At 8 miles around, Mackinac Island is known for a few things. A beautiful hotel, horses, bikes and even some food. That food is fudge, so I’ll not bother with writing about how Murray’s Fudge is the best, but the island is not without other restaurants catering to the throngs of tourists that make their way and need something to eat. On this visit, we left the main drag and found Ice House BBQ.

We started things off with an order of their Crunchy Deviled Eggs because apparently deviled eggs are what my wife craves when she is pregnant. Unlike normal deviled eggs, these are coated in panko crumbs and fried before getting the yolky mixture back in the whites. They were certainly tasty and nice twist on the usual deviled eggs, with the crunch of the crumbs almost making up for the lack of crunchy bacon.

For my main course, I ordered the Baby Back Ribs. They were said to be dry rubbed and slow smoked, and came with two sides and corn bread. I picked mac and cheese for my side and got potato salad so my wife could enjoy it. The ribs came out pre-sliced, which was certainly surprising. But this didn’t stop me from digging in. These wings weren’t fall off the bone, but instead seemed to adhere to the bite mark method of smoking. The flavor was pretty decent, but not exactly something special. On the other hand, I could really appreciate the char on the outside of the ribs and the flavor it brought. The mac and cheese was pretty solid, and made for a nice accompaniment.

Ice House didn’t exactly serve up the finest BBQ in the world, but it was unquestionably a solid choice for a meal on an island made for tourists.

On the Island of Mackinac in Lake Huron, it’s a bit hard to get over the smell of horse poop and concentrate on the need for food. But, an 8-mile bike ride around the entire island is enough to allow hunger overwhelm that smell of life before the automobile. The restaurants of Mackinac Island pretty much have a captive audience. Sure, they compete with each other, but once you’re on the island you’re pretty much stuck eating at one. Without knowledge of the food we consulted our bike rental guy who not only pointed us towards Goodfellows, but gave us a 10% off coupon as well. Kickbacks be damned, we were happy for the discount.

Goodfellows is a classic sports bar with a number of beers on tap, burgers, sandwiches, wings and TVs. The wings seemed to be right up my alley, so I ordered ten of them hot, with fries and blue cheese. They came out pretty fast and were unfortunately coupled with celery. Gets me every time. Yet, celery is certainly not the worst of veggies, and left no residual veggie flavor upon my wings. They turned out to have a pretty good kick and were somewhat better than I had been expecting on tourist-centric Mackinac Island. Nothing too crazy, but certainly a worthy meal after a hardy bike ride.