Next Door is an oddity among Muskegon & Norton Shores restaurants – if you don’t know where to find it, you wouldn’t know it exists.  While Next Door is the other half of the well-known Pints & Quarts, there is no sign to guide you in.  Nothing on the building, nothing in the strip mall list of stores, their hours aren’t even listed on the door.  We wouldn’t go as far as to consider it a kind of secret hidden place, but you’ll still only come across it by accident or by someone telling you.

Next Door rose from the ashes of two other properties owned by the Harris group, CF Prime and Verdonis.  CF Prime closed completely, while Verdonis became a catering business.  Occupying the same ‘other half’ of Pints & Quarts that CF Prime did, Next Door banks hard on their wood oven pizzas.  The wood pizza stove in Next Door came from Verdonis, and a chunk of the staff worked at one or both places.

Next Door’s vibe is more open, like a hang out you would go to instead of a straight-up restaurant.  The former event room of CF Prime is now home to a few couches, with the fireplace out in the open (you can still see the beam in the ceiling where it used to be blocked off).  The pizzas are fantastic but pricey.  They do run a Tuesday buy one/get one promotion, which is totally worth it.  If you like the two restaurants, you could even say it’s a solid one-two punch with buy one/get one burgers from Pints & Quarts on Mondays.

The pizzas below are (in order): Bianco, Yuppie, Popeye’s Gardner (minus the tomatoes and Spinach), Havanah, another Bianco, and Skee Town.  While the bottoms were never burned, they seem to like burning the edges.  (Is that a hip thing to do now?)  The Yuppie pizza was a huge let down – it was certainly not poorly made, but the ingredients are trying way too hard to be hip and edgy.  Instead of coming away with an interesting garlic and sweet flavor, it tasted like a well-cooked piece of tree bark.

Service was good, and the Next Door side has always been less hectic than the Pints & Quarts side.  Personal $14 pizzas aren’t exactly economical, and it’s a let down that they don’t at least have a $20 to $25-ish larger pizza you could split between two or three people.  Considering the more hang-out vibe of the place, having a single larger pizza to split amongst friends seems like a no-brainer.  But definitely swing on through on buy one/get one Tuesdays, and you will not be disappointed in the slightest.

Website: Next Door MKG, Specials
Social: Facebook

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