Drive through the village center on Philip Street this month and the building on the corner looks the same from the outside. Same footprint, same parking apron, same proximity to Hannah's Bakery next door. Walk in, though, and nothing about the last year matches what came before. The bar pours cocktails instead of tasting flights. The kitchen runs full dinner service instead of shareable snacks. And the name on the door, Locals Lake Leelanau, honors a Michigan legal pioneer most people driving past have never heard of.
The easy read on this is that a business closed and another moved in. That's not what happened. Northern Latitudes Distillery didn't close. It moved a few hundred yards up Duck Lake Road into a building roughly three times the size of what it left behind, with a kitchen it never had before. What looks like a simple changing of the guard on Philip Street is actually a village that ended up with two hospitality anchors where it used to have one, each doing something the old shared space couldn't.
Same Address, Different Pour
Northern Latitudes had operated out of 112 East Philip Street, the former Thunderbird Gift Shop building, since 2012. Co-owners Mark and Mandy Moseler built the brand there for more than a decade in a leased space of roughly 4,000 to 5,000 square feet, tight enough that a full food menu was never really on the table. By early 2025 the lease was up. The distillery vacated the Philip Street building on January 31, moving its operation toward a new facility already under construction on M-204.
The very next day, local restaurant veteran Tony West was in the building. He'd worked as a bartender at Dick's Pour House in Lake Leelanau for a decade, then spent twelve years as food and beverage director at the Leland Lodge. West announced plans to convert the space, plus the adjoining Hannah's Bakery, into a full-service restaurant, retail shop, and catering operation. Locals Lake Leelanau opened in May 2025, and within its second week of business was already drawing a steady Thursday-night crowd.
"I'm in the building as we speak, ready to pour my heart and soul into this new adventure."
That's how West described the moment he took over the keys, and the interior reflects it. He worked with the Leelanau Historical Society to source décor and anecdotes tied to the region, weaving local history into a menu that reads like a scrapbook of the county.
What's On The Menu Now
Chef Caden Deatrick runs the kitchen, and the menu leans into "upscale pub food" built around names that mean something locally. Emelia's Prosecutor Poppers honor Emelia Schaub, a Lake Leelanau native who became Michigan's first elected female prosecutor and later the first woman in the country to successfully defend a murder trial. Richard's Walleye Tacos are named for Richard Plamondon, the longtime operator of Dick's Pour House just down the road. Beyond the history lesson, the kitchen turns out pizzas, four variations of nachos, sandwiches, salads, and sides.
The retail side takes up nearly 1,200 square feet of the building and carries a mix of house merchandise and local goods:
- Bee Joyful lip balms
- Leelanau Cookie Co., based on recipes from West's mother, LouAnn
- High Five Threads clothing
- Goodness on Main, sourced from Leland
- Locals-branded shirts, hats, and hoodies
For boaters, the restaurant runs a to-go menu built for the Narrows. Pull up to the docks and the kitchen will send food out to the boat, no need to tie up and walk in. West says the goal was never to poach traffic from Dick's Pour House, Nittolo's, or Fiddleheads down the street, but to complement what already exists, betting that a bigger, more varied food scene keeps people in the village longer rather than splitting them up.
A Few Hundred Yards Up Duck Lake Road
Meanwhile, the distillery the space used to house was quietly becoming a much bigger operation. Northern Latitudes broke ground on its own building years earlier, motivated in part by wanting to own rather than lease, and the project hit the kind of delays that construction projects in northern Michigan tend to hit. The new building, at 7150 East Duck Lake Road, held its grand opening on October 24, 2025, following a soft opening the weekend before.
The scale difference is the whole point. Where the old Philip Street space topped out around 4,000 to 5,000 square feet, the new building landed at just under 12,000 square feet in its finished form, with tall windows, a full bar, and room the distillery never had before. For the first time, Northern Latitudes has a working kitchen. Chef Shawn Botruff, a 25-year food service veteran who had already worked with the company, now runs a rotating menu of shareable plates, soups, and salads. Live music returned on Fridays, with local act Loose Change playing the grand opening weekend.
The building also carries a sustainability story that sets it apart from most hospitality construction in the county. A $10,000 grant from Leelanau Energy helped fund solar panels, a geothermal heat pump system, public EV charging stations, and a carbon capture system that sequesters CO2 produced during fermentation. The roof is a green roof, built in partnership with Cedar-based Inhabitect.
Two Anchors Instead Of One
Here's the part that changes how a resident should think about the village this year. Before 2025, Lake Leelanau's commercial core had one hospitality business trying to be several things at once: a distillery, a light food stop, and effectively the only late-afternoon draw on Philip Street. It worked, but it was one operation stretched across functions it wasn't built for.
Now the same short stretch of road holds two purpose-built anchors instead. Philip Street has a full-service restaurant with its own retail wing and a boat-delivery menu built specifically for Narrows traffic. A few hundred yards up Duck Lake Road, the distillery finally has the kitchen, bar, and event space its brand always implied but never had room for. Neither business is doing a smaller version of what the old shared building did. Both are doing more, in parallel, a short walk or drive apart.
For anyone who already lives here, that's the practical shift worth knowing about this fall. If you want a sit-down dinner with a side of local history, Philip Street has it now in a way it didn't two years ago. If you want a cocktail, a full kitchen menu, and live music on a Friday, Duck Lake Road is where that happens. The village didn't trade one thing for another. It ended up with more of both, running at the same time, on the same stretch of road most people already drive every week.
Peter Fisher lives and works in this county and keeps an eye on exactly this kind of local shift. If you're curious what a changing village core means for the neighborhoods around it, or you just want to talk Leelanau County over coffee, reach out to schedule a conversation.
