SHREWSBURY — The hottest restaurant opening of the season may not be a sleek city bistro but a lodge-like edifice in Shrewsbury where the air smells as golden and buttery as a fresh batch of free popcorn.
For many who grew up going to the Ground Round, this is the smell of childhood. The restaurant chain, founded locally in 1969 as an offshoot of Howard Johnson’s, once had more than 200 outposts nationwide. There were in-state locations from Andover to Fairhaven, all now closed.
But this month, after a long hiatus, the Ground Round returns to Massachusetts. Located in Shrewsbury, the restaurant officially opens April 30, with festivities including live music. It has been serving dinner since April 3, rolling out the menu in stages and getting up to speed.
“We were trying to control it, but once word got out that we were open, there were people pounding at the door,” says Joe Shea, who is reviving the Ground Round brand with his wife, Nachi Shea. (Right now they are focusing on Shrewsbury, without plans to expand.) “It became a not-so-soft opening. We’ve been packed. There are people outside at 3:30 waiting, and we’re slammed at 4.”
So what’s it like to have dinner at the Ground Round again? We went to Shrewsbury to find out.
It’s a Tuesday evening, but it might as well be Saturday, given the dinnertime crowd. “It’ll be 40 minutes for a table,” says Nachi, seating parties at the host station. “Is that OK?” After all these years, what’s 40 minutes more? She gives us a buzzer and we settle in to wait.
The restaurant smells right: golden and buttery, eau de cineplex. Joe stands beside a glass popper, handing out baskets lined with green-checked tissue paper and filled with fluffy piles of bright yellow popcorn. The carpet has a geometric floral motif with yellow accents that match the detritus of an evening’s worth of snacking. The end-of-the-night vacuuming must be epic.
The soundtrack hasn’t changed since the last time we were here, even if the steady stream of what are now oldies is delivered from a jukebox app accessed by an on-screen QR code. And the crowd’s pretty similar, too: families, couples, friends, and teammates squeezing into booths in the dining room or perched at the bar watching a game.
This Ground Round has a New Hampshire cabin vibe, with log beams and walls and a stone fireplace with a chimney that reaches toward the high ceiling. A rustic metal chandelier glows overhead. It’s classier than the Ground Rounds I recall. Maybe that’s why the kids seem less crazed and more contained: As little hellions, we ran rampant at Ground Round birthday parties, absolutely lit on soda, throwing now-illicit peanuts all over the floor. Now, there’s just a little gentle frolicking, perfectly wholesome and adorable. When departing children reach their hands into a bowl of after-dinner Andes mints and their parents shout “justonejustonejustonejustone!,” they actually seem to listen. We would have laughed and crammed whole handfuls into our mouths, wrappers and all. The parents seem better behaved, too. It’s worth noting here that beer isn’t sold by the pitcher anymore.
We eat free popcorn until our mouths are as dry as the Sahara and watch the classic cartoons — “The Pink Panther,” “Tom and Jerry” — that still play on screens in the dining room. Before we know it, our buzzer is buzzing.
The menu is filled with comfort food classics: warm pretzels with cheese sauce and fried mozzarella moons with marinara, soups and salads, burgers made with a custom beef blend, pasta. The bestsellers have been the cheeseburger, steak tips, and fish and chips, the Sheas say.
There are some obvious nods to modern sensibilities: Soba with stir-fried vegetables and grilled tofu wasn’t on any Ground Round menu I ever saw. “It’s a new age,” Nachi says. “Food tastes have changed a little bit. People’s palates and dietary needs and awareness have changed. We’re making sure things are more elevated, a little healthier and less processed.” Executive chef Shannon Woodward and team make things from scratch rather than relying on frozen, prepackaged food. Steak tips are hand-cut; microgreen garnishes bloom on the plates.
We get an order of bone-in wings in Gold Fever sauce, a la the 99. It appears to have everything remotely barbecue sauce-related in it: mustard, ketchup, vinegar, seasonings, sweet stuff, spicy stuff, smoky stuff. Obviously, these wings are gone in five seconds.
The menu says the broccoli cheddar soup is a fan favorite, so we order a crock of that, too. It tastes like broccoli with cheese sauce, but in reverse proportions, with oyster crackers. It seems wrong not to have an iceberg lettuce salad on the table, but those days are behind us. There’s a Cobb salad that looks pretty good, though. It’s got grilled marinated chicken, gorgonzola, grape tomatoes, avocado, bacon, and more.
We order the Ground Rounder, a half-pound burger with beer cheese, bacon, and fried pickles on a grilled pretzel bun. If it’s named for the restaurant, it’s got to be good, right? Not wrong, but we’re left wanting more of the beer-cheese sauce, which is made with Ground Round lager (crisp, refreshing, $5 a pint!). It has soaked into the bun and vanished. Next time, we’ll try the classic cheeseburger.
The fish and chips is a portion that could feed three people, golden battered fish draped over a pile of French fries, adorned with lemon wedges and more microgreens. It comes with coleslaw, plus tartar sauce and ketchup for dipping. And the steak tips are the star of the show, cooked a perfect medium-rare. They come with mashed potatoes and green beans, but my son has ordered the dish, and our server knows her target audience: She used to work at the old Ground Round in Shrewsbury, she tells us. She offers him fries instead, and he is pleased.
There’s an old-timey scale at the back of the Ground Round, but it’s hard to imagine the return of the “kids pay what they weigh” promotion, which charged 12-and-unders a penny a pound and traumatized a generation. Speaking of trauma, a mascot-like figure named Bingo the Clown has been retired altogether.
“The clown … I don’t know if it was a full mascot, but it made appearances. We got mixed feedback on that, with people leaning toward it scared them as kids,” says Joe. (Don’t do a Google image search. Nightmare fuel.) In Bingo’s place is the Ground Round Hound, an unquestionably cute dog figure, along with a contest to name it.
But nostalgia unfurls its full glory when it comes to desserts. Yes, you can get an ice cream sundae in an upended plastic baseball helmet! Also the Ooey Gooey Flower Pot, chocolate pudding with crushed cookie “dirt,” whipped cream, and gummy worms, served in a flower pot with a mini plastic shovel for a spoon.
And nostalgia is what the Ground Round is really all about. The restaurant originally opened as an alternative to Howard Johnson’s, when that business’s traffic tanked along with highway travel during the 1973 oil embargo. “With a turn-of-the-century atmosphere, these sell nostalgia and nightly musical entertainment along with peanuts in shells and pitchers of beer. Ground Round is everybody’s idea of what life was like when grandpa was young,” reads a Forbes article from 1978.
We’re talking about a different turn of the century, but the rest rings true. The moment is right. We can go back again. Thankfully, Bingo the Clown won’t be joining us.
271 Grafton St., Shrewsbury, 508-845-9044, www.groundround.com. Sun-Thu 4-11 p.m., Fri-Sat 4 p.m.-1 a.m. (kitchen closes at 9). Reservations for 6 or more. Appetizers $8-$16, entrees $15-$36, kids menu $10, desserts $6-$10, cocktails $9-$14.
Devra First can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her on Instagram @devrafirst.
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