Tucking in the comfort at the Cedar Rustic Inn
By Norm Wheeler
Sun editor
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.)
The location of the Cedar Rustic Inn and Longview Winery Estate Wines tasting room has a storied past. The intersection has been a gas station, a bakery, a pool hall, and Eddie G’s Roadhouse. In 2002, Aaron and Nikki Ackley bought the old building and made it a little bronze-casting foundry. In 2005 they “crunched the old place and hauled it off to Glen’s Landfill,” Aaron explains. Then they built the new combination restaurant and tasting room and opened for business in May of 2006.
Since then the Cedar Rustic Inn has become a popular mid-county mecca for excellent comfort food. On a recent warm-enough-to-eat-outside evening, Mimi (the Grocer’s Daughter) and I settle back in the courtyard. Jennifer brings a bottle of Cabernet Franc from the wine list comprised of local Longview Winery Estate vintages. It lives up to its description as “blackberry, plum, and spice with lingering and full nuances of black cherry, cacao, and vanilla.” We find it to be a crisp good-with-food red. The Longview Winery Estates is owned by Aaron’s mom and step-dad and is located at Gill’s Pier near the St. Wenceslaus Church. As Aaron describes it, “our winery is one of the smaller ones. We don’t buy any grapes, and all of our wines are estate bottled. We bottle what we grow.” He adds that 2012 looks like it will be one of the best grape harvests ever in Leelanau County. “The hybrids have gone crazy, everything is ripe early, and we’re really looking forward to a huge harvest starting very soon.” The Cabernet Franc and the Rustic Red are their best sellers, and there are also excellent choices among the white wines.
Jennifer starts us off with a basket of cornbread with whipped maple butter. (It is so warm and rich and yummy that one of us tries to lick the last of the maple butter out of the cup and ends up with a white-speckled nose.) Besides the ribs, the Cedar Rustic Inn has a reputation for the quality of Aaron Ackley’s pot roast. We soon congratulate ourselves on our choices. The solid slab of ribs is slathered in a thick iridescent shine of fruity BBQ sauce that has just the right hint of chili pepper. Served on the side are crisp broccoli florettes, green peas, and yellow sweet peppers. And just as Bob Smith promised, the pork slides succulently from the bones. The pot roast also lives up to its reputation. The gravy-topped beef arrives on an ample bed of mashed potatoes that is buttressed on both sides by whole, shaved carrots that are perfectly poached. This is real northern comfort food, the kind that fortifies us for the coming winter and fulfills our fundamental (admit it!) longing for meat and potatoes. This is no minimalist, fancy-dancey, art-project-on-a-plate, Eye of Newt on a bed of Snake’s Knees with a dainty Bat’s Breath reduction sauce drizzled cursively around the edges. This is real food that you tuck in and get full! It’s no accident that the pot roast and the ribs are so good. “I’m an old school “braised” guy,” Aaron laughs. “Moist heat for a long time — if you can braise it, I’ll braise it!”
Aaron Ackley followed a friend up to Leelanau County in 1990 after high school. He spent time working at Sugar Loaf as a ski lift operator, and initially he wanted to stay around just for the excellent hunting and fishing. A job with (Boonedock’s owner) Bob Ewing and former “long–gone” sous chef Tony Benedict at The Homestead in the ’90s was the beginning of Aaron’s education as a chef. They saw his aptitude and encouraged him. “They leaned on me and told me I needed to go to the Culinary Institute of America and learn the food business. Bob and Tony had some connections there, and they pulled some strings and got me in,” Aaron recalls. “One of the things I learned at CIA is that less is more. Everything we do here at Cedar Rustic Inn, the soups, sauces, desserts and dressings, everything is homemade. We favor local, fresh ingredients whenever we can get them. We get vegetables grown to order from Lisa Stachnik on Schomberg Road, for example. This year she harvested many rows of zucchini and yellow squash for us.” The number of meals Aaron cooks, especially over a busy summer season, limits the extent to which his food sources can all be local. “It would be nice if the money could just swirl around the county like a school of fish, but we’re not there yet. We still have to get stuff from outside. When I need broccoli, for example, I need 60-80 pounds at a time. That’s too much for local sources right now.”
Aaron loves cooking breakfast, and one of the big draws to the Cedar Rustic Inn is the extended breakfast time. “Lots of folks who vacation here aren’t up for an early breakfast. We used to be ready at 8, but nobody would come until 10. So now you can get breakfast until 4 p.m.” The early breakfast menu features breakfast platters, pancakes, French toast, and an assortment of awesome omelets. The late breakfast menu (after 11 all week and after 12:30 on Sundays) includes everything except the omelets. The lunch menu has the staples: soups and salads and classic sandwiches like the Monte Cristo, the Reuben, and a falafal wrap, fish and chips, and rustic burgers. In addition to the pot roast and the ribs, the dinner menu includes perch, salmon, shrimp, walleye, a pasta dish, fried chicken & chicken marsala, beef stroganoff, a burrito, the burger, a big 18 oz. Porterhouse, and often prime rib as the special. There is also a take-out only pizza menu, so the Cedar Rustic Inn is covering all of the bases.
And then you have to have Aaron’s favorite apple cobbler cake with a big dollop of ice cream and a shot of whipped cream for dessert. Its warm lusciousness will fill any empty spaces inside you that are still needy.
The Cedar Rustic Inn is open this fall on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday from 10 a.m.-8:30 p.m., Fridays, 10-9, Saturdays 8-9, and Sundays 8-8. The restaurant closes on Tuesdays, during the first week of deer hunting and for a couple of weeks in early December. After the color tour in early November they’ll also be closed on Mondays. Call (231) 228-2282 for reservations or questions, and when you go to eat at the Cedar Rustic Inn, please mention this article so that we get invited back. It’s good!
