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At the Tapawingo, an elegant and easeful lakeside villa, I toast F.H. with an '87 Calera Mills Pinot Noir. Hard to say whether he would have approved. The family was churchly, but the women did most of the praying. Would the jalapeno smoked shrimp, seared and placed on a bed of black-bean-and-garlic sauce, have seemed the work of the devil? The cucumber-dill soup, with little blue borage blossoms floating on it? The lamb with braised lentils, garnished with nasturtium? Owner-chef Harlan Peterson, an escaped car designer who once styled Thunderbirds for Ford, says he is trying to phase out the flower garnishes. His customers won't let him. They are rich resorters, from such glossy Lake Michigan yacht moorings as Charlevoix, and occasional nervous Ellsworth elders being taken to dinner by their children from Chicago or Detroit. They pack the place, wearing the glazed looks appropriate to munchers of black-cherry-with-mint granita salads and paillards of Norwegian salmon.
Trust me, F.H., it is the best meal I have eaten since the time I looked sad during an interview with Craig Claiborne, and he and Pierre Franey fed me lunch. Yes, says my grandfather, but have you tried the Rowe? It turns out that there are two astonishingly good restaurants in Ellsworth. Wes Westhoven's Rowe, in fact, is where the Tapawingo's Peterson learned the restaurant business, and Peterson amiably admits that Wes' wine cellar is the best in northern Michigan. I am in no position to argue. The next evening Westhoven produces an impudent 1987 Cabreo Chardonnay from, of all places, Italy's Piedmont region. The food is exceptional -- strongly accented country French, read off a chalkboard: bean-and-red-pepper chowder, down-home pate, a superior house salad with bacon, and trout stuffed with shrimp. I have heard that people from Ohio fly here in private planes, eat and fly back. A scheduled airline would not be excessive.
On my last morning in town I make the visit I have been putting off, to F.H.'s house, where a cousin still lives. The place seems smaller, and it is; the big barn is gone, and the small barn and the manure pile and the woodshed and the galvanized tank that caught rainwater and, for crying out loud, the privy. In their place are neatly kept new houses. A paved street crosses what was the hillside pasture, and the little creek I tried industriously to dam up every summer -- tried, I think, simply because it seemed impossible -- is gone altogether.