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 mong food lovers in Northern Michigan The Rowe is a sort of living shrine because's it's where most people Up North first encountered "regional cuisine" in the manner of the French provinces.
The style arrived with a one-time history teacher named Wes Westhoven in 1972, when he bought a little knotty-pine, plate-lunch roadhouse near Ellsworth called The Rowe Inn and transformed it. In an era when planked whitefish and sirloin surf-and-turf was about as haute as the cuisine got Up North, Westhoven introduced new ideas -- fresh, local asparagus in June; local strawberries in July and raspberries in August; perch and whitefish without the benefit of deep-frying, and dishes that were inventively sauced and garnished with locally grown herbs.
Some of the neighbors were a bit puzzled at first. Westhoven recalls that they couldn't understand why he went into the woods to pick morels when perfectly good mushrooms were available in the grocery. "Maybe," he says, "they thought we were too poor to buy food from the grocery like everyone else." Before long, however, some of those same people took to showing up at the Rowe each spring to sell morels they had picked.
Inspired, perhaps, by Westhoven's frequent visits to France, today's fare at The Rowe has a decidedly Provençal accent, but it is still Northern Michigan food. A year or so ago, as if to demonstrate that he and the Rowe are as enthusiastic as ever about good food, and always ready to adapt, Westhoven unveiled a new, off-season menu he calls "Bistrot Bridgette." It bowed to the burst-bubble era of fading demand for high-end destination dining by making outstanding cuisine eminently affordable without losing a petit four's worth of quality. (Now you have no excuse; anyone who thinks dining at the Rowe need cost an arm and a leg has some adjustments to make.)
Our first such meal there started with baked onion soup, rich with flavor, and an omelette aux cèpes that conveyed all the earthiness of a sun-drenched Provençal hillside. The entrees were crêpes aux fruit de mer that enfolded generous chunks of richly sauced seafoods, and roast chicken in a hunter's sauce that seemed to have been simmering for days in the pot of a ferme auberge near Avignon. And that's just the Rowe's midwinter economy version. Imagine what delights summer brings!
High season, of course, starts around the time morels appear, so the Rowe always has a couple of morel weekends. Westhoven considers pecan-stuffed morels to be a house specialty. ("I've never seen it done as well as we do it," he says, with the undeniable credibility of an old champ.)
Rowe regulars appreciate that a good restaurant need not be fancy, formal, or even elegant. They know, too, that good meals require good wine and conversation. Much of the charm of The Rowe is in the utterly relaxed nature of a meal there. However good its food and wine, the Rowe is still essentially a simple, unpretentious roadhouse where, on a slow night, the proprietor may well pull up a chair for a little conversation.
The topics likely will include good wine. The Rowe also has an extraordinary cellar. "Wine," Westhoven says, "is as important as the food, and together they make something far more than the two separate entities."
Part of the charm of the Rowe is the attentive and knowledgeable service. Courses are invariably delivered with impeccable timing by unobtrusive servers who hover unnoticed in the background and make sure all is going well, without ever getting in the way of your meal.
Among The Rowe's special events are off-season Sunday wine brunches, where a modest prix fixe brings a starter of eggs Benedict, a sumptuous buffet of such classics as boeuf bourguignon, and an array of wines for sampling. It's another of the ways the Rowe keeps us properly fed in winter (this is one of the few restaurants Up North that you will find open nightly all year long).
Westhoven has given the region something besides good food. He has given us talent as food; Tapawingo's Pete Peterson and Jim Milliman of Hattie's both were once chefs at the Rowe. And they, in turn, have developed new stars in their kitchens.
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