Hereford & Hops will serve its last dinner in downtown Escanaba on Saturday, October 3. The restaurant announced the closing on Facebook on Tuesday, August 26, saying it had been unable to maintain sufficient staffing to operate at the level of service its guests deserve.
Until October 3 it is open Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 4 p.m. until close, and closed Monday through Wednesday. That is the whole of the remaining schedule: five weekends, three nights each.
The announcement named no one. It credited the employees who had continued to work alongside the owners. It did not say how many people the restaurant employs, what becomes of the in-house brewery, or what happens to the space after October 3, and none of those answers are public yet.
What is on the record is the building, and it is worth knowing before it changes hands or changes use again.
624 Ludington Street went up in 1912 and opened in January 1914 as the Delta Hotel. Five stories, all brick, built to be the tallest building in town. For years it was the best hotel in Escanaba, which in a Lake Michigan port city running on ore docks and rail meant it was where you stayed when you came to do business.
Hotels of that generation across the U.P. mostly did one of two things. They burned, or they emptied out as the railroads thinned and the traveling salesman stopped coming. The Delta did neither. It became the Bishop Noa Home for Senior Citizens, which is a second full life for a building most towns would have lost.
Then it had a third. The Moody family converted the first floor into a steakhouse and brewpub, and Hereford & Hops opened in 1994. The Delta Apartments opened in the floors above the following year, so the building went back to housing people at the same time it started feeding them. The restaurant changed hands again in June 2024. The apartments are a separate operation and the announcement says nothing about them.
Thirty-two years is long enough that a good deal of Delta County has a Hereford & Hops occasion attached to it. It ran a grill-your-own steak service and a Mongolian grill, and it brewed its own beer on site, which was not a common thing to find in Escanaba in 1994 and is a large part of why people drove in from outside the county for it.
The stated reason is staffing, and that is the same sentence turning up behind restaurant closings across northern Michigan. It is worth being precise about what it means. Not that nobody wants to work: that a dining room of that size needs a certain number of trained people standing in it on a Friday night, and a small city with an aging population does not always have them to spare.
The other Escanaba places are working the same problem from the other end. The Swedish Pantry sends a shuttle out to bring people in for breakfast. Getting customers to the table was never really the hard part downtown. Getting enough people behind the pass to serve them is.
If you have been meaning to go, the calendar is short and public. Thursday through Saturday, 4 p.m., through October 3.
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