I ate my first fried cheese curd ever in the parking lot of a Culver's in Traverse City, standing next to my rental car with the door open because it was 88 degrees and I hadn't figured out the AC yet. I'm from Southern California and live in NYC now—I’d never had Culver’s in my life, and naturally, it was my first stop upon landing in Michigan. I went back several times throughout my visit up north.
That's the thing about Northern Michigan that nobody warns you about: it keeps handing you stuff you didn't know you'd been missing. The water, for one—you come around a bend somewhere past Elk Rapids and Grand Traverse Bay opens up turquoise and clear enough to see your feet in four feet of it, and you understand why people have been buying cottages up here for a hundred years and never selling them. (As someone who has only ever known the ocean when people say “beach”, I was honestly so shocked at how much Lake Michigan really looked like the ocean beaches I grew up with.) The top of the mitt has more shoreline than any of the lower 48 states. It has dunes that climb four hundred feet straight out of Lake Michigan and small towns strung along the coast like beads—Charlevoix, Petoskey, Harbor Springs, and so much more—and, out past the straits, an island where cars have been banned since 1898.
The throwback charm has always been here. What's new is what's grown up around it: design-forward hotels opening in villages of 1,600 people, James Beard–nominated chefs leaving Detroit to shuck oysters up north, wineries on Old Mission and Leelanau that are shepherding a growing wine movement that's positioning the region as the next best wine destination. It’s possible that Northern Michigan may be the best summertime spot in America that no one talks about—here's where to stay, eat, and play once you're there.
Where to Stay
The Dexter Hotel Elk Rapids
The newest reason to know where Elk Rapids is. Opened in May 2026 in a reimagined apartment building a few steps from the marina, the 29-room Dexter comes from Daniel Caudill, Shinola's former creative director, working alongside his Kinship Hospitality partner Kamron Bijeh-Apple, and the pedigree shows. Nearly everything in the building was designed and made in Michigan—the white oak furniture, the ceramics thrown by Traverse City potters, the drapery sewn by a local seamstress, the salon-style walls hung with work by Michigan artists—which gives the whole place a sense of belonging that most new boutique hotels spend years trying to manufacture. Downstairs, the Noble Lounge pours craft cocktails above the waterfront, and the airport is about 20 minutes away.
The Otis Harbor Springs
Set between two horse farms on the meadows outside Harbor Springs, The Otis is a beautifully renovated 31-key mid-century lodge that manages to honor the Birchwood Inn it used to be while feeling entirely of the moment. Rooms are dressed in custom furnishings, Frette linens, and Flamingo Estate products, and the property organizes itself around the Fireplace Lounge, a central gathering space serving light bites and cocktails from a chef duo out of San Francisco's James Beard–recognized NOPA. There's also Birchwood General, an on-site shop stocked with local goods and charcuterie, and a café pouring La Colombe for the mornings you'd rather not commit to anything. Harbor Springs itself, one of the prettiest harbor towns on the lake, sits just down the hill and is worth a stroll (and a cookie or two from Tom’s Mom’s Cookies).
Hotel Iroquois Mackinac Island
The Grand Hotel gets the postcards (and it’s def worth a visit), but the Iroquois is where you should stay if you'd rather be on the water than looking at it from a porch. The white clapboard Victorian sits directly on the shoreline at the edge of downtown, is family-run, with gardens tumbling down toward the straits and rooms that feels like a summer house someone has kept up beautifully. Freighters slide past the windows, bikes and horses clop by out front, and there’s an excellent restaurant to boot.
The Inn at Stonecliffe Mackinac Island
If the Iroquois is Mackinac's front porch, Stonecliffe is its quiet back garden. Built in 1904 and recently given a property-wide transformation, the Edwardian mansion sits on the island's bluff side, where fire pits and lawn games look out over the Mackinac Bridge and the straits connecting Lakes Huron and Michigan. The renovation kept the history and the restored apple orchard now supports beehives, chicken coops, and a garden. Come here to be reminded that Mackinac has an entire wooded interior beyond the fudge shops on Main Street.
Hotel Walloon Walloon Lake
Hemingway spent his boyhood summers on Walloon Lake, and the village finally has a hotel worthy of the literary real estate. Hotel Walloon is a polished lakeside property in the heart of a village small enough to walk in ten minutes, with water views, a proper dock, and a level of service that feels closer to the old Adirondack camps than to anything you'd expect this far off the interstate. The position is the real luxury: Petoskey and Boyne City are both minutes away, and the lake—deep, clear, and considerably quieter than its famous neighbors—is right outside the door.
Inn at Bay Harbor Petoskey
This is the grande dame of the stretch, a sprawling Victorian-style resort perched above Little Traverse Bay just outside Petoskey, all gabled rooflines and long waterfront lawn and sunsets that turn the entire bay pink. (Petoskey calls them million-dollar sunsets, and while that's the sort of thing a chamber of commerce says, in this case it holds up.) It's the full-service version of Up North—spa, pools, golf, rooms and cottages built for a week rather than a night—and downtown Petoskey's gaslight district is a short drive away when you want an afternoon of bookstores and boutiques.
Alexandra Inn Traverse City
Traverse City's hotel strip along East Grand Traverse Bay is (mostly) forgettable, which makes the Alexandra Inn feel like something of a rescue. Family-owned and run by third-generation hoteliers, the 32-room property opened in 2023 with a private sugar-sand beach, balconied rooms looking north toward Old Mission Peninsula, and Blush, the only waterfront rooftop bar in town. Warm cookies appear in the evening, local art hangs in every room, and the whole operation carries a personal quality that newer builds rarely manage. You're five minutes from downtown and three from the base of the Old Mission wine trail, which is the ideal position for a first trip.
Where to Eat
Farm Club Traverse City
Equal parts working farm, market, brewery, and restaurant, Farm Club sits on Lake Leelanau Drive just outside town and has been the region's best argument for eating where the food is grown since the team behind Loma Farm opened it in 2020. The menu is veggie-forward without being precious about it—the kitchen cooks whatever the fields have surrendered that week, and the beer is brewed on site—and the whole property is built for lingering, with a beer garden looking out over the growing rows and a market selling bread and produce on your way out. I enjoyed some fried zucchini along with my main dish of sausage and potato salad, but order whatever speaks to you. Tables can be hard to come by in July and August, but the garden takes walk-ins, and there’s often ample seating at the bar.
Umbo Traverse City
The buzziest opening of the summer, and it earns every bit of it. Chefs Sarah Welch—a four-time James Beard nominee and Top Chef finalist who spent years running Detroit's Marrow—and her husband Cameron Rolka, formerly of the Detroit raw bar Mink, left the city for Traverse City and opened this 25-seat oyster and seafood bar on Front Street in May. The room is nearly entirely bar seating by design, which means you end up talking to your neighbors and to the chefs whether or not you'd planned on it, and the menu runs to eight or twelve oyster varieties at a time alongside tinned fish and small plates built on Northern Michigan farms. There is nothing else like it for several hundred miles in any direction, and the room fills accordingly. Bonus: Walk two minutes down the road to Super Cone for some dessert after (the soft serve is the move, obviously).
Carriage House Mackinac Island
The dining room at Hotel Iroquois is the best table on the island, and it isn't especially close. You're eating essentially on the straits, with sailboats and freighters drifting past the windows, and the kitchen leans into that setting with Great Lakes whitefish handled the way it deserves to be. If dinner is beyond reach, lunch on the terrace is also a good bet. Request outdoor seating if possible.
Legs Inn Cross Village
At the northern end of the Tunnel of Trees, the M-119 drive you'll be taking anyway, sits one of the strangest and most wonderful restaurants in the country. Polish immigrant Stanley Smolak built Legs Inn out of fieldstone and driftwood across the 1920s and '30s, naming it for the row of inverted stove legs lining the roof, and his family has been serving pierogi, kielbasa, and gołąbki to generations of pilgrims ever since. The back garden looks west over Lake Michigan toward Beaver Island, and on a clear evening it is one of the great sunset dinners anywhere on the Great Lakes.
Dairy Grille Charlevoix
Every serious eating trip needs its counter-service reality check, and up in Northern Michigan it comes with soft serve. The Hayden family has been running the Dairy Grille on Bridge Street for more than fifty years, and the order isn't complicated: an olive burger—a Michigan institution the rest of the country has inexplicably declined to adopt—plus fries (or cheese curds) and a swirl cone or custard malt, eaten at a picnic table right outside. It's exactly the counterweight you'll want after a night of tasting menus. Make sure to bring cash.
North Perk Coffee Petoskey
The morning anchor in downtown Petoskey that does some killer coconut cold foam. Get your coffee, walk to the waterfront, hunt for Petoskey stones. If you need to grind some work out, there’s fast WiFi here, too.
Where to Play
Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore
The Midwest's most dramatic landscape: 450-foot sand dunes plunging into water so blue it reads Photoshopped. Do the Dune Climb if your quads insist (heads up that the hike on that famous main dune is steep, and there’s a hefty $3000 price tag to be airlifted up), drive Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive if they don't, and give yourself the whole day either way.
Swim in Lake Michigan
You’ll be surprised this isn’t a beach in the Caribbean, until you jump in and feel how cold it is. Yes, the water’s frigid, but it’s crystal-clear and freshwater—no salt, no sharks, no stingrays. Every town on this list has a beach; pick one and get in. (The beach at Charlevoix was honestly pretty great.)
Visit the Mushroom Houses in Charlevoix
Charlevoix's other great attraction is architectural, and it's strange in the best way possible. Earl Young—a University of Michigan dropout who never registered as an architect, never worked from blueprints, and stood all of five foot three—spent roughly fifty years hauling glacial boulders and Onaway limestone out of the Northern Michigan landscape and building houses that look like they grew where they stand: low wavy rooflines, cedar shakes drooping over the eaves like caps, walls three feet thick, ceilings scaled to a short man's sense of proportion. The clusters are in the Boulder Park neighborhood and along Park Avenue and Grant Street. Nearly all of the houses are private homes, so walk the blocks, shoot from the sidewalk, and be respectful. (When I visited, many residents offered to take photos of visiting tourist families.)
Mackinac Island
Take the ferry over (the crossing itself is the opening act), rent a bike, and do the full 8.2-mile loop around the island on M-185—the only state highway in America where cars are banned. Stop at Arch Rock, the limestone arch suspended over impossibly turquoise water, then let a horse-drawn carriage tour handle the interior. The island runs on hooves, fudge, and Victorian time, and you should surrender to all three. We’ve got a full guide here if you wanna go more in-depth.
Bonobo Winery
The Oosterhouse brothers' winery sits on the spine of Old Mission Peninsula, with tasting-room views that roll over vineyards to both arms of Grand Traverse Bay. Northern Michigan wine has gotten pretty legit—the Rieslings and sparkling pours especially—and this is a fine place to confirm it.
Drive the Tunnel of Trees
M-119 from Harbor Springs to Cross Village: twenty miles of narrow, centerline-free road canopied in hardwoods, with Lake Michigan flashing between the trunks. Take it slow, stop at Pond Hill Farm on the way, and end at Legs Inn for a reward you've now fully earned.
Michigan
