Small by Design: The Long Version

Café Bliss is probably one of the most idiosyncratic and unusual little hybrids of a restaurant you’ll ever hear of. From our food to our premises to our management style to our extended Bliss family, we are the farthest cry from your typical chain restaurant that you could ask for. We’re even a pretty good shout away from your typical Mom & Pop or Chef-centered bistro.

Our Food

The menu at Café Bliss ranges from pristine vegan dishes to scrumptious seafoods and spicy ethnic re-creations, with many special offerings available daily. No matter what the dish, we always strive for great-tasting, clean food, using premium ingredients and the healthiest cooking methods. Our goal is to offer high quality, delicious, original food you can feel good about eating, and we enjoin you to battle against the terrible sameness of typical north American cuisine — eating can be so much better!

Our restaurant is housed in a century-old Victorian home on St. Joseph’s Avenue in the historic waterfront village of Suttons Bay. Inside are hardwood floors, oak wainscoting, and oak-framed windows of stained and hand-rolled glass. Outside are beautiful gardens filled with annuals and perennials, many of them producing the organic herbs and spices used in our recipes or supplying the flower vases on your table. Just behind the restaurant is the small glistening bay for which the village is named, with a public beach, playground and marina that make for excellent meandering.

We are three: Tim Johnson, Ewa Einhorn, and Sarah Jane Johnson. Tim and Ewa are married to each other, and Sarah Jane is Tim’s sister. In addition to wanting a restaurant that served food that we ourselves could feel good about eating, we wanted one that would be as socially and environmentally responsible as possible. To that end, we worked very hard to create an environment for our staff and each other that is respectful and fun, one in which we could work hard to build a reputation for truly caring about what we do.

What we’ve been heartened to learn is that people will come back. We have a high rate of return for both employees and customers, and this has been one of the chief pleasures of being in business. The other is getting to eat great food all summer long and never having to wash any dishes. Come in and check us out for yourself!

Who We Are

The three of us decided to create Café Bliss back in 1992; we knew there was no better place to be in the summer than the Little Finger of northwest Michigan, and we’d all three worked several summer seasons at various restaurants in Leelanau County in order to enjoy the beautiful summers. By starting our own business, we would in effect be providing ourselves with summer jobs, and more — summer jobs that would hopefully provide enough income to let us indulge in our many other varied interests throughout the off-season. Having worked at several area restaurants and eaten at all of them, we decided that what the county really needed was an alternative to the usual menu offered up north — food that was exciting, spicy, different — ethnic and vegetarian fare that you couldn’t get anywhere north of Detroit.

All three of us had worked on and off in the restaurant industry for years, putting ourselves through college and later, supporting our “Art” habit. Tim and his sister Sarah Jane, in fact, grew up down in Benzonia and got their start in the biz as teenagers at The Cherry Hut, one of the region’s best-known and most venerable old summer restaurants.

Sarah Jane is a published poet and fiction writer with a Master’s Degree from Northern Michigan University, as well as an established local potter. She’s been a student of vegetarian cookery since she was a teenager and lives on a solar homestead in Lake Leelanau with her husband and three young daughters. She teaches 6th grade in the off-season at the Interlochen Pathfinder school and is involved in regular Leelanau County social work as well.

Ewa immigrated from Poland with her family when she was eleven, living in New York City and then moving to Pittsburgh. She studied ballet for many years and earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Pittsburgh in European History. She’s traveled widely, and worked in the front of the house at some of the world’s most famous restaurants, including The Rainbow Room, Michael’s Place, and the River Cafe, all in New York City. She runs the front of the house at Bliss and handles all our books and finances.

Ewa and Tim met at the University of Pittsburgh, where Tim was a graduate student in the English Department, earning a Master of Fine Arts degree in Writing. He is the published author of short stories and feature articles, and has taught English and writing at Carnegie-Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and currently teaches Literature at the Interlochen Arts Academy. He has also written two unpublished novels, one of them set in the Little Finger of Northwestern Michigan. He worked for several years at the famed Russian Tea Room in New York City, and does a fair amount of cooking and menu creation here at Bliss, in addition to handling the advertising and the maintenance of the building, equipment and grounds. Tim and Ewa have one young daughter.

We are truly a family business, and the chance to work together was one of the main reasons we were drawn to this project. As we enter our eleventh season this year, we are proud not only to still be around in a business with a high fatality rate, but to have developed a reputation for fine food, responsible environmental practices, and a social atmosphere that both our employees and patrons enjoy.

The History of Bliss

When Ewa and Tim came to Leelanau County from New York City in the winter of 1992, it was with the express purpose of hooking up with Sarah Jane, who’d already discovered the “Land of Delight.” We were on a quest to find a suitable property for the restaurant we had by then been talking about and imagining for several years. We first had the idea of a spot out in the county somewhere, a destination restaurant, maybe convert one of those beautiful old farmhouses. But the prospects were few and the idea of creating a commercial kitchen in an old farmhouse — once we’d actually toured through a few of them — was daunting. Spring was almost over and summer fast-approaching; while we didn’t have any illusions about getting off the ground that fast, we had hoped to be installed somewhere in time to at least participate as food vendors in a few festivals we knew about.

Then one Sunday in May we spotted a classified advertisement in the newspaper, listing a property in Suttons Bay that “might be” used for commercial purposes; in any case it was located in the village’s Central Business District and was zoned for commercial use. The Realtor who’d placed the ad was closed of course, but we drove over just to get a look at the outside of it.

What we found was an old house on the main street at the north end of the village, with sagging eaves and crooked windows, covered with flaking barn-red paint. The grounds were overgrown with mulberry and ivy and the backyard functioned as an unpaved parking lot. Not exactly what we had in mind. But then we noticed the bay, glistening in the dusky light of early evening, just visible through the dense box-elder trees at the back of the lot. A young woman’s head poked out the rear door.

She was a tenant; the building, she told us, had been cut up into two apartments, and she was living in the rear. She invited us in for a look. In the kitchen, way at the back, was some dully gleaming stainless steel; on closer inspection it turned out to be a commercial six-burner stove and convection oven, sitting underneath a huge commercial hood, all of it dusty and spider-webby.

“Yeah,” the young woman said, “I guess this was used as a restaurant at one time.” Ewa and I looked at each other. The young woman toured us through the rest of her side of the house, which, like the outside, was fairly dilapidated and gone to seed.

Believe or not, we weren’t struck right away by the obvious hand fate was dealing us. The place was such a wreck that we were definitely put off. But in the middle of the night — true story — Tim sat bolt upright in bed and announced to no one in particular that this was it. The advantages were suddenly overwhelming; a commercial kitchen already semi-in place, a location in a busy village whose main street also happened to be the major thoroughfare for the whole county, a small but livable space upstairs, a century old building that, once you looked more closely, had lots of buried charm like hand-rolled glass in the windows and oak wainscoting on the walls, maple floors and hickory cabinetry. Not to mention lots of outdoor space for the gardens we wanted and a view of the bay to boot.

We were on the phone first thing Monday morning with the Realtor. We made an offer which was accepted and had driven in with the earnest money by ten o’clock. The rest, as they say, is history.