For weekenders heading to one of Michigan’s many lakeside resorts, traveling away from the city can feel like traveling back in time. At least that’s how the proprietors up there hope it will feel. The 20-room Gordon Beach Inn in Union Pier, owned by Devereux Bowly, a Chicagoan and past president of the Hyde Park Historical Society, advertises itself as “a step back in time.” One reviewer even went so far as to call the decor “Amish”–despite cable TV and Jacuzzis, to say nothing of up-to-date paper-thin walls. The soothing hearth in a lobby hung with hunting trophies recalls the days when the inn was a sportsman’s lodge, and the core of the building does date back to the 20s, but the space can’t help feeling like a set from the nearby “Antique Village,” the latest addition to Union Pier’s strip of antique malls.
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Jenny’s Restaurant, now in its second year at the inn, echoes the nostalgia with which the resort is marketed in the decoration of its walls but nowhere else. Over the tables at this exquisitely unpretentious bistro are reproduced snapshots of local vacationers from the 30s and 40s–unnamed souls on permanent holiday. But if the inn tries vainly to take us back to the past, Jenny’s enriches our present, importing good tastes from many worlds to coexist in this unlikely one.
The best meals at Jenny’s tend to move from the raw to the cooked. Carpaccio is not for the faint of heart, but the rest of the menu is really just a footnote to these shavings of sirloin marinated in olive oil with suggestions of tomato and parmesan. Even vegetarians will blush a rare color, then give in. Gravlax attempts to give fish lovers a comparable delight, but fish is Apollonian, steak Dionysian.
The success of Jenny’s is its assumption that everyone is as interested in food as the chef herself. Drilon’s touch is surest and least obtrusive when she is most playful, and the atmosphere of her first restaurant–unlike that at the Creekwood Inn–is accordingly easygoing. Several times an evening the good-natured elder sister of the kitchen can be seen wandering through her dining room, as if she’s misplaced a cat. Drilon might have come to the country to grow a garden and bake bread, but she brought her innovative taste with her, to keep us company when we visit.
