For five years, if you wanted a full sit-down dinner on Old Mission Peninsula, you were mostly out of luck. Old Mission Tavern, the white-tablecloth institution that had anchored Center Road since the Bartnick family opened it, went dark in 2020 and stayed dark. The peninsula kept its farm stands, its wineries, its church basements. It did not have a table. This week it has both a table and a trail, and the fact that they landed in the same season is not a coincidence worth skipping past.
Monday evening, Peninsula Township is cutting the ribbon on the Hope for Hemlocks boardwalk at Pelizzari Natural Area, a project that took three years of fundraising to reach this point. Four months before that, on March 18, a Chicago-trained chef and his partner quietly reopened Old Mission Tavern under new ownership. Neither project moved fast. Both finished now. If you live here, that pattern is worth noticing, because it says something about how long real change actually takes on this peninsula, and how much is happening beneath the surface while the wineries get all the attention.
The Tavern Was Never Really Gone, It Was Just Waiting
Old Mission Tavern sat empty from 2020 until January 7, 2026, when Stephanie Krupka and Brian Daley bought the building. Daley spent years at Blackbird in Chicago's West Loop before it closed, and Krupka came from Sepia, a Michelin-recognized kitchen a few blocks away. They could have gutted the place. They didn't. The carpet stayed. The tables stayed. The chairs stayed. The one structural addition was an HVAC system in the main dining room, which finally ends the era of space heaters the previous owners used to fight the winter chill.
What changed is the pacing. Daley calls the balance between honoring the old menu and updating it a tightrope walk, and the wine list reflects that same restraint. Krupka runs the bar with a short, deliberate list rather than a sprawling one.
"Too many choices are not a luxury."
That's Krupka's stated approach behind the bar, and it shows up on the menu too: Sunday chicken dinners, prime rib specials, a dozen wines by the glass or bottle pulling from the region plus Oregon, Italy, France, Argentina, and the Iberian Peninsula. The back dining room, still closed off while the owners decide its future, may eventually open for private events. For now, the patio is doing double duty as a cocktail space through the warm months.
Opening night in March drew 75 guests, family and longtime regulars mixed together, which matters more than it sounds. This building has been a fixture since 1979, when it started as Mission Freeze ice cream before becoming a burger-and-pool-table spot and eventually the tavern generations of peninsula families ate at on Sundays. A five-year gap in a place like this doesn't just mean fewer dinner reservations. It means the peninsula's only real gathering spot for a sit-down meal went missing, and everyone who lives here felt that absence whether they said so out loud or not. Now it's back at 17015 Center Road, same footprint, same bones, new hands.
The Boardwalk Took Three Years, And Tonight It's Finished
The hemlock wing at Pelizzari Natural Area is a nearly seven-acre stand of old-growth trees along the John Spencer Trail, and it has a shallow-root problem. So much foot traffic has moved through that section over the years that the hemlocks and their understory were being damaged just by people loving the place too much. The fix, an elevated sustainable boardwalk, has been in the works since a fundraising campaign began roughly three years ago.
Getting there took a specific mix of township money and private philanthropy. A portion of Peninsula Township's ARPA funds covered part of the cost. The rest came from a list of family foundations, including the Huckle Family Foundation, the Thomas Family Foundation, the Tim and Libby Ash Foundation, the Oleson Foundation, the Biederman Family Foundation, the Traverse City Track Club, and the Schmuckal Family Foundation, plus hundreds of individual donors who closed the gap dollar by dollar.
Construction started the week of April 20 and wrapped by early June, on schedule. The ribbon-cutting ceremony happens tonight, Monday, August 10, at 6 p.m., at the Pelizzari trailhead parking lot off Center Road. Peninsula Township worked with the Grand Traverse Regional Land Conservancy on the project, and if you've hiked that section of trail before, the change is straightforward: an elevated path that keeps foot traffic off the shallow roots while still letting visitors of every age and ability walk through the old-growth hemlocks instead of around them.
Here's the timeline laid flat:
| Milestone | Date |
|---|---|
| Hope for Hemlocks fundraising campaign begins | roughly 2023 |
| Boardwalk construction begins | week of April 20, 2026 |
| Construction completes | early June 2026 |
| Ribbon-cutting ceremony | Monday, August 10, 2026, 6 p.m. |
Three years from idea to ribbon. That's the actual pace of getting something built out here, and it's worth keeping in mind the next time a peninsula project seems to be moving nowhere. Sometimes it's just banking foundation grants one at a time.
The Rest Of The Week, If You're Making Plans
Not everything on the peninsula this week is a multi-year project finally landing. Some of it is just the ordinary rhythm of August:
- The Friends of Peninsula Community Library's annual used book sale is running now through Wednesday, August 12, at PCL. Proceeds fund the library's programs, and the sale is a chance to stock up on books, puzzles, games, DVDs, and CDs while joining as a Friend if you haven't already.
- Wednesday night community picnics continue at Old Mission Congregational Church, 18687 Mission Road, from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m., a low-key weekly gathering that's been running through the summer.
- Lyon Farm and Vineyards opened a new farm stand on Island View Road in mid-July, stocked with fresh produce, firewood, and baked goods. Christopher Lyon is running it, taking over from his father John, a small but real example of a peninsula farm passing to the next generation.
- Established cherry stands are worth the stop as the season winds down, including Johnson Farms on Center Road just north of Mapleton and Edmondson's Cherry Connection near the Center Road and Island View Road intersection.
None of these is a headline on its own. Together, they're the texture of a normal August week here, the kind that doesn't make it into a tourism brochure but is exactly what living on the peninsula actually feels like.
Why It All Landed The Same Month
Look at the tavern and the boardwalk side by side and the pattern is hard to miss. Neither was fast. The tavern sat empty for five years before Krupka and Daley bought it in January and reopened it in March. The boardwalk took three years of grant applications and community donations before a single board went down in April. These aren't projects that got easier over time. They got harder to keep waiting on, and then they finished within months of each other almost by accident.
That matters for anyone who lives here and has watched other peninsula projects stall, whether it's a road repair, a shoreline fix, or a farm transition that seems to take forever to happen. The tavern and the boardwalk are proof that things do eventually land, they just land on their own schedule, usually longer than anyone would like, and usually all at once when they finally do. If you've been waiting on something specific here, patience has historically paid off, even if it took years longer than expected.
The smaller stories this week point the same direction. Christopher Lyon taking over his family's farm stand is its own small version of the same pattern: a peninsula institution changing hands and picking right back up rather than disappearing. Whether it's a restaurant, a trail, or a roadside stand, the peninsula keeps proving that its long game usually resolves in favor of continuity rather than loss.
If you're weighing what any of this means for property here, whether it's proximity to a trail that just got meaningfully more accessible or a dining scene that finally has an anchor again, that's exactly the kind of on-the-ground context worth a conversation. I Love Traverse City offers a free home valuation and consultation for anyone curious how these peninsula shifts are showing up in the market, no pressure, just information from someone who's watched this ground change for decades.
