Shopping & Dining in the Traverse City Area

Thanks to its award-winning wines and talented local chefs, Traverse City has acquired a reputation as a place of surprisingly sophisticated food and drink. In recent years, our dining options have evolved into a sizzling restaurant scene with a distinctive cuisine based on fresh local ingredients. From appetizers to dessert, local restaurateurs seem to be on a mission to showcase the best of what the area has to offer from fresh meats and fruits to vegetables and fish.

But there is another side to the story, too: the talented artisans who create delicious foods that you can sample, purchase and enjoy on your own – whether it’s a fresh baked loaf of bread, a warm cherry pie, a glass of crisp Reisling or a string of smoked sausages. So when you finally regretfully leave Traverse City, you can take some of that delicious goodness back home to tide you over until you come back to us!  

 

Like its dining scene, Traverse City’s shopping opportunities are diverse and unexpected.

 

Front Street, our main shopping thoroughfare, is a bustling place with more than 150 boutiques, galleries, restaurants and coffee shops, but it has the kind of small-town flavor that makes you want to stay around just to enjoy the feeling. Just around the corner, on Union Street, is the small but captivating Old Town district, and a few blocks to the west is the Grand Traverse Commons, where the rambling Victorian-Italianate buildings of a 19th century asylum are being redeveloped into an elegant new retail district.

 

And don’t forget our neighbors in the quaint port towns of the Leelanau Peninsula: laid-back little villages like Suttons Bay, Empire, Glen Arbor, Leland and Northport. (Don’t miss Leland’s famous Fishtown district, a collection of old fishing shanties and net-drying sheds that are now shops, galleries and stores.) or the Chain of Lakes country with the charming towns of Elk Rapids, Bellaire, and Alden -- secret jewels of the shopper’s art.