Living in a city with 6,000+ restaurants, why would you ever drive 150
miles to eat in a city with a population of 1,500? For me, it’s a kind
of a Hillary Clinton type thing. She was right, it does take a village
to raise a child. Unfortunately for my wife and I, parents of a 16
month old boy who believes soil is a basic food group, we left the
village back in our home state of Michigan when we moved to Chicago. So
when we need a break from the exhaustive process of keeping our son’s
mouth free of dirt and other things you find on the average floor, we
gotta go to the village.
It turns out Fennville, a one Subway franchise town surrounded by farmland and located two hours from Chicago and about six miles from the nearest freeway, is the perfect halfway point between Lansing, home of my in-laws, and our West Loop loft. Luckily for us, it’s also home to one of Michigan’s best restaurants, the Journeyman, our drop off point for junior’s sleepovers, aka parental sanity breaks, with the grandparents.
The Journeyman is a culinary dream, a destination so incongruous
with its location you’re not sure it really exists. It’s the real life
embodiment of fictional isolation fantasies like the Brick bar and
restaurant from the TV show Northern Exposure or the Mystic Pizza
parlor. The Journeyman sits smack dab in the middle of a charming
ramshackle downtown, where the tattered awning from the local
video/electronics flutters in the breeze. Downtown Fennville is so
small, your average little leaguer could easily toss a baseball its
entire length, and locating a “gourmet” restaurant here feels like an
exercise in entrepreneurial suicide.
Fennville is the kind of place where you find a mom and pop pie shack (Crane’s Pie Pantry in this case), not a top notch culinary destination that features handmade charcuterie, wood fired hearth baked breads, and some of the best farm to table fare this side of Chez Panisse. But owners Matthew Millar and Amy Cook didn’t worry much about that. They just put their heads down and set about their goal of creating a “fresh dialogue about food and a new ethic in cooking.”
The Journeyman is a place where the community spirit is as warm as a
cup of great steamy coffee. There are places in Chicago that attempt to
be like the Journeyman and come pretty close, but there’s nothing here
that’s quite as pure. In Chicago, when restaurateurs talk about
establishing a small family run seasonal spot, it’s more often an
exercise in PR fantasy. In Chicago, when restaurants talk about their
farm to table philosophy, it usually means getting fresh produce and
meat that’s been driven at least a few hundred miles from surrounding
farms in Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
When the Journeyman puts a chicken leg on the menu and girds it with oozy dill flower and squash risotto and a zingy red beet and cassis vinegar reduction, that chicken was raised 10 miles away at Providence Farms in nearby Saugatuck. Salad greens, tossed with blue cheese, scallions, and truffle oil vinaigrette, come from Eater’s Guild, a veg and fruit farm located in Bangor, MI 20 miles away.
The sausage is house made and studded with fennel. The creamy foie
and chicken liver pate slathered on the wood fired homemade crostini
melts in your mouth and is served alongside Armandino Batali’s salumi,
Paul Bertolli’s sausages, and a selection of pickles and cheese.
Rustic presentations here aren’t garnished with frilly bullshit or molded in ridiculous shapes. There are no chemical stabilizers in the bourbon maple gastric paired with juicy Creswick farms pork tenderloin and belly.
Though Chicago is a town of pizza, we are more a town of stomach distending deep dish slices and wispy bubbly Neapolitan style crumb. Though Burt and Pequod’s come close, they don’t quite have the perfect Sicilian airiness of the square wood fired crust topped with a rich, funky blend of aged parmesan, provolone & ‘Fumicata’ mozzarella cheeses served here.
Simply put, even if you don’t have a demanding dirt eating toddler that you plan on dropping off with the grandparents, you should make the drive to Fennville and eat at the Journeyman. You could also make a side trip to peruse the nearby art galleries in Saugatuck or play on the shore of Lake Michigan in South Haven, but once you stop in at the Journeyman, you probably won’t want to leave.
Journeyman is located at 114 E. Main St., Fennville, MI. journeymancafe.com or 269.561.2269
This article first appeared in Newcity in a slightly different form and is currently published on hungrymag.com.