Foothills Restaurant & Motel

We come back to the foothills café for breakfast every time we’re up here as a family-​and it never disappoints. Always friendly service, hot coffee, and tasty food. Even though we’re grown up after 25 years of coming to Glen Arbor, we still like drawing on the placemats with crayons and taking family pictures. Can’t wait to come back again!
Recommendation: if you toured the breweries or wineries of the area or just went through a few six-​packs of local flavors the night before, the southern omelet with a hot heaping helping of sausage gravy and a coffee and water on the side really does the trick to get your morning back on track.

A friend and I stayed for two nights during the off season. We found it on Unilocal and wanted somewhere cheap and close to Sleeping bear. We loved the location but you truly get what you pay for. Very bare bones place. Also we had rowdy neighbors who were loud.
Pros:
–great café
–reasonable rate
–great proximity to Glen Arbor area & Sleeping bear dunes
Cons:
–outdated décor
–not super clean/​maintained
Overall good for the budget conscious traveler.

The food is nothing to write home about – generic American diner fare. It was great a few years ago. After changing hands I feel that the food quality dropped a bit. Service isn’t great.

Ate here while on vacation in the area. «Meh» is a good way to describe it. I’m not hard to please when it comes to breakfast, and this wasn’t *bad* but everything tasted pretty generic. And what kind of breakfast joint in Michigan of all places doesn’t serve real maple syrup?

What a warm spot. A family friend (and Maple City local) brought us here last week. Loved it! Like a local family diner at home.
Breakfast is served all day and my picky vegetarian tastes were met with a smile and perfect veggie egg white omelet. Bf and our friend loved their meals as well. The restaurants in Glen Arbor are touristy and kinda crappy.
Choose this.
They take cash only and most curious, checks! Hah! Love small towns. And when we asked about ATM’s, the sweet waitress offered that we could always pay later in the day!
Love them.

Traveling on my own I did some sightseeing during the day and needed a room for one night only. I tried The Homestead but didn’t want to spend $ 250 just for the night. I checked with the Foothills motel and they had one room left for $ 98 (tax included). I was heading south on M22 and the turnoff (County Rd 675) was before Glen Arbor. It was almost 9 pm when I got there and Frank greeted me. He showed me the room and since I wanted to use a credit card he asked if I would settle up in the morning when the owner would be in. Friendly, trusting, and casual. Nice. The room is very basic. Not my normal but I could tell it was clean. There was a tv with cable and free WiFi.
Next morning I checked out and then had a great breakfast at the adjacent café. Staff was friendly and helpful with tips and directions. A good traveling stop.

There is a reason this place has been around for so long, it’s good! Food is predictably tasty and delicious. The Eggs Benedict, Huevos Rancheros, and all the standards are excellent!

Great place for a good breakfast or lunch. Small, but here is where you will find the locals and those who know the better places to get a simple, good meal.

So, I used to have a boyfriend from around here. Being one of the few southeast michiganders who actually doesn’t have a cottage up north, I didn’t get my first northern michigan experience until I was a college student…
Anyway, Glen Lake has to be one of the most beautiful lakes I’ve ever seen. And the Foothills restaurant really just helped make my up north experience complete. It’s in a cute little cottage, with friendly service and good, fresh coffee. But the food truly is the reason this place shines. I can’t even describe how much better the food is here than all the other breakfast types I’ve been to. Fluffy pancakes (not the just add water kind), amazing bacon, perfect eggs, really good sausage gravy, crispy hashbrowns (I’ve been here quite a few times)… I’m actually starting to get sad I don’t have a northern michigan connection now… Anyway, I’ve never tried anything from the lunch menu, but I’m sure that is good also. I’m really just not one to turn down a really good breakfast, regardless of the time of day.
To make it even better, prices are damn reasonable, quite a shocker from someone who spends the majority of their dining experiences in Ann Arbor. So go here if you have the chance :)

So, here’s how it goes. The girl and I get to Chicago and meet up with the one and only Unilocaler we know at the time. She proceeds to show us around when she has the time. We are grateful.
Unilocaler finds out I am a Red Sox fan, which flies in the face of all reason considering I’ve spent the first twenty-​six years of my life in Tennessee. She too, being from the New England style parts of the country, is a Red Sox fan. She happens to know these two cats over in Logan Square who are also Red Sox fans, and oh, by the way, would we maybe like to come to their bar and watch the ALCS. Of course we say yes.
The two cats in Logan Square are incredible and, I am certain, will someday be involved in my wedding. But not, you know, in a creepy Mormon kind of way. I don’t want to give anyone the wrong, Mitt Romney/​Massachusetts sort of impression.
So we spend almost every night until the Red Sox are finished beating the Indians and then trouncing the Rockies at this bar with our new friends. During all this, we find out that one of these cats, the female of the pair, is from a family that’s done alright for itself. She informs us that her family has a very nice lake house on Glen Lake, which is somewhere in Northern Michigan, or what we Southerners refer to as the Alabama of the North. I’m skeptical, but I like lakes, so when they invite us up to join them, we work our schedule out so that we can go.
The girl and I spend the next few days isolated from the city and having what most people who believe in God would probably refer to as a «Come to Jesus» moment. I don’t come to Jesus, much to Jesus’ chagrin, but I do come to my senses. What a beautiful world I’m living in. Man do I miss Tennessee.
So on our last morning in town, these two baseball lovin’ cats from Logan Square take us to breakfast at this joint the Foothills. We get a table right away and are set upon by some girls who are almost certainly sisters. I think there were two of them, but there may have been as many as five. Anyway, they were nervous but accomplished servers. I’m thinking maybe the nervousness had something to do with the fact that one of my new friends and I both have a predilection for showing off our tattoos. They don’t seem like the folk who see a lot of tattoos. There are painted woodland scenes and handmade crafts on the walls, for chrissakes.
Regardless of our (not really that) shocking appearance, they wait on us diligently, and the food they bring us is just short of divine. I went simple, having a breakfast of eggs, pancakes, and sausage and it was damn excellent. Everything was fresh, and I’m told local, and it definitely showed. Despite the divinity of my breakfast, I still didn’t come to Jesus.
But I will come back to the Foothills.

Celebrating it’s 50^th anniversary this year, the Foothills Café has always been a favorite destination of mine when I’m at Glen Lake. I remember sneaking away early in the morning with my grandfather to have breakfast here when I was a kid… the food is just as good now as it was then!
GREAT breakfasts and very inexpensive as well. 4 large breakfasts, juice & coffee for the group came to only $ 41.00. I went in with friends today & everyone loved their meals. Fresh coffee and real cream to go with it, cherry pancakes, local sausage and bacon (not some crap from Sysco, clearly), delicious and perfectly crisp hash browns, golden eggs ~ it was all great. Of special note were the Southern omelet which was stuffed with onion, cheese, hash browns and topped with an amazing sausage gravy and the veggie eggs benedict with perfect poached eggs and a delicious hollandaise. Lunch menu includes well prepared standards such as the Patty Melt and French Dip sandwiches. I’ve never had a bad meal here.
Only open from 7 – 3, but breakfast is served all day if you are lazy and like to sleep late like me. Small, but charming, dining room lined with windows that look out onto bird feeders — we saw a woodpecker, several gold finches and some black capped chickadees while we ate. Friendly service, low prices, great food & locally owned — you can’t go wrong here.
****11/​14/​2007********* Power went down tonight, we headed into town and hit our local watering hole, Art’s, that has a generator to get our drink on and ride out the power outage. Whilst there, we were lucky enough to meet the owner — and chef — at the Foothills… being the awful drunk that I am, I told him insistently that his hash browns were the «tits» and tried to get tips on sausage gravy from him, I’m awful I am! He was very nice about it, phew!
In any case, this food really is locally sourced!!! Seriously, do yourself a favor and get over here already — the food actually is home made and the owner/​chef is kinda rad — do it, eat here already!