By Scott Sullivan
Editor
From Chicago to Me., Chicago to Me. to here. So’s the road gone for Missy Corey, who, with help from Pennyroyal Café and Provisions partner Ryan Beck, has won a James Beard Award semifinalist designation.
While growing up in the Windy City, she recalls food called to her — not only cooking and eating it, but its sources.
At Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Me., Corey won an art history degree in 2006, then came back to Chicago to teach but sought something more.
“I got a side gig as a hostess at Ambria, a four-star French restaurant, and kept bugging the owners to let me work in the kitchen there,” she says.
“I finally got a chance to do that at Mon Ami Gabi, a French bistro in Lincoln Park, but missed Maine and wanted to go back there.”
Corey lived in a yurt on a farm (“where food is sourced,” she notes) outside Portland, Me., where she cooked under past Beard Award winners Sam Hayward (Forestreet) and Doug Evans (Hugo’s and Duckfat).
Evans encouraged her to go on the Food Network program “Chopped,” which gave Corey and competitors a list of disparate ingredients from which to create a great dish. She won, good for $10,000.
“That was 10 years ago,” Corey says. “It’s gone. But knowing where food came from hands-on helped me to find my way.”
She came back to Chicago in 2012 to work as a butcher at Publican Quality Meats. “It was like in the yurt, getting back to more food basics,” she says.
Corey rose to Chef de Cuisine at Publicam and won more recognition. The Chicago Reader cited her in 2014 as one of 20 area chefs to know. Thrillist named her one of Chicago’s top female chefs the next year.
She met Beck, who had also grown up in Chicago and come back, but not before venturing out his own way to win a degree in ethnobotany from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
“Ryan had a small urban farm there, came home and we met in a knife store,” Corey says.
“We hit it off — and still do.”
It was time for both to set out once more, this time together. Corey and Beck bought a 17-acre home and farm in Saugatuck Township plus two commercial acres at 3341 Blue Star Hwy. They named the latter Pennyroyal after a mint-like herb once used by the ancient Greeks for cooking and Native Americans for healing.
“Like many herbs that were once widely useful and abundant,” reads the restaurant’s website, “Pennyroyal is now overlooked as a weed.” Diners, however, paid attention.
“Herbs uniquely represent the overlap in the past of food and medicine,” the website goes on. “Our style of cooking reflects this idea. We start with humble ingredients and enhance them by using historic recipes with a tasteful, cultivated touch.”
Seems every restaurant and its sister stresses locally-grown fresh ingredients, but Beck and Corey take it further.
“We’re both farmers,” she says. “Ryan raises some of our food at home, but not enough. It helps that we can talk with other farmers about best practices and what their ingredients will go into.
“We’ve built a network of other sources who share our views.”
Regular local suppliers credited on Pennyroyal’s menu include Pleasant Hill Farms (“Organic blueberry pancakes are a staple,” says Corey), Visser and Forest Ridge Farms, Crisp Country Acres, Mackinac Straits Fish Co., Cosgrove Orchards, Evergreen Lane Creamery and Nantucket Bread.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner dishes range from basics (omelettes, croissants, eggs, toast, potatoes …) to quirky (try a xuixo pastry on Fridays, to, well …)
“This isn’t Chicago,” says Corey. “We’re in a small market and depend on regulars. A lot of our customers like comfort food they know will satisfy; others are more adventurous.
“We change dishes seasonably and often, but there are favorites you can always get, if you choose.” A drink menu with unique picks is offered too.
Open seasonally behind the building is “the best patio on the lakeshore,” Corey says. “Ryan is great at horticulture and landscaping.
“It’s an oasis for guests,” she says.
Pennyroyal is open Mondays and Wednesdays from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. plus Thursdays through Sundays from 8 a.m. until 9 p.m., 11 months a year.
“We take Januarys off,” says Corey, whom, when we spoke, had returned to reopen in time for Valentine’s Day.
“Go someplace warm?” we ask.
“The U.P.’s Keewenaw Peninsula,” she answers. “For skiing, saunas and to run our two Anatolian shepherds.”
Pennyroyal first opened April 20, 2019. In less than a year the Covid pandemic started.
“We were too broke to close,” recalls Corey. “So we stayed open, abided by masking protocols and provided food for people who otherwise had nowhere else to go.
“We dug in,” she says.
Last year’s roundabout construction, which from April through mid-July detoured through traffic off Blue Star Highway, cut into business too. “Folks had to go out of their way to get here,” she says. “Luckily, they did.”
Lucky for them too: “It’s an honor to be recognized,” Corey says of the Beard nomination. “We’re among five restaurants in Michigan and 20 in the four-state Great Lakes region (others are Illinois, Indiana and Ohio).
“We have lots of big-city (Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit) cited with us. Finalists will be named in April.
“I suppose we compete, but we learn from each other too,” Corey says.
