Drive through the village on M-204 in the summer of 2025 and you'd have counted three separate kinds of trouble in about four blocks. NJ's Grocery, one of the only real grocery stores between Suttons Bay and Cedar, sat dark behind construction plastic after an electrical fire tore through the building. The storefront at 112 East Philip Street, home to Northern Latitudes Distillery for over a decade, stood empty with a note taped to the door. And the distillery itself, caught mid-move to a new building out on Duck Lake Road, couldn't legally sell a bottle of its own spirits anywhere in the county, not even at its satellite tasting room in Suttons Bay, which had nothing to do with the construction delay.
If you judged the village by what you could see from a car window that summer, you'd have guessed it was losing ground. You'd have been wrong. A little over a year later, the same two blocks have more places to sit down for a meal than they've had in years, and every one of those 2025 disruptions turned out to be the setup for something bigger rather than the start of a slide.
What Actually Shut Down, and Why
The distillery trouble traces back to a construction timeline. Mark and Mandy Moseler, who founded Northern Latitudes in 2012, had been planning a new production facility on Duck Lake Road for years. When the move finally came in January 2025, they vacated their leased space on Philip Street before the new building was fully ready. Michigan's Liquor Control Commission requires a distiller's license to stay tied to an active production facility, so NLD's small distiller's license went into escrow at midnight on June 15, 2025. For months, the Moselers couldn't pour or sell spirits at either location while they finished the new building.
The new facility finally opened with a grand celebration on October 24, 2025. At 11,800 square feet, it's more than double the roughly 5,000 square feet the distillery had leased for years, and it came with something NLD had never offered in over a decade of business: a kitchen. Chef Shawn Botruff, a longtime NLD employee, now runs a rotating menu of shareable plates, soups and salads. Mandy Moseler put it simply when the doors opened: people had never been able to sit down and order food from them before. Now they can, Tuesday through Sunday, with live music on Fridays.
The grocery store fire was a separate problem entirely. NJ's, owned by Sam Chugh, caught fire on June 10, 2025, and stayed closed for close to six months while contractors rebuilt. It reopened the first weekend of December, bringing back its home-cooked Indian food alongside the usual meat counter and produce. The Currysome brand, NJ's line of fully cooked, refrigerated Indian meals that used to sit on shelves at the Leland Mercantile, Hansen Foods in Suttons Bay, and Anderson's Market in Glen Arbor, had been on pause since Labor Day. It's back in the store now, though it hasn't returned to those other locations yet.
The Building on Philip Street Never Sat Empty Long
The empty storefront the distillery left behind didn't stay empty. That building has cycled through a handful of village institutions over the decades, from the Leelanau Chamber of Commerce to Hannah's Bakery to Trish's Dishes to Lylah's, before Northern Latitudes moved in. When NLD moved out, Tony West saw an opening.
West is a Traverse City native who spent a decade tending bar at Dick's Pour House in the village and another dozen years running food and beverage at the Leland Lodge before deciding to open his own place. He picked May 10, 2025, for a reason: it's the anniversary of the day in 1871 when the village, then still called Provemont, was officially incorporated. Locals Lake Leelanau opened that Saturday with a menu built around that history, playing off the old post office name and filling the space with historic photographs pulled from the building's past lives.
What West didn't have on opening day was a liquor license. Getting one took nearly a year, so for most of its first year in business, Locals ran as a dry restaurant in a building that had poured spirits for over a decade under its previous tenant. That's the kind of friction that never shows up on a menu board but explains a lot about why a new restaurant can look slower to catch on than it actually is. By this spring, the bar was finally open.
Here's what that same stretch of the village actually looked like two years apart:
| Location | Fall 2024 | Fall 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| 112 E. Philip St. | Northern Latitudes Distillery (leased tasting room, no kitchen) | Locals Lake Leelanau (full restaurant, kitchen, bar) |
| 7150 E. Duck Lake Rd. | Under construction | Northern Latitudes Distillery (11,800 sq ft, kitchen, live music Fridays) |
| 115 W. Philip St. | NJ's Grocery | NJ's Grocery, reopened December 2025, Currysome back on shelves |
| 106 St. Mary's St. | Capital Dog (seasonal) | Capital Dog, reopened for the season May 14, 2026 |
Nothing on that list disappeared for good. One address gained a business it never had before, and the distillery that used to occupy 112 Philip Street didn't leave the village, it just got a lot more room down the road.
Groceries and Hot Dogs Held the Rest Together
While the distillery and the restaurant story played out on Philip Street, the rest of the village kept its rhythm. Capital Dog, the seasonal hot dog counter Kevin and Sue Burns opened in 2022 inside the village's original fire station on St. Mary's Street, closed as it always does over the winter and came back for its 2026 season on May 14. The Burns family has run businesses in the county since the 1980s, including the Riverside Inn in Leland and the upcycled clothing line Baabaazuzu, and Capital Dog fills a gap locals had complained about for years: a quick, decent hot dog within walking distance of the docks.
NJ's Grocery, meanwhile, remains the closest full grocery store for a lot of people who live between Suttons Bay and Cedar, which is exactly why its six-month closure felt so disruptive while it lasted. Its reopening in December restored something the village genuinely relies on, not just a nice-to-have shop but a daily errand stop.
What This Means If You Live Here This Fall
If you've been avoiding the distillery because you remember it as a small tasting room with no food, that version doesn't exist anymore. The new building on Duck Lake Road has a full kitchen and live music most Fridays. If you haven't tried Locals because you assumed the old NLD building was still a liquor storefront, it's a full restaurant now with a working bar. NJ's is fully stocked again, samosas and all. And Capital Dog will keep serving through the fall before it closes up for the winter, same as every year.
None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened because the village was struggling. A fire, a licensing freeze, and a slow-motion building swap all landed in the same twelve months, and the village came out the other side with a restaurant it didn't have before, a distillery more than twice its old size, and a grocery store back on its feet. That's a different story than the one a boarded-up window tells from the road.
If you're weighing what a place like Lake Leelanau actually offers day to day, beyond the lake views and the drive up M-204, this is the kind of detail worth knowing. The team at Team Shimek spends enough time in this village to watch these threads long before they resolve, and we're always glad to talk through what's changing here or in any of the towns across Leelanau, Grand Traverse, and Benzie counties. Schedule a free consultation if you'd like to talk about what any of it means for you.
