The Winchester

The Winchester has held its corner of Wealthy Street SE for well over a decade and is one of the fixtures that made that stretch a destination, alongside the independent shops and restaurants filling the blocks either side of it. The format is a gastropub — a full kitchen, a serious bar, and a room that works equally for a weeknight dinner, a weekend brunch or a late drink. It sits a few doors from Chartreuse Sisters and within an easy walk of Sacred Springs and Buffalo Traders Lounge, which together make the Wealthy Street corridor the densest concentration of alcohol-free-friendly venues in Grand Rapids outside the downtown core. Service runs 11am to 11pm Sunday through Wednesday and 11am to midnight Thursday through Saturday, with brunch on Saturday and Sunday from 11am to 3pm.

The spirit-free list is printed alongside the cocktails and built to the same specification. One For The Honey is the more considered of the two standing drinks: it uses Ghia, the bitter Mediterranean aperitif made from gentian root, elderflower, ginger and yuzu, and layers honey, lemon, strawberry puree and soda over it — a build that keeps genuine bitterness rather than falling back on sweetness, which is the failure mode of most zero-proof menus. Kelly Kapowski runs in the opposite direction and is unapologetic about it, putting strawberry and vanilla simple syrup with mandarin Jarritos under a marshmallow cold foam. Beyond the mixed drinks the bar keeps rotating non-alcoholic beer from Athletic Brewing and rotating High Noon seltzers, so there is a straightforward can option as well as a made drink. Earlier menus carried seasonal builds including Ugg Season, a pumpkin, cinnamon, lemon and soda combination, and The Afterlife, made with basil-infused simple syrup, grapefruit, lime and soda; those rotated out, which is a useful signal that the list is actively maintained rather than printed once and forgotten. Two practical notes. First, thewinchester.net has nothing to do with this business and now hosts unrelated casino content — the real site is winchestergr.com. Second, Wealthy Street is scheduled for full reconstruction from 2026 into 2028, so access and parking along the corridor will be disrupted; the restaurants stay open through it, but check before making a special trip.