Then and Now: The iconic Ice House on Main

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The story of the Ice House on Main dates back to 1912, when it first opened as the Bryan Ice Company. Back in the day before air-conditioning, refrigerators, and the make-it-at-home ice cube, ice houses like the one at the far north end of Main Street along Martin Luther King Street in Downtown Bryan provided a modicum of year-round comfort for customers, particularly in the sweltering summers common to the Central Texas region.

The ice trade began in the latter half of the 1800s along the United States’ East Coast with the large-scale harvesting and transport of natural ice. By the beginning of the 20th century, the practice of creating artificial ice had been perfected and large blocks of ice were commonly transported by rail to places like the Bryan Ice Company. From there, ice was sold to commercial and residential customers for use in coolers and ice boxes.

Through the years, the iconic brick building with the Mission Revival façade, and the interior cork-lined rooms ideal for storing ice, has also been home to a grocer, a furniture manufacturer, a trade school, a John Deere dealership, and in the early ‘80s, a nightclub called Cell Block 5. The building was abandoned in the late 1990s, and the City of Bryan purchased it in 2007. Then, in 2014, the city gifted the venue to the community and economic development consulting firm, Advent GX. The deal was contingent on the ability of the company’s owners, Jose and Joan Quintana, to bring in the funded needed to restore the historic structure.

Familiar with this sort of challenge through his consulting work, Jose Quintana established what he calls a community-development partnership.

“That was really our only option to save the place,” he says. “We created the partnership in two phases and in loan amounts from $5,000 to $100,000. In the end, we secured 43 investment partners who had seen the successful redevelopment of Downtown Bryan south of our location and believed in our vision for what the venue could become.”

The 20,000-square-foot Ice House on Main banquet and event center opened in 2017 and enjoyed

immediate success hosting community gatherings, live entertainment, weddings and other large gatherings, including the acclaimed Town and Gown dinner, which Quintana devised to help “movers” from Texas A&M University get better acquainted with “shakers” in the local business community. Also contained within the old icehouse building is the Ronin restaurant. The establishment features family farm cuisine with menu items crafted from food harvested from the affiliated Ronin Farm located near Lake Bryan.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, event venues like the Ice House on Main were forced to cease operations. But now, more than a year later, the banquet and event spaces at the historic icehouse are abuzz with activity again.

To step inside the Ice House on Main is to step back in time. Throughout the structure, the walls are mostly original brick, and in the repurposing of the facility, about 90% of the original wooden floors were preserved.

The space possesses modern amenities within its throwback decor. Rather than the ballroom chandeliers featured at many luxury venues, the Ice House’s main banquet space is lit with strings of bulbs draped from the ceiling rafters. In the adjacent event space, the square configuration of the overhead light rigging suggests the temporary boxing ring that’s featured once a year during a benefit for the Bryan College Station Boxing Club. Concerts have also returned to the Ice House on Main.

“Another of the important elements to this culturally rich environment is our commitment to the local catering community,” Quintana says. “We are friends with many of the area’s top restaurants, and we’ve set up our facilities to provide them the ability to succeed with their clients.”

“We’re open to pretty much anyone our clients would like to bring in,” says Ashley Mullins, event manager at both the Ice House on Main and the Stafford Theater, another Advent GX redevelopment project in the Downtown Bryan area. “We've been asked, ‘Can a food truck come park outside so we can have tacos at our wedding?’ ‘Of course!’ is our answer.

“We’ve also heard, ‘Can Napa Flats come in the back and make wood-fire pizzas?’ ‘Sure!’ we say. ‘We can make that happen for you.’”

Food is at the heart of most events at the Ice House on Main. And Jose Quintana knows the inherent value in a quality dining experience.

“Once on a trip to Rome, the group I was with stopped for dinner at a little neighborhood restaurant close to our hotel,” Quintana says. “It was late and when we walked in; the owner told us he was closed. But after we chatted briefly, he welcomed us in, presented us a bottle of his best wine, fired up his oven and made us a late-night pizza for dinner,” he says. During the rest of their stay, they ate at his establishment every night and became friends. “I invited him to visit Joan and me in Texas. Four

months later he did, and he cooked for us in our own home, an experience we’ll always treasure,” he says.

“Through food, relationships are formed, ones that often transcend geopolitical and cultural boundaries and which bring people together unlike anything else,” Quintana says. “That’s what we want the Ice House on Main to be for our community.”