Chianti at Mission Point Resort

The Restaurant

Chianti occupies a low-lit dining room on the ground floor of Mission Point Resort, the 18-acre property at the east end of Main Street where the island opens to the Round Island Channel. The room is intimate — forty-eight covers across two seatings on weekend nights, a single seating on weekdays — with dark wood, low gold light, an exposed wood-fired pizza oven at the back, and a small private booth at the entrance that is the most-requested two-top on the island. The format is a five-course prix fixe; à la carte ordering is not the room's intent and is offered only at the bar.

The cooking is Italian with a contemporary, ingredient-led sensibility. Recent prix-fixe menus have moved through a chilled corn velouté with house-cured guanciale, a hand-rolled cavatelli with summer squash and pecorino, a Lake Michigan whitefish in salsa verde, a slow-braised short rib over polenta, and a Tuscan olive-oil cake with rosemary cream. The pasta is made every morning in a glass-walled pasta room visible from the entrance, and the wood-fired oven turns out a handful of pizzas at the bar for guests who want a more casual format. The wine list — for which the room is named — runs heavily Italian with serious depth in Tuscany and Piedmont, and a particularly well-selected by-the-glass programme.

Service is the most polished on Mackinac Island after the Main Dining Room at Grand Hotel: a captain to every two tables, wine guidance delivered without pressure, and a pacing that handles a full five courses inside two hours when the guest wants it shorter and stretches to two and a half when the guest wants it longer. Chianti is the Mackinac dining choice that gets cited most often by Detroit and Chicago food writers travelling to the island, and it is the room where serious business hosts close evenings with serious business guests.