In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Finding the Farm-to-Table Experience of a Lifetime
"For 452 days, I fantasized about what it would be like to travel again. I imagined diving into the turquoise sea in Turks and Caicos or stuffing myself silly at a Taiwanese night market. What I didn't picture was sitting around a campfire in the backwoods of Michigan on an early June night, trading tips on pig butchery. And yet here I am, having scored a last-minute reservation at Milkweed Inn, the latest venture of the lauded Chicago chef Iliana Regan. In early 2019, fed up with the churn and burn of the restaurant industry, Iliana and her sommelier wife, Anna, bought a four-bedroom hunting lodge, sight unseen, on 150 acres in Hiawatha National Forest, seven and a half hours north of Detroit. The yard is carpeted with wild strawberries and fiddlehead ferns, its perimeter ringed with elderberry bushes. The place is so remote, and the old logging road to reach it so rutted, the women often pick up their guests at a gas station 28 miles away and bring them out in a four-wheel drive. Even those with the gears to make the trek aren't allowed to attempt it alone, instead trailing Anna on the winding, cell-service-free road that leads to the compound. The couple hosted their first guests that summer while simultaneously running the Michelin-starred restaurant Elizabeth in Chicago. Thanks to early media attention, a cap of 10 guests per weekend (six in the lodge; four more split between a canvas-walled tent and a silver Airstream), and a season that spans only May through October, Milkweed was quickly booked solid for the next two years. Then the pandemic forced the pair to push all their reservations back a year. On a whim last spring I joined the waiting list (like Sweden's now-shuttered Fäviken, Milkweed is the kind of forest-to-fork destination where you book the table first and worry about getting there later), and by some miracle of the calendar gods immediately landed a spot."
