Aerie Restaurant & Lounge

The Restaurant

Aerie Restaurant and Lounge occupies the sixteenth floor of the Tower at Grand Traverse Resort and Spa — the resort sits at 100 Grand Traverse Village Boulevard in Acme, ten minutes northeast of downtown Traverse City along the working East Bay shoreline, and the Tower elevator climbs sixteen stories to the dining-room level — and has held the seat as Northern Michigan's reference sunset-and-special-occasion resort dining room for more than a decade. The dining room runs about a hundred and ten covers across a single high-ceilinged glass-walled parlor with panoramic floor-to-ceiling windows on every side — a deliberate design move that brings the working East Bay shoreline, the West Grand Traverse Bay and the resort's working golf-course-and-vineyard valley into the dinner programme as a working second course. The vibrant, contemporary palette reads as a working modern Northern Michigan resort dining room rather than a chain-hotel ballroom.

The kitchen runs the contemporary American format the way the format ought to be run with deliberate Northern Michigan farm-to-table integration: the dining card sources local ingredients to give the guest a true taste of Northern Michigan — working Old Mission and Leelanau Peninsula produce, careful Lake Michigan whitefish from local fishers, Michigan cherry-and-pork preparations, hand-cut steaks finished with deliberate house dry-age, careful chef-driven seasonal plates and a dessert programme that pulls from the working Northern Michigan stone-fruit and dairy calendar. The dining card rotates with the Northern Michigan working seasonal produce calendar and the East Bay's working fishing supply. The careful curation of local wine and beer selections gives the room a deliberate Northern Michigan reference programme that no chain-hotel dining room can replicate.

Service is the older school of Northern Michigan resort hospitality — career servers, a sommelier who can guide a working bottle conversation through the dinner progression, and a pace that treats a two-hour sunset dinner as the format rather than the exception. The wine programme runs to about two hundred labels with deliberate Old Mission, Leelanau, French and working Northern-Michigan-friendly depth. The sixteenth-floor Tower elevation gives every table a working panoramic backdrop that no ground-floor restaurant in Northern Michigan can replicate — the sun shifts color across the East Bay shoreline through the dinner service. For a Northern Michigan evening that needs to register as the working resort sunset address, Aerie is the standing answer.