On a Thursday evening in late summer, the gravel lot at 9502 Lake Street fills the way it has for years: slowly around six, then all at once by 6:15, as people angle for a spot with a view of St. Clair Lake before the light goes soft. By 6:30 there's a guitar going, live and unplugged, played by the son of the owners, who grew up around this building. The menu is fixed for the night. Nobody asks what's on it before they reserve, because in a village of a few hundred people, everyone already knows the rhythm by now.
That building used to be Tapawingo, one of two restaurants that turned this corner of Antrim County into an actual food destination decades before "farm to table" became something restaurants printed on a menu. Tapawingo closed in 2009 after nearly three decades of national attention. For a while, there was a real question about whether Ellsworth's reputation as a place people drove an hour to eat would end with it.
It didn't end. It compressed.
The address never actually left
Gregg and Ginny McCallum, both culinary school graduates, honeymooned in northern Michigan in 1992 and made a point of eating at Tapawingo while they were up here. They relocated from Clarkston to Charlevoix in 2003 to build a catering business called A Matter of Taste. By 2011, the Tapawingo building had come up for sale, and they bought it.
Since then, every Thursday evening from spring through December, the same lakefront space runs as a pop-up restaurant under the name A Matter of Taste at Tapawingo. Dinner runs 6:30 to 8:30, priced as a fixed menu per person that changes by theme week to week. One documented Thursday ran a "Polish Nite" built around the Kujawski family's own recipes: pierogi, kielbasa and sauerkraut, housemade kolache cookies, for $37 a person. That's a fair sense of the format even though the theme rotates. Kadin McCallum, the couple's older son, still plays fingerstyle acoustic guitar every week, the same instrument he's played there for years.
Ginny McCallum has described the whole operation simply:
"We never want to stop learning and improving."
The point isn't nostalgia. It's that Ellsworth's fine-dining identity is still fully intact, just running on a single scheduled night instead of seven, in a building a lot of former Tapawingo regulars would still recognize on sight.
The second landmark nobody can quite confirm
Ellsworth's other historic anchor is The Rowe Inn, open under owner Albert "Wes" Westhoven since 1972 on East Jordan Road, a restaurant that built its reputation on French-American cooking and a wine list serious enough to draw its own following. Over the years the restaurant said it had picked up recognition from DiRoNA, AAA, Gourmet, and Food & Wine, the kind of national attention that's rare for a place this size.
Its current status is genuinely unclear. Yelp and MenuPix both mark it permanently closed. Other listings, including Sirved and Wine-Searcher, still show nightly operating hours as though nothing changed. Nobody has posted a formal closure announcement anywhere in the research trail. That ambiguity is itself a useful fact about how a village this size actually works: there's no press release when something like this happens, just listings that quietly stop getting updated while everyone local already knows the answer.
What's actually open on an ordinary night
Thursday fine dining is the exception, not the rule. On any other night, Ellsworth runs on a much smaller, steadier list:
- Gold Nugget Bar & Grill, 6513 Center Street, the everyday burger-and-barbecue stop most residents mean when they say they're "grabbing dinner in town"
- Front Porch Cafe, 9235 Main Street, casual and open daily, the closest thing the village has to a diner
- Antrim Dells Golf Course and the Sunset Bar & Grill, a course-and-tavern combination just outside the village that doubles as a low-key dinner option for people who aren't golfing
- Friske's Farm Market, along US-31, a roadside stop that leans hard into the produce and pie side of the season rather than a sit-down meal
None of these compete with what Tapawingo built its reputation on. They don't try to. They're built for a population this size to actually use on a Tuesday, which is a different job than drawing diners in from three counties away on a Thursday.
The campground's last two weeks
Wooden Shoe Campground sits on Ellsworth Lake, part of the Chain of Lakes system, with 45 sites carrying water and electric hookups and seven tent sites for anyone traveling lighter. It runs on a typical mid-May through mid-September camping season, which means the campground is in its final stretch before it closes for the year.
The adjoining Ellsworth River Park is the more year-round-useful part of that same stretch of shoreline: a beach, a boat launch, and a fish cleaning station that gets used by plenty of people who never book a campsite at all. If there's a last real weekend to get a boat on Ellsworth Lake before the campground shuts down and the crowd thins out, this is close to it.
What's actually on the calendar next
The Ellsworth Village Council meets the second Monday of every month at 6:30 p.m., and one of the trustees who sits on that council is Gregg McCallum, the same person pouring wine and running the grill on Thursdays. He also serves as the village's zoning administrator, which means the person who brought Ellsworth's most famous restaurant address back to life is also the one who signs off on your neighbor's deck permit. In a village this size, those two roles belonging to the same person isn't unusual. It's close to the norm.
After Labor Day, the next real date on the community calendar is Halloween, when the village runs its annual Trunk-or-Treat on October 31. It's a smaller, quieter marker than the summer festivals that get more attention outside the village, but it's the one that actually shows up on the local events page, and it's the one residents plan around once the campground closes and the Thursday dinners start running against colder evenings.
What this actually says about the place
Ellsworth never stopped being a place with a real food reputation. What changed is the math. A village with a year-round population in the low hundreds was never going to support two nationally recognized restaurants running full schedules indefinitely, no matter how good the food was. What survived is the version that fits: one night a week, one guitar, one fixed menu, run by people who used to be the customers and decided that was worth keeping.
That's a fairly honest description of how infrastructure works in a village this size generally, whether it's a restaurant, a campground season, or a council seat. Things get right-sized to the population that's actually here, and the result tends to be smaller, more personal, and more durable than anyone visiting for a weekend would guess.
If you're already living around Ellsworth, none of this is news exactly, but it's worth having the details straight: the address, the schedule, the two names on the council roster, the two weeks of camping season you have left. If you're weighing a move to this stretch of Antrim County and want a clearer read on what daily life actually looks like here, Pat O'Brien & Associates has spent more than two decades working this part of Northern Michigan and is glad to talk through what a place like Ellsworth offers beyond the Thursday menu.
