the street. 

All these efforts hint at the reality that creating an inclusive barroom doesn’t happen without some aggressive social engineering. Some of that signaling has targeted the old white guys in his bar. Dwyer’s first hire was Dawn Kuehl-Miller, a tough lady from the punk band Smut. His second was Zaccardi, a dreadlocked African-American barback. This wasn’t a place where you could use the N-word or talk about “broads.” “I lost a lot of customers that way,” Dwyer says, without regret. 

The main challenge now is the opposite: Nordeast is gentrifying. There’s a James Beard Award–nominated restaurant where the strip club 22nd Ave Station used to be. Dwyer isn’t given to lazy nostalgia on that count. “I’m not a fan of cocaine or prostitution,” he says. “I don’t miss a lot of the rougher elements of Northeast. What I hope we hold onto is St. Mary’s Russian Orthodox Church, Kramarczuk’s, Sikora’s, the history and the culture of the neighborhood.” 

He’s encouraged that Tillmann just bought a house a few blocks away. His customers are raising families here again. “This place is going to be here 20, 30 years,” he says. 

A great bar is representative of the people who live nearby, but remains welcoming to those who don’t. You should be able to get a beer or something harder, but fancy cocktails aren’t a necessity. It would be nice if you could order a bite, but gourmet food isn’t the biggest priority, either. (Grumpy’s does offer chips and 13 varieties of Heggies pizza.) A person should be able to meet her friends after work, or get a drink when she doesn’t have to work (or maybe especially when she has to). And pick-up joints are a bummer, but a lonely person should have the option to become unlonely. 

Grumpy’s is pretty great at a lot of this stuff. But it’s best at being itself.   

Read up on 56 other bars that we named the best in the Twin Cities.