Restaurant reviews with ratings and Patty's "Best Bets" for good food in Northern Michigan including artisan bread, burgers, Cherry Festival food, designer milk, homemade ice cream, farm markets, ice cream and local wineries. This guide includes business locations, hours, phone numbers and web sites. It's a foodies bible to northern Michigan cuisine.
Patty LaNoue Stearns (1950- ) grew up outside Detroit in Allen Park, Michigan, in the shadow of the giant Uniroyal Tire on I-94. She wrote and illustrated her first newspaper at the age of nine and distributed it to her fourth grade friends at Arno Elementary. Nine years later in 1968, she was working full time at the Detroit Free Press, spending mornings as a fashion assistant, afternoons editing stock reports and evenings studying at the University of Detroit.
Since then her career has taken her around the world, inside the homes of the rich and famous and nose to nose with race-car drivers, celebrities and chefs. She worked as an editor and writer for Ward's Auto World magazine, managing editor of the edgy city magazine, Detroit Monthly, and did a second stint at the Detroit Free Press as a feature writer, food columnist and restaurant critic, during which time she studied in Paris at Le Cordon Bleu in its centennial year and was lead contributor to the 1998 Detroit Free Press Dining Guide.
As a freelance writer, Stearns has written thousands of stories for newspapers and magazines around the country and contributed to the Mobil Guide and AAA Guide. She is a member of the Association of Food Journalists and the American Society of Journalists and Authors and lives with her husband and two cats on a small lake outside Traverse City, Michigan.
