Sometime within the next few months, Cedar Rustic Inn will officially adopt the name Big Cat Brewing Company, as owners Aaron and Nikki Ackley transition their cozy, popular restaurant just north of Cedar into a brewpub. The metamorphosis has been five years in the making, as chef Aaron became more interested in microbrews and decided he wanted to broaden the restaurant’s appeal to also include the millennials and young professionals who have grown more visible in the Traverse City region.
When you walk through the dining room at the Cedar Rustic Inn (by the blinker just north of Cedar) on a warm evening, you pass through the back door into a cozy and charming courtyard that is shaded with umbrellas amid young maples and birch trees surrounded by tomato and lima bean plants, peonies, hydrangeas, and flower baskets mounted on the wood walls. If it’s a Wednesday night you’ll probably see Bob Smith of Glen Arbor sucking on his fingers as he polishes off the full rack of ribs. (He claims that some of his charter-fishing customers from Florida recently brought some of those leftover ribs out on the Mariah for their lunch. When they threw the bones over the side it must have attracted the salmon, because the next several fish they caught had rib bones in their mouths! But that’s a fish story.)