While she might favor a beret, Martha Ryan actually wears many hats: Chef, restaurateur, cooking instructor, tour guide. They’re all based around Martha’s Leelanau Table, her popular Suttons Bay restaurant. Many of her regular customers accompany Martha on tours of Europe. “People like to travel with me,” she says, noting that while the trips are not billed as culinary tours, they invariably include stays in hotels with and stops at various restaurants, cafes and the like.
When the order came in mid-March to shut the doors of non-essential businesses throughout Michigan, including restaurants, Martha Ryan, her son Matt and his wife Andi had an ace in their back pocket. Though taken by surprise, they were able to immediately reconfigure Martha’s Leelanau Table, the European-style bistro in Suttons Bay, from a sit-down dining establishment offering breakfast, lunch, and dinner into a dinner-only take-out.
Susan Braymer is passionate about what she does. And what she does during the vast majority of her waking hours is run her and her husband Bill’s Laurentide winery in Leelanau County. Opened in 2012, Laurentide is the culmination of shared dreams for doing something in the wine business that started bubbling many years ago. Wine is part of Susan and Bill’s love story, on the table at celebrations, guiding their vacation destinations, and a source of endless learning and conversations.
In Northport, the nonprofit housing development corporation Leelanau REACH project hopes to establish a model for sustainable, quality affordable housing in both physical development and community philosophy.