"For me it is about building something out of nothing and having the satisfaction of it catching fire and growing."
That's Bridgett VanDerhoff, talking about the building at 91 Arthur Street that she and her brother Rob, along with Rob's wife Carey, turned into Wander In. "Building something out of nothing" is generous phrasing, though. There was something there already: a fast food restaurant, vacant since 1995, sitting on one of the more naturally valuable stretches of shoreline in the city.
If you've lived in Manistee for a while, you know the corner even if you never knew what used to be a Little Caesars. It's a few steps from the Arthur Street Boat Launch, the city-owned fishing pier and ramp that's provided public access to Manistee Lake since the 1930s and got a full accessibility overhaul in 2010 with help from a Great Lakes Fishery Trust grant and a DNR waterways grant. It sits on US-31, one of the busier roads through town. None of that explains thirty years of plywood and a for-sale sign nobody answered.
The Answer Isn't "Nobody Wanted It"
The honest answer is more specific than that, and more useful if you've ever wondered about a different empty building somewhere else in Manistee. A vacant fast food building on a small lot doesn't just need a buyer who likes the location. It needs a buyer whose math works, and for three decades, the math on this particular building didn't, not without help.
That help has a name in Michigan: a property can be certified as "functionally obsolete," meaning the structure's usable life in its current form has effectively run out because of how uses, codes, or design standards have shifted since it was built. Under Michigan's Brownfield Redevelopment Financing Act, passed in 1996, that certification opens the door to redevelopment financing tools that otherwise wouldn't apply. The text of Act 381 itself lays out functionally obsolete, blighted, and contaminated as three separate paths into the same program.
Manistee has its own Brownfield Redevelopment Authority for exactly this reason. It was established in 2006, and its own FAQ page is unusually candid about where the need is concentrated: many properties along the Manistee River Channel and the Manistee Lake shoreline carry contamination from fill material like ash, coal, slag, and old foundry sand, waste from the industrial uses that lined this water back into the late 1800s. The city notes it has directed most of its effort toward two areas: downtown, and the east side of the city on Manistee Lake. Arthur Street is exactly that second area.
So the building didn't sit empty because the waterfront wasn't worth wanting. It sat empty because this specific parcel needed a specific legal designation before a private buyer could make the numbers close.
The Push That Actually Moved It
Once the designation was in place, the rest moved fast enough to have a ribbon cutting. The grand opening was organized by the Manistee Area Chamber of Commerce, with a ceremony on Friday, August 29, 2025, followed by a public opening that afternoon.
Andrew Stafford, the chamber's director of economic development, put the collaboration in plain terms:
"Public-private collaboration is essential to the success of redevelopment projects."
He credited the developer's follow-through for turning a long-blighted property on one of the city's major roads into a working restaurant and community gathering spot, and the project's own numbers back that up: 35 new jobs created in Manistee County. That's not an abstract economic development statistic. Some of those jobs belong to people you've probably already been served by if you've eaten there.
This Isn't the Only Corner Getting This Treatment
Wander In is the most visible proof that the tool works, but it isn't the only project running through it. Manistee's Brownfield Redevelopment Authority currently lists the South Washington Area Redevelopment as its largest active project in the city, a plan to rehabilitate the unfinished River Parc condos and the North Channel Outlet building along with several vacant parcels around them, eventually adding condominiums, apartments, retail space, and boat slips. The same authority has also handled the demolition of blighted buildings at the former Manistee Plating property and worked on remediation tied to the old General Chemical site, where freighters once docked and bulk material was stored.
None of that is happening at Wander In's scale of visibility, since you can't eat dinner at a tax increment financing plan. But it's the same mechanism, applied to the same kind of problem: land the market wanted but couldn't finance on its own. If you've noticed other quiet changes along the channel or the lake's east shore over the past few years, there's a good chance this is the tool behind them.
The Family and the Kitchen Behind the Slogan
The building's new life carries a detail that's hard not to notice once you know the history. Wander In's stated philosophy, printed on its own site, is "good food, not fast food." The building spent thirty years as the opposite of that.
The VanDerhoffs aren't newcomers borrowing a lake view for a concept. A photograph inside the restaurant shows Bridgett and Rob's grandparents, who spent their working summers as charter fishers on these same waters. To run the kitchen, they brought in Chef Brian Kissel, a Michigan native and graduate of the Great Lakes Culinary Institute, who built his reputation leading kitchens at Manistee National Golf & Resort and at the Blue Slipper in Onekama before coming to Arthur Street.
What Kissel put on the menu leans into comfort with a few unexpected turns: malted pancakes and French toast alongside biscuits and gravy at breakfast, bourbon-glazed salmon and hearty pastas later in the day, and a bacon dish sweetened with honey that regulars already ask for by name. Outside, there are firepits, live music on a regular rotation, and boat rentals for anyone who wants to get out on the water directly from the dock, including a donut boat cruise that comes with snacks and cocktails built in.
More Than a Year In, Still Adding Layers
Restaurants that open with a ribbon cutting and a chamber press release aren't always still worth writing about a year later. This one keeps adding reasons to check back. Heading into its second fall, Wander In has been running a rotating seasonal cocktail menu, with drinks like the Guthrie Ghost and the Oak Street Sweetie built specifically for the time of year and not meant to last past it. Come winter, the restaurant sets up heated outdoor igloos looking out over Manistee Lake, a reservation-only setup that turns the coldest months into their own draw rather than a slow season to survive. Live programming has kept coming too, including a Paddock Rock and Road Show booked at the restaurant in early September 2026.
That kind of ongoing investment is its own kind of evidence. A building can get a ribbon cutting from good financing alone. Staying interesting more than a year in takes something the tax incentive can't buy.
What This Actually Tells You
The next time you pass a shuttered building somewhere else along the lake or the channel, the more useful question isn't whether anyone wants that spot. On water like this, someone almost always does. The real question is whether the site has been through the same process Arthur Street went through: certified as functionally obsolete or blighted, folded into the city's Brownfield plan, and given the specific financial nudge that turns "nobody's bought it" into "here's what it takes." Manistee has already built that machinery and used it more than once. Wander In just happens to be the version you can sit down in.
If you're curious about what's changing elsewhere in Manistee, or anywhere else along West Michigan's shoreline, West Michigan Homes and Land keeps an eye on these corners as part of daily life here, not just as listings. Explore West Michigan Listings whenever you're ready to see what else is out there.
