Mackinac Island’s Greatest Tables
5 restaurants listedGet the complete Mackinac Island dining guide.
New openings, reservation tips, and editor picks — updated quarterly. Free to join.
$ under $40 · $$ $40–$80 · $$$ $80–$150 · $$$$ $150+ per person
Best for First Date in Mackinac Island
Best for Business Dinner in Mackinac Island
The Top 5 Mackinac Island Restaurants
The Main Dining Room at Grand Hotel
The Main Dining Room at Grand Hotel is the centrepiece of an 1887 resort hotel that sits 200 feet above the Straits of Mackinac at the highest point of the island's south bluff. The room runs the length of the hotel's main floor, with floor-to-ceiling windows facing south over the Straits, white-cloth tables set for two and four, ceiling-high palms, and a small bandstand where the Grand Hotel Orchestra plays nightly through dinner. Dinner is served in a single long seating that begins at 6:30 PM and runs to about 9 PM; the room turns over once per evening rather than twice.
Woods Restaurant
Woods Restaurant occupies a Bavarian-style chalet in the wooded interior of Mackinac Island, half a mile from Grand Hotel and reached by a horse-drawn carriage shuttle that runs every fifteen minutes from the hotel's front portico. The building was originally the hotel's recreation pavilion; today it holds a dining room of about a hundred covers across two levels, with timber beams, antler chandeliers, a stone fireplace, and a duckpin bowling alley downstairs that hotel guests routinely take a turn on before or after dinner. Woods was named the Best Resort Restaurant in the United States by USA Today and earned a spot on Only in Michigan's list of Twelve Must-Try Michigan Restaurants in 2026.
The Carriage House at Hotel Iroquois
The Carriage House sits at the front of Hotel Iroquois, a Victorian inn on Main Street whose porch hangs over the rocky shoreline of the Straits of Mackinac. The dining room is bright and white, with linen tablecloths, a single line of windows facing the water, and a porch terrace that — when the wind is right — is the most pleasant place on Mackinac Island for a long summer dinner. The room seats about seventy across the inside dining room and the porch. The Carriage House has been an island-wide favourite for nearly three decades and reliably appears on every Best of Mackinac list compiled by the Mackinac Island Tourism Bureau.
Chianti at Mission Point Resort
Chianti occupies a low-lit dining room on the ground floor of Mission Point Resort, the 18-acre property at the east end of Main Street where the island opens to the Round Island Channel. The room is intimate — forty-eight covers across two seatings on weekend nights, a single seating on weekdays — with dark wood, low gold light, an exposed wood-fired pizza oven at the back, and a small private booth at the entrance that is the most-requested two-top on the island. The format is a five-course prix fixe; à la carte ordering is not the room's intent and is offered only at the bar.
The Jockey Club at the Grand Stand
The Jockey Club at the Grand Stand is part of the Grand Hotel family of restaurants but stands separately on Cadotte Avenue, halfway up the hill from Main Street toward Grand Hotel itself. The room is built around a central stone fireplace, with cozy leather booths along two walls, an open kitchen at the back where the wood-fire grill anchors the line, and a wide outdoor patio that overlooks the first hole of The Jewel golf course — a Jerry Matthews-designed 18-hole course laid across the island's slopes. The Jockey Club is open from May 1 through October 24 and runs lunch from 11 AM to 4 PM and dinner from 5 PM to 10 PM every day of the season.