ADVENTURE IS WHAT attracts many of us to Northern Michigan, whether to sail a new course, hike a new trail, or seek out a new artist. The region also delights the culinary adventurer with interesting restaurants and the fresh, seasonal products of farms, wineries, cheese makers, and specialty food shops. Gone are the days when good restaurants operated mainly in summer for the benefit of resorters. Northern Michigan has become a world-class culinary market, complete with its own highly regarded wines.
   With so many good restaurants to choose from, people often ask our advice, and we try in our books to answer by applying the same standards we use when we dine out. We seek restaurants that are assiduous and inventive in the selection, preparation, and presentation of food; we seek gracious, welcoming, knowledgeable staffs.
   We look, too, for restaurants whose owners are on the premises every day, either in the kitchen or at the door. Top-grade hospitality is difficult to achieve in absentia.
   Cuisine need not be haute to be fine, however, which is why we include so many simple cafes and taverns in our guide. If you don't expect them to be something they're not, we think none will disappoint you.
   We realize that we live in a highly seasonal place, where most proprietors streamline service and simplify menus in the off-season. You're not always likely to have the same experience in April as in July. Many places simply close. Of the ones that remain open, the best offer quality regardless of season.
   At any season, however, we encourage you to seek new experiences in places you've never been. That's what adventure is about.

YOU CAN ALSO FIND food adventure in Northern Michigan without going near a restaurant. Vineyards and wineries have proliferated Up North in recent years, as have bakeries, cheese-makers, patisseries, delis and specialty food shops. What once were roadside fruit stands are now full-scale farm markets with a wide range of fine, home-grown produce. Many community-based farms grow produce for a pre-paid clientele. Numerous towns have weekly market days when farmers and orchardists sell from stalls and trucks. Seeking and sampling this bounty is as rewarding as adventuring among the lakes and dunes.

A WORD ABOUT EDITORIAL INDEPENDENCE: We treasure ours and guard it jealously. Some restaurant critics and columnists (and we all know who they are) seem more interested in pleasing chefs and owners than informing restaurant customers about food. We realize whose hard-earned money restaurants are after, and we're on the customers' side. And, unlike newspapers and magazines, we have no advertisers to cater to.
   This is the ONLY way we have remained free to report and write objectively about the restaurants where we eat. So let us be very clear about this:

• No restaurant pays to be in our book.
  
• No chef tells us what to say.
  
• We always pay for every bite we eat .
  

Sherri and Graydon
--May 2004

Sherri DeCamp provides inside perspective on the hospitality industry as co-founder of Professional Guest, a hospitality-industry consulting firm. The company provides detailed evaluations of restaurants, lounges and guest services for a nationwide clientele of luxury hotels and resorts. The company was bought out in 2002 and is now based in Atlanta. Prior to that she was for six years national sales manager and director of sales at Grand Traverse Resort in Traverse City, following a 20-year career in elementary and outdoor education and executive training.

Graydon DeCamp is a veteran journalist who wrote entertaining, authoritative, pull-no-punches restaurant reviews as Senior Editor of Traverse magazine in the early 1990s. This followed retirement from a long career as a politics columnist and editor for Cincinnati's daily newspapers. He has written books about the U. S. Naval Academy and his former newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer (Old Lady of Vine Street) and was editor of the official history of Michigan's Mackinac Island State Parks. He also writes for Food Arts and other magazines.

The DeCamps live in Elk Rapids, Mich., and are active in the region's arts community, having served between them 18 years on the Traverse Symphony board and six with the Traverse Area Arts Council. Sherri has also served as a volunteer for the Make-A-Wish Foundation and Graydon formerly was on the Goodwill board. They have both been active as well as volunteers and vestry members at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Elk Rapids.