Before Canal Park became one of Duluth’s busiest tourist destinations, it was a rough stretch of warehouses, junkyards, and industrial buildings pressed against the edge of Lake Superior. In the mid-1970s, it wasn’t the kind of place most people looked at and thought, “This area needs a restaurant.”
But Mick Paulucci and Andy Borg believed otherwise.
When they opened Grandma’s Saloon and Deli near the Aerial Lift Bridge in February 1976, they embraced the neighborhood rather than apologizing for it. Much of the décor was sourced from salvage yards and antique shops, creating an aged, industrial feel that matched the surrounding warehouses and shipping buildings. Even their story about Grandma Rosa Brochi was largely invented as part of an early marketing campaign designed to lure people down to this forgotten stretch of waterfront for burgers and beer. The mythology was manufactured, but the instinct behind it was sharp. Every place needs a story.
Grandma’s opening day was chaotic. Customers poured in and overwhelmingly ignored the counter-ordering system, sitting down in booths and waiting for table service that never came. By the end of the first night, the owners knew they needed to adapt to the customers’ needs.
Hosts and servers were added almost immediately, and within weeks, Grandma’s had begun building the loyal following that would help transform Canal Park entirely. By the early 1980s, it had become one of the most recognizable restaurants in Minnesota outside the Twin Cities, with tourists lining up on summer weekends and the dining room expanding repeatedly to keep pace.
At the same time, Duluth itself was changing around it. Shipping and heavy industry were declining, and Canal Park was beginning its slow transformation from an aging industrial district into a tourism and entertainment destination. Grandma’s didn’t just benefit from that transformation; it helped drive it by becoming an anchor for revitalization.
Reading through old Grandma’s recipes, it’s the quieter menu items that feel most tied to what Duluth was like in the 1980s. A hearty Beef Barley Soup makes sense here near the big lake. It’s practical, flavorful, and filling. It’s completely unpretentious, which is probably why it fits so naturally into a restaurant that carved icon status out of a former junkyard.
The combination of Midwestern charm, hearty food, and a unique setting is exactly what makes a place an institution. It isn’t just nostalgia. It’s how certain restaurants get woven into the rhythms of a place, until it becomes genuinely hard to imagine the city without them. Canal Park without Grandma’s now feels almost unthinkable. Which is remarkable, given that fifty years ago, the whole neighborhood felt like something the city had already given up on.
Beef Barley Soup
Ingredients
- 8 oz. onions
- 8 oz. celery
- 8 oz. carrots
- 8 oz. cabbage
- 1 lb. beef round steak
- 2 to 3 qts. beef stock or beef consomme
- 1 garlic clove
- 6 oz. barley
- 1 12 oz. can tomatoes
- 4 oz. butter
- Salt and pepper to taste
Instructions
- Dice vegetables; cut meat in strips; prepare beef stock. Mince garlic; cook barley and rinse. Cut up canned tomatoes.
- Have all ingredients ready. Place butter in 4- quart pot with garlic, add onions, celery, carrots and cabbage and cook until half done or transparent.
- Add meat, cook just until meat is brown. Add stock and bring to boil and simmer 1 hour. Add barley and tomatoes and simmer another ½ hour.
