Ask someone who spends their summer on M-22 what's new in Empire and they'll probably mention the gelateria, the one with the bright green building that's been drawing a line out the door since 2022. That's not new. What's actually new happened this spring, in three unconnected moves that had nothing to do with drawing more visitors downtown. A golf clubhouse got a coffee counter. A thrift shop opened on the west side of the county for the first time. A campground added six-person bunkhouses and priced them like it was still 2019. None of it was flashy. All of it solved a problem someone in town had already been living with.
That's worth sitting with for a second, because it says something about how a town of Empire's size actually grows. It doesn't add competition to Front Street. It fills the gaps around it.
Three openings in eight weeks
Between mid-May and the end of June, three things opened or expanded in and around Empire:
- Dunes Café, inside the clubhouse of the Dunes Golf Club off M-72, opened May 15.
- Samaritans' Closet, a secondhand shop run by the nonprofit Leelanau Christian Neighbors, held its grand opening May 22 at 11840 S. Lacore Rd.
- Indigo Bluffs RV Park & Resort added four new family bunkhouses at the end of June.
None of these are on Front Street. None of them are trying to out-charm Shipwreck Cafe or pull traffic from the Empire Village Inn. Each one is answering a specific, practical question that a specific group of people in this town had been asking for a while.
A coffee counter answers a question golfers and campers were already asking
Dunes Café sits inside the Dunes Golf Club clubhouse, which is a stretch of M-72 that has never had much in the way of food and drink. Clayton Morrow, an experienced barista, helped his sister Brittany open the space this spring, and their father Chris Wall owns the golf club itself. The menu is coffee, tea, light food, and smoothies, including a Cherry Bomb made with tart cherries, banana, and homemade vanilla syrup, which is about as on-brand for cherry country as a drink gets.
What makes the opening worth noting isn't the smoothie. It's who Wall said the café was for. He described hoping it could help out "the community over at the campground" and cover their need for coffee and baked goods, a nod to Indigo Bluffs, which sits close enough to the golf club that a family staying there for a week now has somewhere to walk for a latte that didn't exist in May. Brittany was explicit that the café isn't meant to be golfers-only. "I want it to feel approachable, not like you have to be a golfer to stop in," she said, and golfers who do play a round get 10% off. This is a business built to serve two overlapping groups, golfers and campers, who were both underserved by the same gap in the map.
You can read more about the café's opening here.
The county's thrift network finally reaches the west side
Samaritans' Closet has existed in Lake Leelanau for years, run by Leelanau Christian Neighbors, a nonprofit that also operates food and baby pantries and the Blessings in a Backpack program, which sends nutritious food home with students across the county on weekends. Lake Leelanau is on the east side of Leelanau County. Empire is on the west side, and until this May, there was no equivalent store anywhere near it.
Mary Stanton, the nonprofit's executive director, put the gap plainly: "We always wished we had a bigger presence on the west side." The new Empire location, managed by Empire resident James Gerndt, opened with the same hours as the Lake Leelanau store and the same mission, funneling proceeds back into county programs rather than out of it. This isn't a boutique competing for foot traffic. It's an organization that has been serving half the county for years finally reaching the other half.
Full details on the opening are in this piece from the Glen Arbor Sun.
Six beds under $130 a night, on purpose
Indigo Bluffs RV Park & Resort added four new 320-square-foot bunkhouses at the end of June, each with a queen bed and four bunks, sleeping six. Owner Gary Becker called that number "magic" for hospitality, breaking it down as two grandparents, two parents, two kids. The three-generation vacation, in other words, and a real gap in what most Northern Michigan lodging offers, since a lot of it is built around couples or small families rather than groups that span three generations under one roof.
The pricing is the part that stands out. Becker set the bunkhouses under $130 a night even at the height of July, which he framed as a deliberate choice to protect access rather than chase peak-season rates. In a region where lodging prices tend to climb every summer, holding a family-sized unit under $130 during the busiest month of the year is a decision, not an accident.
Twenty-five years buys you the asparagus festival
None of this is happening in a vacuum. Front Street is still anchored by Miser's Hoard, the gift and antique shop Paul and Shelly Skinner have run since 2001, when they moved the business from Interlochen, where Paul's late wife Heidi had started it in the late 1980s. This year marks 25 years of Miser's Hoard operating in Empire, and in that time Paul has taken on a role that goes well beyond retail. He's the one who oversees the Empire Asparagus Festival, an event he inherited almost by accident in 2003 when the original organizer got married and left town, and this year's festival is expected to draw between 2,000 and 2,500 people to a village that measures its downtown in blocks, not miles. He also runs the Empire Hill Climb.
That's the kind of trust that takes decades to build, and it's not the kind of thing a new business can shortcut. The new openings this year didn't try. Dunes Café isn't trying to become the next Miser's Hoard. It's solving a coffee gap. Samaritans' Closet isn't trying to replace the county's other thrift options. It's reaching a part of the county nobody else had reached. Indigo Bluffs isn't trying to reinvent lodging. It's protecting a price point for families who'd otherwise get priced out of a week together.
Read more on Miser's Hoard and the Skinners' 25 years in town in this profile from the Glen Arbor Sun.
What the pattern says about the town
If you're looking for a theme in what opened in Empire this year, it isn't variety and it isn't tourism. It's access. A coffee stand that reaches golfers and campers who had nowhere close to walk. A thrift shop that reaches half a county that had been driving 30 minutes for the same service. A bunkhouse that keeps a family vacation affordable on purpose, in July, when almost nothing else in the region is doing the same.
That's a useful thing to know if you're trying to understand what Empire actually is right now, separate from the postcard version. It's a town that still runs on a handful of long-standing institutions like Miser's Hoard and Joe's Friendly Tavern, which stays open through the winter when most of Empire's restaurants scale back, while quietly filling in the practical gaps around them one small, unglamorous opening at a time.
If you're already living here, or thinking about what it means to put down roots in a town like this, Blue Lakes Real Estate Group spends a lot of time in towns exactly like Empire, watching for the kind of changes that don't make it into the visitor guides but matter to the people who actually live there. If you ever want to talk about what's happening in this corner of Leelanau County, from a neighbor's perspective rather than a headline's, let's work together.
