Jeanmarie Harper, left, and Katie Henry stand in front of Mean Jean’s at 2201 Commerce Dr. in Grundy Center, which officially opened on Friday, Nov. 15. The restaurant offers a breakfast and lunch buffet and a full pizzeria menu five nights a week. Harper is Mean Jean’s owner; Henry, one of Harper’s five children, is assisting with the launch of the restaurant. PHOTO BY JAKE RYDER

GRUNDY CENTER — An area native is bringing decades of experience in the restaurant business on the East Coast back to her Iowa roots.

Jeanmarie Harper owns and operates Mean Jean’s at 2201 Commerce Dr. in Grundy Center, which officially opened on Friday, Nov. 15, after a two-week soft opening.

The restaurant, located inside the former Chad’s Pizza location, features a breakfast and lunch buffet seven days a week and a full menu five days a week in the evening hours, with take-out options available.

Harper is being assisted by Katie Henry, one of her five children who has experience in helping start up small restaurants, for the first month of operation to get Mean Jean’s up and running.

“We’re getting a lot of really, really good feedback from the Facebook page,” Henry said. “And Nick [Hitchings] is in the back, he’s very tightly-knit with the community and everything I’ve read and heard from them, people seem to be very pleased.”

Growing up in Grundy, Harper moved out with her mother just before graduating from high school in Pittsburgh in 1974. After a brief stint back in Grundy after high school, she returned to Pittsburgh, starting a family and otherwise staying busy.

“I was always working at something,” Harper said. “When my twins were little, I was a carnival person for five, six years, traveling the whole east coast with my twins.

She sharpened her skills at Roma Restaurant in Pittsburgh, where over the course of the next four decades she added more and more job titles to her day-to-day work at the establishment.

That wasn’t where the nickname “Mean Jean” started — Harper credits her five brothers that she helped raise in Grundy insisting that their sister was “so mean,” and eventually she just latched onto it.

“I’ve been called a lot of names at work,” Harper said. “Mean Jean, the b-word – lots of words. But people that grew up with me here in high school will know Mean Jean is very appropriate.”

Eventually, her brothers and mother passed, and her kids got old enough to embark on their own adventures.

“So I said, ‘You know what? I’ll go back to Grundy’,” Harper said.

Wilma Vos, the mother of one of Harper’s high school friends, was among those encouraging Harper to come back home.

“Wilma Vos would always say that we needed a breakfast place here in Grundy – ‘Why can’t you move to Grundy?'” Harper said. “It was her and Brenda [Biersner, Wilma’s daughter] who went house hunting to find me a place.”

Harper closed on her house in Grundy Center in late October 2023, two months before Vos passed at the age of 86.

Harper said that once the restaurant is fully operational, she will put a plaque in the corner of the front window in dedication to Vos.

“I loved Wilma. She was good to me and I was close with her,” Harper said. “I rolled a car with her daughter in it at 110 miles per hour and she still let Brenda keep riding with me. It’s sad that she passed and never saw this. I did this for her.”

The breakfast buffet features traditional fixings like meat, eggs, biscuits and gravy, pancakes, waffles, and more. The lunch buffet has a rotating menu that will often include pizzas, soups, salad, potato options, vegetables and at least one kind of meat like fried fish, broasted chicken or turkey rolls.

Harper also emphasized the importance of keeping prices affordable for her meals while still pricing meals fairly to support her business and her staff. The breakfast buffet is $10, seven days a week, and lunch is $11 six days a week, save for Sunday, where the price is $14.

“Someone may say, ‘You should do this, you should do that,’ and I’ll tell them they should go own their own restaurant and do whatever they want to do,” Harper said. “You’ll always get that one percent of folks — but 99 percent of the people you come across are going to be the most wonderful people in the world.”

In response to Vos’ wishes, Mean Jean’s was only meant to be a breakfast place at first, but Harper figured if she was doing breakfast, she would do lunch, too — and then heard from the community about the need for a pizza option in Grundy Center.

“I was very particular in doing this – I’m not here to take away from the Mexican place, the Chinese place, Landmark [Bistro],” Harper said. “A lot of buffets have ice cream, but I’m not here to take away from Spartan Freeze. I could have all the fancy coffees, but I don’t want to take away from Natural Grind. I want to do something that’s going to bring people back, to make them want to live in this community.”

Mean Jean’s breakfast buffet runs from 8 to 10:30 a.m. Monday through Saturday with lunch from 10:30 a.m.-2 p.m. On Sundays, breakfast is extended to 11 a.m. with lunch beginning at 11:30. The restaurant will also be open between 5-9 p.m. Thursday through Monday with the full menu. Mean Jean’s will be closed on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.