Fresh Lives Here: Creating Space for Diverse Voices
Michiganders love where they live, and they’ll tell you why. We spent time with some locals in some of their favorite places to learn about why they choose to live, work and play in Michigan.
While they had already built their careers and family in Grand Rapids, Nadia and Shatawn Brigham experienced something during their travels that inspired them to enrich their local community.
“We went to a wine bar called The Wine Institute of New Orleans,” says Shatawan. “I said to my wife, ‘We don’t have a space like this in Grand Rapids.’ Grand Rapids is Beer City, USA, but we don’t have a dedicated space for wine and jazz.”
While Shatawn has always been a wine enthusiast and is now a trained sommelier, neither he nor Nadia had a background in hospitality – Nadia is in philanthropy and Shatawn is in education. But sometime after their trip, Nadia woke up from a dream with an idea about a place called GRNoir.
“We come from a legacy of entrepreneurship on both sides of our families,” says Nadia. “We had a good experience with wine and jazz in New Orleans, and so all of that together created space to say, ‘Let’s launch something that this community has never seen before.’”
By tapping into their Grand Rapids networks and accessing resources geared toward small businesses, Nadia and Shatawn brought their vision to life in February 2021 – and they’re still going strong today. At GRNoir Wine & Jazz, guests can choose from a robust wine menu (and get recommendations from Shatawn himself) while enjoying the sounds of live jazz, spoken word artists or a weekly DJ.
While opening a wine and jazz bar during a pandemic may seem like a bold move, Nadia sees it differently: “Our ancestors created a whole genre of music that changed the world. Surely we can get through a global pandemic, so we did.”