Customers eat lunch at the Main Street Grill Wednesday afternoon.
Kristen Dean, left, and Steve Ingham, right, sit at a booth in the Main Street Grill Wednesday afternoon in Centralia.
The Main Street Grill is located at 719 W Main St. in downtown Centralia.
Kristen Dean, right, talks to server Adele Ewing at the Main Street Grill Wednesday afternoon in downtown Centralia.
Steve Ingham, left, and Kristen Dean, right, pose for a picture inside the Main Street Grill Wednesday afternoon in downtown Centralia.
For Steve Ingham, one of the owners of Centralia’s popular Main Street Grill, restaurants run in the family.
“I’ve been doing it since I was about 6 years old,” he told The Chronicle Wednesday after the lunch rush.
Ingham’s grandparents had a restaurant in Puyallup with one of the state’s first liquor licenses after the Prohibition era came to close.
“At the time, it was a fancy dining room restaurant,” he said. “The restaurant still exists, but under new ownership.”
Ingham’s parents helped out at the restaurant, and naturally, he spent a lot of time there. Later, he and his sister each got into the business as well.
Ingham bought the Main Street Grill, then operating under the name Papa Ray’s, for the first time in 1996 and sold it in 2008. However, he and wife Kristen Dean bought it back in 2014 after they learned the business was struggling.
They changed the name that year to the Main Street Grill, and started over.
The locals have stayed loyal, Dean said, and treat the place as a home away from home — sometimes coming for both breakfast and dinner.
“This is a locals’ hangout,” she said. “There’s a good vibe in here.”
Unlike her husband, Dean is fairly new to the restaurant industry, but said she has come to enjoy running the front end of the house — particularly her interactions with customers.
Dean said the restaurant prides itself on being family friendly, and relishes competition with other local eateries.
“The better the restaurants, the more we keep people here (in Centralia),” she said.
Meanwhile, Ingham runs the back of the house, where the restaurant’s 13 staff members make almost everything from scratch in what used to be Centralia’s A&W restaurant.
“Ninety-eight percent of our food is all homemade,” he said.
That includes processing about 400 pounds of potatoes a week for hash browns, clam chowder and more. The Main Street Grill batters its own cod for fish and chips and makes from scratch about 9 gallons of sausage gravy each week.
“We hand-bread all our own fish and it’s incredible,” Ingham said.
The grill serves traditional home cooking, and its most popular items are big breakfasts, chicken fried steak, meatloaf and hamburgers. Lighter options and salads are also available, Ingham and Dean said.
