Info

The Little Grill has been a restaurant in Harrisonburg, VA since the 1940's manifesting in many incarnations under many different owners. In the early 1980's, the Grill became hipified when a young man by the name of Christopher Boyer, working for then owner Maria Prytula, started renting the place out on weekend nights to present rock shows, theater, cheap beer and super spicy chili. Chris bought the restaurant in 1985 with blues musician and down home cook extraordinaire, Bob Driver, and The Little Grill became a full service, 3 meals a day restaurant with live entertainment on the weekends. John Eckman bought out Boyer's share of the business in 1986 - he and Driver sold the restaurant to Tom Kildea in 1990, and Tom sold the restaurant to his former employee Ron Copeland in 1992. Copeland's initial contributions to the Grill legacy were the Free Food For All Soup Kitchen which has served a hot noon meal at the Little Grill for free to Anyone in the World every Monday since October of 1992 and menu changes which made the restaurant more and more appealing to healthy minded eaters and vegetarians. Copeland also began a many years long trek to slowly rid the restaurant's product line of multi-nationals such as Coca-cola, Anhauser-Busch, Miller, Coors, and Folgers. In 2002, Copeland began attending regular meetings with a few of his workers and together they formed a worker-owned corporation called The Little Grill Cooperative which would ultimately, in June of 2003, purchase the restaurant from Copeland using what they called "community financing" to procure the sown payment. So on June 1, 2003, the latest incarnation of the Little Grill was born: The Little Grill Collective.