Glen Lake

Glen Lake is really two lakes tied together at the Narrows, the channel under the M-22 bridge where On The Narrows Marina keeps its docks. Big Glen runs deep and open to the east; Little Glen, to the west, sits close enough to the Sleeping Bear dune field that the 450-foot Dune Climb drops almost straight into its water — the dune field and the lake share a boundary you can watch from a beach towel. Climb it at 9 a.m. before the sand gets too hot to stand on, then swim it off at the Little Glen picnic area a five-minute walk from the parking lot. Glen Arbor is the size of a village — year-round population under a thousand — and runs a restaurant roster that would be unusual in a town ten times its size. Blu has a James Beard nomination and a dining room built around the Sleeping Bear Bay sunset. La Becasse has been serving French country food out of a crossroads building in Burdickville since 1980. Trattoria Funistrada took over the old Glen Lake Inn on Big Glen's east shore in 2000 and has run Italian out of it ever since. None of this reads like a small-town food scene; it reads like a food scene that happens to be small. Cherry Republic anchors the middle of it — a campus on Lake Street with a winery, a brewery, a restaurant, and a retail hall selling nearly two hundred cherry products, none of it replicable anywhere else in the state. Empire, ten minutes south, holds the park's visitor center and Grocer's Daughter Chocolate. Burdickville, at Big Glen's south end, is quieter — a French restaurant, an Italian trattoria, and a milkshake stand that's been there since 1986. The season runs Memorial Day through Labor Day for most of it; the farmers market and Glen Craft Marina both close earlier than the restaurants do.