The Mike Levine Lakelands Trail State Park opened in 1994, built on a stretch of Grand Trunk Western railroad bed the company abandoned back in 1978. For most of its life, the paved section between Hamburg Township and Pinckney has done exactly what a rail trail is supposed to do: give walkers, cyclists, and cross-country skiers ten flat, tree-lined miles to move through without a car. That is still true. What has changed, quietly and over roughly the last year, is what waits at the ends of it.
Walk or ride the paved stretch west from the Hamburg trailhead today and you pass Zukey Lake, one of eight lakes in the chain that spans southern Livingston County, with the 90-year-old Zukey Lake Tavern perched right on the water. Keep going and the trail spits you out at the historic Pinckney Depot. Hop off there, head south, and within a few blocks you can be sitting down at a restaurant that did not exist eighteen months ago, or buying a ticket to a professional dinner theater that has been staging shows in a converted 1800s general store since 2013. None of this required anyone to plan a food-and-entertainment loop. It assembled itself, one opening and one award at a time, along a path that was never meant to be a reservation list.
What's New at the Depot End
The clearest evidence that something has shifted is Bliss & Fish, which opened in May 2025 in the former Fondness Sushi Bar space at 102 South Howell Street. Owner Shadia Zamlut is continuing a family business that goes back to 1979, when her father Joe ran Bet & Jessie's Fish & Chips in Redford until 2013. Bliss & Fish keeps the fish and chips but adds Mediterranean dishes built around a family olive oil imported from Lebanon, plus live music on Saturdays that has become part of the draw rather than a side note.
The restaurant did not stay a quiet neighborhood addition for long. In January 2026, the Greater Brighton Area Chamber of Commerce named Bliss & Fish its 2025 Pinckney Business of the Year, with the state of Michigan presenting a tribute plaque alongside it. That is not the kind of recognition a town hands out to a place that is coasting. It is a signal that a business less than a year old had already made itself part of how people in Pinckney spend a Friday night, and it sits close enough to the depot that anyone finishing a ride on the paved trail can walk straight into it.
The Cidery That Grew Up Next to a Pizza Place
A few minutes from downtown on McGregor Road, Ore Creek Craft Cider has been quietly building its own case since it opened in October 2019. It started as one founder's basement hobby, using generations-old family recipes, before growing into a taproom that locals now compare to something you would expect further north in Michigan. In 2021 it picked up a Vote 4 the Best award for Best Wine Shop, followed by Best Brewpub in 2022, and in 2025 it was voted the top cidery on the Michigan Brew Trail. That last title matters because it did not come from a hometown popularity contest. It came from a statewide vote, which means Pinckney's cider bar is now competing on a scale bigger than the village itself.
Ore Creek sits right next door to Riverside Pizza, and the cidery openly tells customers to order a pie next door if they want food with their flight. That is a small detail, but it is the kind of arrangement that only happens when two businesses have figured out they are stronger as neighbors than as competitors. Together they give the trail's midpoint its own reason to stop, separate from what is waiting downtown or on the water.
Where the Trail Actually Takes You
| Stop | What's There | Why It Matters Now |
|---|---|---|
| Zukey Lake Tavern | 90-year-old waterfront tavern directly on the paved trail, Chef Michael D'Antoni's Italian and Louisiana Creole menu | Has anchored the trail's midpoint since before most of today's other stops existed |
| Ore Creek Craft Cider | McGregor Road taproom, Michigan-sourced apples, next door to Riverside Pizza | Voted top cidery on the Michigan Brew Trail in 2025, a statewide title, not a local one |
| Bliss & Fish | 102 S. Howell Street, opened May 2025 | Named 2025 Pinckney Business of the Year within a year of opening |
| The Dio | 177 E Main Street, downtown | Livingston County's first professional dinner theater, now cycling into its next production |
The Show That Was Never the Point Until Now
The Dio has been part of downtown Pinckney since 2013, when co-founders Steve DeBruyne and Matthew Tomich moved their young theater company into a building that had spent most of its history as the Pinckney General Store. It became Livingston County's first professional theater company, contracting actors from as far as Chicago and New York, and its dining room seats 70 guests at 20 tables for a meal served before every performance.
This spring's run of Big Fish closed out May 31, and the box office has already moved on to its next title, The Explorers Club. What makes The Dio relevant to this particular loop is not any single production. It is that a night at The Dio has quietly become the thing that anchors an evening that might have started with a bike ride past Zukey Lake or a cider flight on McGregor Road. Dinner and a show used to mean driving into Ann Arbor or Detroit. In Pinckney, it increasingly means staying exactly where you are.
What This Actually Means If You Live Here
None of these businesses opened because someone was building a trail loop on purpose. Zukey Lake Tavern has been there for nine decades. The Dio has been downtown for over a decade. But Bliss & Fish is not even eighteen months old, and Ore Creek's statewide recognition only landed last year. Put those two recent developments next to the two established ones, and what shows up is a version of Pinckney where a resident can genuinely start at a trailhead and end at a dinner theater without getting in a car in between.
That matters for anyone who has lived here long enough to remember when a night out meant a drive to Brighton or Ann Arbor. It also matters if you are the kind of person who tracks these things for practical reasons, like knowing where the trail's pavement actually runs out. The paved section only covers about ten miles, from Hall Road in Hamburg Township to M-36 just west of the village. Push further toward Gregory and Stockbridge and the surface shifts to crushed limestone and, in spots, unimproved slag and sand, better suited to a mountain bike or a horse than a road bike. Knowing that before you plan a ride saves you from finding out the hard way.
The trail itself carries a name that most people riding it have never asked about. It was renamed the Mike Levine Lakelands Trail State Park in 2018, honoring a Michigan philanthropist who pledged $5 million toward trail projects across the state in 2016. Whether or not that history changes how you ride it, it is the kind of detail that separates someone who has actually spent time on this path from someone reading about it for the first time.
If you are already living near this loop, none of this requires you to do anything differently. Ride the trail, stop at Zukey Lake Tavern or Ore Creek Craft Cider along the way, and see what is playing at The Dio before you decide whether dinner ends at Bliss & Fish or starts there. The pieces are already in place. You just have to notice they are pointing at each other.
If you are curious what it actually looks like to live within walking distance of this stretch of Pinckney, or you want to talk through what is available near the depot, downtown, or the water, Heidi Smith knows this part of Livingston County well enough to walk you through it honestly.
