Restaurants we'd send our parents to, breweries we'd send our brother-in-law to. Filtered by quadrant where it matters — sun on the dock at six, dinner by seven.
A laid-back waterfront spot on the Clam River channel into Torch Lake — arrive by car or by boat and tie up right at the patio. Burgers, baskets, deli sandwiches, and a Mexican menu alongside frozen cocktails, with outdoor seating that fills fast on a July Saturday. Open daily from 11 a.m. May through August; April and September–October run shorter, Thursday-through-Sunday weeks. Check the seasonal hours before making the drive in shoulder season.
A gas dock, pontoon-rental counter, and snack shack rolled into one, sitting at the mouth of the Torch River about two hundred yards from the sandbar itself. Pizza, ice cream, and packaged snacks cover the food side; eight pontoons rent by the day for anyone without a boat of their own. It's also where to gas up — including racing fuel — before or after a day anchored on the sandbar.
Joe Short opened this pub in 2004 inside a 100-year-old former hardware store on Bridge Street — the original location of what's now one of Michigan's best-known breweries. Twenty beers and Starcut Ciders run on tap, house-made pretzels and pizza cover the food, and local art and live performances fill the room most weekends. This is the pub that put Bellaire on the state's craft-beer map before the Elk Rapids facility existed.
The production side of Short's operation, purchased and renovated in 2008 to scale batches past what the Bellaire pub could handle — now brewing roughly 30,000 barrels a year. The Pull Barn taproom started as a summer beer garden in 2017 and went year-round and indoor in 2021, with lake views and twenty beers on tap, all brewed on site. Worth the short detour south of the Chain of Lakes for the completists.