Walk down Main Street in the village of Lake Leelanau this month and 104 Main Street is dark again. There's a sign in the window about leasing the space, the third restaurant concept under the same building owner to fail there since last fall. Two blocks over on Philip Street, the opposite is happening. The parking lot at Locals Lake Leelanau is full most evenings, there's a line for brisket, and the bar finally has a working tap.
Both buildings sit in the same two-block downtown. Both have hosted a string of restaurants trying to make a go of it in a village small enough that everyone knows whose car is parked where. One keeps failing. One just found its footing after nearly a year of operating without the one thing a restaurant usually can't survive without: a liquor license. The difference between them has nothing to do with the food, the buildings, or even the concepts. It comes down to who actually owns the risk.
A Building That Keeps Changing Hands
The space at 104 Main Street has a longer history than most people realize. Before it was Nittolo's Seafood & Pizza, it was Bella Fortuna, and before that, Keys to the County, and long before either of those, the Dew Drop Inn, a building locals still talk about for the bullet hole in the wall attributed to Al Capone. Eric Nittolo opened his version there in 2021, building out a small empire under one roof: Nittolo's Pizza, then Nittolo's Seafood & Social, then briefly a Spanish tapas concept called The Social. For a few years it worked. Nittolo became known around the peninsula for authentic Italian cooking, and the restaurant developed the kind of following that makes a place feel permanent.
Then, late last October, the restaurant closed for what was described as a planned winter break. It never reopened. By February, the Leelanau Ticker confirmed that Nittolo was done in Lake Leelanau for good, even as his newer restaurant in Traverse City's Warehouse District, Nittolo's Little Italy, kept packing a dining room every night. The building went up for sale or lease. Behind the scenes, a partnership had come apart. Building owner Roger Colburn and Nittolo ended up in a legal dispute over who actually owned the Nittolo's name, a fight that included a federal trademark claim and, per the Ticker's reporting, a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ruling in February that refused the registration on the grounds the mark was primarily just a surname. Colburn says he put up the money to start the restaurant. Nittolo says the arrangement was never that simple. Either way, the restaurant that had spent five years becoming a local fixture was gone, undone by a disagreement over who was actually in charge of it.
Two Concepts, One Season
Colburn didn't wait long to refill the space. By the end of March, he'd lined up two new tenants for 104 Main Street: Leelanau Steakhouse, Seafood & Pasta, positioned as a multi-cultural fusion concept, and a reopened version of the seafood-and-pizza restaurant under new management, without Nittolo's involvement. Colburn said at the time he wanted the steakhouse to fill a gap he saw in the market, a proper steakhouse in a county that didn't really have one. Both concepts opened around the beginning of May.
By September, both were closed. Colburn told the Ticker the issue wasn't demand, it was staffing. The head chef running the kitchen, Anthony Craig, had built a name for himself at Traverse City's Georgina's before sexual harassment allegations stalled that career, and his departure from 104 Main Street left Colburn without someone to run the kitchen. What had launched that spring as Leelanau Steakhouse and Tapas & Tacos Beer Garden shut down for good by late summer, according to the Ticker's fall roundup, with Colburn donating well over 1,000 pounds of leftover food to Leelanau Christian Neighbors rather than let it go to waste. The building is back on the market, and Colburn says he's talking with a potential lessor who might turn it into something simpler: pizza and light meals.
Three restaurant concepts closed under the same building owner in under a year. Every one of them backed by someone who wasn't the one behind the counter every night.
The Building Two Blocks Away Bet On the Opposite Model
The space on Philip Street has its own history, most recently as the original home of Northern Latitudes Distillery for fourteen years before the distillery outgrew the village and relocated to a much larger, purpose-built space on Duck Lake Road last fall, more than double its old footprint. That move freed up the old Thunderbird building in the heart of the village, and Tony West, who'd spent years running food and beverage at the Leland Lodge, signed the lease.
West didn't bring in outside investors or hire someone else to run the kitchen. He wrote the business plan himself, on bar napkins, sitting in his own pole barn. He completely gutted and rebuilt the space. The adjacent Hannah's Bakery closed around the same time, and that space became the restaurant's kitchen. Locals Lake Leelanau opened on May 10, 2025, a date he chose on purpose: it's the anniversary of the day the village, then called Provemont, was incorporated back in 1871.
Then came the part that would have sunk most new restaurants. Locals operated for 347 days without a liquor license, as Northern Express reported, burning through its entire first summer season unable to sell a single beer. West has said customers would apologize and leave when they realized there was no alcohol on the menu. He kept the doors open anyway. The license finally came through in April 2026, and West marked it with a grand reopening on May 9, complete with live music from local bands Loophole and Drew Hale, a takeover bar shift from Pedaling Beans coffee shop, and paintings for sale from local watercolor artist Mike Sincic. Soul Squeeze Cellars, the winery directly across the street, ran its own set that same afternoon, treating the whole thing as a shared block party rather than a competitor's grand opening.
Why the Menu Isn't the Point, and Who's Running the Place Is
What's kept Locals afloat through a year with no alcohol sales isn't the smokehouse menu, though the brisket has developed a following. It's that West built the restaurant around the village itself. Every dish carries a QR code, developed with the Leelanau Historical Society, that links to a bit of local history behind the name. The pizzas are named after old ferries that once ran on the lake. A sandwich called Polka Fest nods to the Cedar Polka Fest down the road. The retail counter up front sells goods from other Leelanau County makers: lip balm from Bee Joyful, cookies from Leelanau Cookie Co. based on West's own mother's recipes, clothing from High Five Threads, gifts from Goodness on Main in Leland. West has also stayed visible in the community well beyond the restaurant, coaching football at Suttons Bay High School and volunteering with the Leland Chamber of Commerce and the Leland Wine & Food Festival.
Compare that to what closed at 104 Main Street. Both replacement concepts marketed themselves around an outside idea, multi-cultural fusion, a steakhouse the county supposedly lacked, brought in by an owner who wasn't cooking the food or greeting the tables. When the hired chef left, there was no one with enough stake in the place to hold it together. The pattern isn't new for that building. It's the third restaurant to close there under an operator model built on someone else running the kitchen, all within the same year.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of this is really a story about restaurants failing in a small village. Lake Leelanau supports plenty of small businesses just fine. Soul Squeeze Cellars is still pouring wine across the street from Locals, and Dick's Pour House keeps doing what it has always done. The story is narrower than that: in a village where everyone can name the owner of every business by their first name, a restaurant's survival seems to track less with what's on the menu and more with whether the person who opened it is the one who has to be there when things go wrong.
If you're weighing where to grab dinner this fall, Locals is open, serving a full bar now alongside the smokehouse plates, and the retail shop up front is worth a browse even if you're not eating. The Nittolo's building is empty for the moment, waiting on whoever signs the lease next. And Northern Latitudes, if you're craving the horseradish vodka Bloody Mary that made its name, is still around, just a few minutes up M-204 in a space that finally has room to breathe.
Lake Leelanau keeps reinventing its restaurant row because the village is small enough that every business here is a personal bet, not a portfolio play. Some people are willing to lose a summer's worth of drink sales rather than close the doors. Others aren't the ones standing at the register when it matters. That's the difference that's actually shaping what's open on Main Street this month, not the menu, not the building, not even the neighborhood.
If this two-block stretch is already part of how you spend your Thursdays, or you're the kind of person who wants to understand a place down to who owns which building and why, that's exactly the sort of local knowledge Found Realty Co brings to every conversation about property in Leelanau County. Find Happiness at Home. Schedule a personalized consultation whenever you're ready to talk about what it actually means to live here.
