Where the Pharmacy Used to Be: What Actually Changed on St. Joseph Street This Year

Walk down St. Joseph Street in Suttons Bay this month and the sidewalk traffic is different. The tour buses have thinned out, the wine walk crowds haven't started yet, and for a few weeks the village belongs mostly to people who live here. That's usually when locals notice things they missed all summer. This year there's a lot to notice.

The building that used to house HomeTown Pharmacy is a whiskey bar now. The restaurant that spent close to two decades as North Country Grill and Pub is still there, same address, same general layout, but it goes by a different name and serves margaritas instead of whatever North Country served. A distillery that closed its doors in late March reopened in July, still working to get its old coffee bar back up and running. None of this happened quietly, exactly, but it happened in pieces, spread across a spring and summer that gave residents plenty of other things to pay attention to. Now that the pace has slowed, it's worth adding it all up.

The pharmacy building has a new tenant, and it isn't retail

HomeTown Pharmacy's old suite at 321 N. St. Joseph Street sat empty for a while before Grand Traverse Distillery moved in this year, opening its first-ever Suttons Bay tasting room in a ribbon-cutting held in mid-June. The company's own account of how it landed there is almost accidental. Grand Traverse Distillery had operated a shop in Leland for about fifteen years before closing it, assuming that chapter was finished. It was the distillery's own Leelanau team that found the old pharmacy space in Suttons Bay and signed a lease to move in. Then, according to the Leelanau Ticker's account of the expansion, the company got word just two weeks later that its old Leland spot had opened back up too. Rather than pick one, they kept both.

The Suttons Bay location now runs a single-barrel program with the Inland Seas Education Association as its nonprofit partner, currently pouring a bourbon made from an unusual blue and white corn mash. The Leland location's parallel program partners with the Fishtown Preservation Society. It's a small detail, but it tells you something about how these businesses think about the two towns differently even while operating under the same roof brand.

What matters for a resident walking past 321 N. St. Joseph is simpler: the space that used to fill prescriptions now pours spirits. That's not a judgment on either business. It's just what happened to that particular storefront, and it's one thread in a pattern worth watching.

Same building, new name

A few doors down, the space that spent close to two decades as North Country Grill and Pub is now Cantina TwentyTwo, a Mexican-inspired restaurant with a patio built around waterfront views. The ownership history here matters more than it usually would. North Country was founded in 2008 by Barry Boone, the same restaurateur behind Boone's Prime Time Pub, Boone's Long Lake Inn, and Boonedocks. Boone passed away in 2011, and his wife Karen kept the restaurant running until she sold it in early 2023 to Matthew Branton. Branton kept the space and relaunched it as Cantina TwentyTwo on May 14, 2026.

This is a rebrand, not a closure and reopening under new ownership from scratch, and that distinction is worth sitting with. The building never went dark. The name changed, the menu changed toward smoked brisket, tableside guacamole, and Cadillac fajitas, and the happy hour now runs two dollar beers, shots, and tacos daily from 2 to 5 p.m. and again from 8 p.m. to close. But the continuity of ownership means Suttons Bay didn't lose a restaurant this year so much as watch one evolve.

Two distilleries, two blocks apart

Here's where the pattern gets interesting. Grand Traverse Distillery's arrival wasn't the only spirits news on St. Joseph Street this year. Northern Latitudes Distillery's Suttons Bay satellite tasting room closed on March 29 and stayed dark for three months before reopening on July 10, going back to its regular slate of complimentary spirit tastings, bottle sales, and cocktails. The satellite location says it's also working to bring back a coffee bar stocked with Higher Grounds Coffee, which would put it in a slightly different lane than a straight tasting room, more of a daytime stop as much as an evening one.

So within the same short stretch of downtown, you now have two distillery tasting rooms operating within a couple of blocks of each other, one brand new and one freshly reopened after a season-long gap.

Whether the village can support two spirits-focused tasting rooms this close together is a question only next summer will answer. For now, both are open, and that alone is worth knowing if you're deciding where to walk on a Thursday evening.

The calendar hasn't slowed down, it's just changed audiences

None of this is happening in a vacuum. The Leelanau Harvest Tour ran on September 12, with cyclists choosing among 18, 38, 56, and 70 mile routes that started near the Herman Park pickleball courts and finished along the Suttons Bay waterfront, where VI Grill provided the finish-line picnic. That's a business founded in 1871, the oldest eating establishment in Leelanau County, still run by Chef and Owner Joshua Deters, who's had the place since 2009. It's a useful counterweight to everything above: some storefronts turn over, and some don't.

The rest of the month keeps moving too. The Bay Theatre's Fall 2026 Live at the Bay concert series opens on September 18 with Jon Langford and Sally Timms of the Mekons, the first of six shows running through November 13, with doors at 6 p.m. and shows starting at 7. Cider by the Bay Fest lands September 19. The Saturday farmers market at Ice Rink Park, on the corner of Broadway and Lincoln, is still running from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., trading peak summer produce for the first apples and squash of the season. And the Suttons Bay Chamber of Commerce has the Fall Artisan and Wine Walk booked for October 16, the annual stroll where local merchants each host an artist and often a winery, with a stamped walking guide that enters participants for gift card prizes.

What the two blocks are telling you

Put it together and a shape emerges. What's leaving downtown Suttons Bay this year, at least on this one stretch, is daily-need retail. What's arriving is hospitality: bars, tasting rooms, a rebranded restaurant leaning harder into food and drink as destination rather than neighborhood grill. That's not a story of decline. The fall calendar alone, a cycling tour, a concert series, a cider festival, a wine walk, argues against that. It's a story of a village whose commercial core is increasingly built around people coming to eat, drink, and be entertained rather than to run errands.

For someone who already lives here, that's just useful to know. It changes what you expect to find on a walk down St. Joseph Street, and it changes what kind of evening you can put together without leaving the village. The pharmacy is gone. The whiskey bar that replaced it has a rye program tied to Fishtown's preservation society two towns over. The restaurant that anchored that spot for close to two decades is still there under new colors. And VI Grill has been pouring drinks on that same waterfront since long before any of the rest of this was a plan.

If you're watching this stretch of Leelanau County for reasons beyond a Thursday night out, whether you own property near the village, are weighing a move here, or are simply trying to understand how a small downtown reinvents its storefronts without losing its center, Leelanau Living Realty Group keeps closer track of these shifts than most. Relax. We got this.