Up until May, I’d only ever heard about morels from chefs who spoke about them with the kind of excitement once reserved for clandestine Detroit loft parties. Maybe they knew somebody who knew somebody. Maybe they foraged the morels themselves. Either way, the mushrooms remained oddly elusive to me for more than a decade of eating and reporting my way across metro Detroit.
That changed at Trattoria Stella, the influential Traverse City restaurant housed within the Village at Grand Traverse Commons. As my server walked me through the menu, casually rattling off specials, she paused at one dish: “We’ve got a wonderful plate of morels tonight.”
To her, it was another seasonal special. To me, it was a Michigan rite of passage: baby’s first morels. Minutes later, a plate arrived piled with morels sautéed in garlic butter and minced ramp tops, served alongside grilled house-made tigelle. Their honeycomb-like caps trapped garlic butter in every crevice, and each bite delivered a concentrated burst of spring. Encountering morels for the first time felt like an introduction to northern Michigan itself.
When I told the server I’d never tried them before, she responded with the knowing confidence of someone initiating a newcomer into a local obsession. Indeed, I was a newcomer.
Plate of morels at Trattoria Stella. // Photo courtesy of Trattoria Stella
For years, I’d been hearing about a growing number of chefs, restaurateurs, and hospitality professionals who had traded the glamour and prestige of cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York for restaurant life in northern Michigan. I’d visited Traverse City before but only in passing. Having grown up on the West Coast, I’d never quite understood the pull of “Up North” life that seems almost universal among Michiganders.
But again and again, members of the restaurant industry described the same appeal: natural beauty, agricultural abundance, a tight-knit food community, and the rare opportunity to forge meaningful relationships with other chefs whose cooking is informed by what’s growing in or near their own backyards.
The Great Chef Migration
Among the pioneers who helped shape the region’s modern dining identity is Amanda Danielson, co-owner and sommelier at Trattoria Stella. Danielson grew up in Detroit before moving to Traverse City in 1999. Five years later, she, executive chef Myles Anton, and Paul Danielson opened Trattoria Stella, known for sourcing ingredients from northern Michigan farms.
Stella established a style of dining that celebrated local farms and seasonal ingredients long before “farm to table” became a ubiquitous marketing phrase. Between 2010 and 2015, Anton was named a James Beard Award semifinalist for best chef in the Great Lakes region five times, drawing national attention to a dining scene that was still flying under the radar.
Danielson says momentum has been growing for years, and there’s now a “renaissance of Detroit people coming up and really recognizing Traverse City as a great place to settle down and create their business and work their magic.”
Several years after Stella’s opening, chefs Eric Patterson and Jennifer Blakeslee moved to Traverse City from Las Vegas. Blakeslee, who grew up in northern Michigan, suggested returning home when she and Patterson began to discuss opening their own restaurant. The area’s farms, wineries, and access to fresh, local ingredients appealed to the pair, as did the chance to help define a dining scene still finding its footing.
In 2008, they built The Cooks’ House, transforming their vision into an intimate tasting-menu experience served inside a converted home. The restaurant became one of northern Michigan’s defining dining destinations, hosting visiting chefs from all over the country. Last year, the chef duo earned a James Beard Award nomination for best chef in the Great Lakes region, a nod to their role in shaping the region’s culinary identity.
Together, restaurants like Stella and The Cooks’ House helped lay the groundwork for a new generation of chefs who increasingly see northern Michigan not as a retreat from the food world but as a place to build a different one.
Photo courtesy of The Cooks’ House
Longtime Detroit chefs Sarah Welch and Cameron Rolka are among the latest to bring their talents to Traverse City, contributing to the region’s newest culinary chapter with the opening of Umbo in mid-May, just ahead of the unofficial start of summer.
Previously, Welch spent years making Marrow into a fixture of Detroit dining. Rolka, meanwhile, made a name for himself with Mink, the intimate Corktown oyster bar launched in 2019.
Umbo’s menu leans heavily toward seafood, with oysters, tinned fish, and Great Lakes-inspired dishes sharing space with ingredients sourced from nearby farms. The beverage program is equally ambitious: an all-Michigan wine list assembled by the couple and opening general manager Jessie Nigl, a Detroit hospitality veteran whose résumé includes Midtown’s award-winning Vecino.
A Visit to Umbo
To catch a glimpse of the couple’s plans for Umbo, I made the trip over on Mother’s Day weekend. The team was co-hosting a ramp festival with The Foxglove Farm, a wedding venue about a 30-minute drive north of downtown Traverse City.
The Foxglove Farm sits on the eastern side of the Leelanau Peninsula between Suttons Bay and Northport, where rolling farmland meets the turquoise waters of Grand Traverse Bay. By the time we arrived, everyone had gotten to work unpacking supplies and ingredients.
I ducked away for a bit to explore more of Foxglove’s sprawling, 140-acre property. The morning was overcast and cool, the kind of day in Michigan that never quite commits to warming up. At the bottom of a hill stood the farm’s immaculately restored century-old barn and event spaces, tucked into a wooded clearing. From there, I followed a winding path bordered by fields of winter rye and cherry orchards on one side and the distant blue expanse of the Grand Traverse Bay on the other.
When I emerged from my walk, guests were lined up, and the Umbo crew had assembled a functioning outdoor kitchen line. “We’re used to the catering clown show,” Welch joked as she moved between trays and bubbling stock pots. That clown show involved months of pop-ups, collaborations, and catering events that helped Welch and Rolka introduce themselves to northern Michigan before opening Umbo.
Photo courtesy of Umbo
When I had run into Welch in Detroit a year earlier, she told me she wanted her hands on as many aspects of running a restaurant as possible. And there she was, serving freshly shucked oysters dressed with mignonette made from ramps picked a few yards away beside a historic Leelanau County barn.
By midday, ramps had taken over the property. They surfaced in ranch dressing, atop hot dogs, alongside oysters, and folded into butter and pesto. Guests wandered the grounds clutching ramp-laced snacks while small groups followed co-owner Glenn Barnes into the woods, returning with paper bags bulging with freshly foraged bundles. Not the kind of scene you’re likely to see in the big city.
For Rolka, the advantages of proximity are especially evident when it comes to sourcing ingredients. At Umbo, chefs form direct relationships with producers operating at a scale that’s difficult to sustain in larger food cities like Detroit, where distance often places another layer between chefs and food growers. “It allows us to get that one-off thing from a small [vendor] who’s never going to sell more than 12 pigs a year,” Rolka says.
At one point, Nigl, who was busy taking orders inside the little hut, called out to me. “You should interview her,” she said, her eyes pointing to a red-haired woman standing nearby with her daughter. It was Danielson. The same Amanda Danielson whose restaurant I’d visited the evening before. I laughed.
Exploring Other Eateries
Less than 24 hours before my visit to Umbo, I had arrived alone with little more than a loose reporting plan and the feeling that if I simply showed up, the story might reveal itself.
I arrived on a Friday, and after dropping my bags at the Delamar, a waterfront hotel perched along west Grand Traverse Bay, I headed out in search of lunch. I found myself at Raduno, a daytime Italian restaurant and market stocked with fresh pasta and imported goods. The chicken Alfredo was so rich and comforting that it nearly derailed the rest of my food reporting plans.
It didn’t take long to realize how much of Traverse City’s dining scene fits within a surprisingly compact footprint.
The Cooks’ House sits just off Front Street across from The Little Fleet, a rotating campus of food trucks. Umbo is a few doors down. A short stroll away, Water Bearer pours coffee and matcha inside the Warehouse MKT development, its interior awash in the same blue-green hues that make northern Michigan’s shoreline feel almost tropical.
Nearby, Charles and Reid — where Faygo bottles and Motor City memorabilia cover the shelves — serves Detroit-style pizza squares convincing enough to win over even die-hard Detroiters. And Bubbie’s Bagels, where I custom-ordered a whitefish salad sandwich piled with ramp schmear and pea shoots, was worth the mile-long walk from my hotel.
I made it a point to touch base with the Umbo crew as soon as I settled in. Inside, curved marble counters wrapped around an open kitchen, while wine bottles lined dark walnut shelves beneath a canopy of trailing plants.
As we settled into conversation, the geography of Traverse City’s dining scene revealed itself as a man entered the restaurant to return a set of oyster forks he had borrowed from the couple for an event. I had no idea who he was until someone introduced him: It was Eric Patterson of The Cooks’ House.
In Detroit, chefs collaborate. They know and support one another. But geography has a way of scattering even the closest communities. Restaurants are separated by miles, freeways, neighborhoods, class divides, and long-standing racial boundaries. But in Traverse City, one of the state’s most celebrated chefs could quite literally walk down the street to borrow kitchen utensils from another pair of lauded chefs from downstate and return them a few days later — easy peasy.
Photo by Lindsey Mak Photography
Farther west on Front Street is Modern Bird, helmed by chefs Andy Elliott and Emily Stewart. Before relocating to Traverse City, Elliott ran the kitchen at the now-closed Chicago seafood favorite GT Fish & Oyster, while Stewart served as chef and head baker at Bang Bang Pie & Biscuits. In 2018, they left the Windy City behind, seeking an opportunity to build something of their own.
The couple spent three summers selling pastries at the Traverse City Farmers Market and hosting pop-ups around town. When they finally opened Modern Bird in 2022, they embraced what Elliott describes as “fine-casual” dining: seasonal cooking rooted in northern Michigan ingredients but filtered through a lighthearted Midwestern lens.
A Fresh Take
One night during my visit, the fine-casual philosophy arrived in the form of the humble corn dog. What landed on the table bore little resemblance to the foot-long versions I’m more accustomed to seeing at, say, the carnie section of the Hamtramck Labor Day Festival. Crowned with microgreens, draped in creamy mustard, and punctuated with bits of apple, it felt both playful and deeply considered. Beneath its indigo batter made with southwest Michigan-grown blue corn was a breakfast sausage instead of a hot dog — a small but brilliant swap that transformed a familiar Midwestern comfort food into a creation entirely its own.
I was still thinking about it days later. Not because it was elaborate. Quite the opposite. Like the morels at Trattoria Stella, the ramps at Foxglove Farm, and the pea shoots that seemed to appear everywhere else, it reflected a recurring theme of the weekend: chefs crafting menus around local produce.
When I arrived in Traverse City, I wanted to understand what was pulling so many chefs in the same direction. As I made myself comfortable on my return flight to DTW, the answer seemed surprisingly simple. I had stumbled into a tightly woven culinary ecosystem, where farmers, winemakers, chefs, and restaurateurs orbit the same few blocks and regularly cross paths in ways that feel almost impossible in larger cities.
This story originally appeared in the August 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
Dining and Cooking