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Shopping & Dining in the Traverse City Area

Traverse City - It's a "Foodie Town!"

Thanks to its award-winning wines and talented local chefs, Traverse City enjoys an international reputation as a place of surprisingly sophisticated food and drink.
For two years in a row, Midwest Living magazine has listed Traverse City among its Five Top Food Towns. Livability.com gave it first-place billing among 200 American cities in its Top 10 list of Surprising Foodie Towns, and Bon Appetit has listed it as one of America’s Top Five Foodie towns.

Traverse City cuisine is the opposite of traditional. It’s an eclectic, relatively recent movement that borrows freely from other regional styles and relies heavily on imagination, boldness and spunk, and its defining characteristic is a generous use of fresh ingredients from nearby farms, forests, waters and orchards. From appetizers to dessert, our restaurateurs seem to be on a mission to showcase the best of what the area has to offer.

And what could go better with all this culinary bounty than a fine wine? The beautiful Leelanau and Old Mission peninsulas are dotted with vineyards and award-winning wineries whose awe-inspiring settings make them attractions in their own right – and they’ve established a firm reputation for their crisp, intensely flavorful wines.

Traverse City area shopping...

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.