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For 452 days, I fantasized about what it would be like to travel again. I imagined diving into the turquoise sea in Turks and Caicos or stuffing myself silly at a Taiwanese night market. What I didn't picture was sitting around a campfire in the backwoods of Michigan on an early June night, trading tips on pig butchery.
And yet here I am, having scored a last-minute reservation at Milkweed Inn, the latest venture of the lauded Chicago chef Iliana Regan. In early 2019, fed up with the churn and burn of the restaurant industry, Iliana and her sommelier wife, Anna, bought a four-bedroom hunting lodge, sight unseen, on 150 acres in Hiawatha National Forest, seven and a half hours north of Detroit. The yard is carpeted with wild strawberries and fiddlehead ferns, its perimeter ringed with elderberry bushes. The place is so remote, and the old logging road to reach it so rutted, the women often pick up their guests at a gas station 28 miles away and bring them out in a four-wheel drive. Even those with the gears to make the trek aren't allowed to attempt it alone, instead trailing Anna on the winding, cell-service-free road that leads to the compound.
The couple hosted their first guests that summer while simultaneously running the Michelin-starred restaurant Elizabeth in Chicago. Thanks to early media attention, a cap of 10 guests per weekend (six in the lodge; four more split between a canvas-walled tent and a silver Airstream), and a season that spans only May through October, Milkweed was quickly booked solid for the next two years. Then the pandemic forced the pair to push all their reservations back a year. On a whim last spring I joined the waiting list (like Sweden's now-shuttered Fäviken, Milkweed is the kind of forest-to-fork destination where you book the table first and worry about getting there later), and by some miracle of the calendar gods immediately landed a spot.
After 50 minutes bumping through corridors of sun-dappled pines, dust billowing in our tracks, we arrive. Immediately, four dogs bound out of a modest pine log cabin, barking their fool heads off; there's George, a fluffy Newfoundland with a graybeard's tired face; Bunny, an Old English sheepdog; and Shih Tzus Clementine and Bear, the latter of whom cannot and will not be befriended.
Iliana is out back when we pull up, stoking the fire beneath an enormous lake trout. She wears her pants tucked into her hiking socks and is so soft-spoken I have to lean in to hear her. It's not what I expect from someone whose viscerally raw, hard-partying 2019 memoir, Burn the Place, opens with a fantasy of torching her own restaurant. Raised on a 10-acre farm in rural Indiana, the self-taught cook battled countless demons—alcohol, gender dysphoria, the death of a beloved sister—on her rise to the top of Chicago's restaurant scene. The one thing that kept her grounded was cooking. Watching her pinball between the kitchen and firepit, unfurling sheets of fresh pasta, scoring sourdough in a Dutch oven, and rhythmically cracking eggs on the rims of metal bowls, you sense a steadiness beneath all of the movement.
Despite her success (industry hotshots René Redzepi and David Chang are fanboys), her decision to slow down was a long time coming. The exhaustion of running Elizabeth—as well as the critically acclaimed Kitsune and the micro-bakery Bunny, both of which shuttered in 2019—consumed her. Milkweed was a ticket out. “My dream was to have something small, where I was foraging and growing my own food and using extremely local ingredients,” says Iliana. “This was everything I ever wanted and beyond my wildest dreams.”
Anna ushers us onto the porch, where we exchange pleasantries with other guests over fruit leather and cashew cheese. We lavish attention on the dogs, because they're the easiest thing to talk about when everyone's social skills have spent the last year rusting on concrete blocks. Still, it's a good warm-up for what will effectively be a three-day dinner party.
The night's inaugural meal offers a taste of things to come: smoked trout with pesto, pierogi stuffed with sauerkraut and mushrooms, a wild-strawberry sorbet laced with tender young spruce shoots. After dinner, Anna cracks open a bottle of Two James Spirits J. Riddle peated bourbon, and the ice begins to splinter. I look around at my dining companions, including a gym teacher and an orthopedic surgeon, and think of how a love of good food and the outdoors unites us. It feels nice, almost natural even, to break bread with strangers and leave as friends, though it helps that Milkweed is self-selecting. “Our guests know what they're getting into here,” says Iliana. “They're ready for this experience.”
By that, she means a real-deal, off-the-grid lodge: solar panels, well water, no Wi-Fi. The cabin is too secluded to wander off-property, so guests busy themselves with activities. With her tips, I scour the forest floor for ramps and yarrow, and rumble down back roads in an ATV, pausing at a pond dotted with butter-yellow lilies. Thunder ripples across the sky as I try my hand at archery, steadying the bow exactly as Anna showed me and squealing when my arrow zips through the air with a satisfying snap. Other guests curl up with a book on the lodge's covered deck or pick Iliana's giant brain about foraging and fermentation. Over the next two days, we feast on the fruits of her labor: five extraordinary meals, including an epic tasting menu on Saturday night. In Iliana's world, a salad is never just a salad. It's mustard greens, violet leaves, spruce shoots plucked from the forest, and koji-fermented black beans tossed in a wild-blackberry vinaigrette. Ramp pasta is just that—plus trout lily, stinging nettle, marsh marigold, cattail shoots, egg-yolk amino acids, and a “shit ton of butter.”
Four hours pass like this, with an exquisite parade of creative dishes, but I'm too lost in merry banter to notice the time. Like riding a bicycle, the old rhythms of confabulation come roaring back, and all the anxiety I've been hanging on to falls away. Belly laughs echo through the rafters as the dogs run maniacal circles through the house. Iliana wipes down the counters, and Anna checks and rechecks that our glasses are full. And indeed they are.
Milkweed Inn hosts guests weekends from May through October. Rates from $1,750 for two for a two-night stay, all meals and activities included.
This article appeared in the September/October 2021 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here. All listings featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. If you book something through our links, we may earn an affiliate commission.
