MDRD

The Restaurant

MDRD occupies the twenty-seventh floor of the Amway Grand Plaza Hotel's Tower side — the property sits at 187 Monroe Avenue Northwest, the working downtown Grand Rapids commercial-core address with the historic 1913 Pantlind Hotel front fused to the modern Tower addition, and the Tower elevator climbs twenty-seven stories to the dining-room level — and has held the seat as the city's reference panoramic-view fine-dining destination since the kitchen's establishment. The dining room runs about a hundred covers across a single high-ceilinged glass-walled parlor with working floor-to-ceiling windows on every side, working brass-and-walnut fixtures, deliberately elegant low-light through dinner service, careful Spanish-influenced artwork and a deliberate modern-Spanish-luxury palette that reads as a working AAA Four-Diamond dining room rather than a chain-hotel restaurant. The twenty-seventh-floor elevation gives every table panoramic working Grand River and downtown-Grand-Rapids-skyline views.

The kitchen runs the modern Spanish format the way the format ought to be run with deliberate fine-dining discipline. The dining card runs through expressive working entrees, tantalizing shareables, careful working decadent desserts and a deliberate lavish-libations programme — beef tenderloin steak finished with piquillo pepper and black garlic sauce, lightly salted cod finished in working pil-pil garlic sauce, careful patatas-bravas openers, working Spanish-tapas plates suitable for shareable opening courses, hand-rolled paella for the table and a dessert programme that pulls from the working Spanish-pastry calendar. The format reads as a careful chef-driven modern Spanish interpretation rather than a traditional fixed-tapas card.

Service is the older school of AAA Four-Diamond hospitality — career servers, a sommelier who can guide a working Spanish-and-international wine programme across the dinner progression, and a pace that treats a two-hour dinner as the format rather than the exception. The wine programme runs to about two hundred labels with deliberate Spanish, Champagne-and-sparkling, French-and-Italian-regional and working California depth — a careful curation that pairs across the working Spanish dining card. The twenty-seventh-floor Tower elevation with panoramic working floor-to-ceiling Grand River views gives every table a backdrop that no ground-floor downtown Grand Rapids restaurant can replicate — the sun sets across the Grand River through the dinner service. For a Grand Rapids evening that needs to register as the city's working panoramic-view fine-dining destination, MDRD is the standing answer.