Presque Deli and Earl E. Byrds Just Bookended Your Presque Isle Loop
The stretch between Lakewood Lane and the entrance to Presque Isle Park has been the same commercial nothing for years. A gap between residential blocks and the trailhead where the only decision was whether to bring your own water bottle. That gap closed on February 23, 2026, when Presque Deli held its ribbon-cutting at 1635 Presque Isle Avenue. Seven months later, on the other end of the loop, the food scene shifted again. Earl E. Byrds opened its doors downtown on August 25 and held a grand-opening celebration on September 16 at 102 W. Washington Street, inside the Harlow Block at Front and Washington.
Two openings, seven months apart, on opposite ends of the same route. What looks like a coincidence is actually two different growth patterns happening at the same time, and knowing the difference tells you something about how this corner of Marquette is developing.
Presque Deli opened with three owners behind the counter: Mario Gohl, Heath Lefke and Scott Maynard. The Lake Superior Community Partnership helped mark the occasion, and the menu leans into deli basics done with some intention. Hot and cold sandwiches, fresh salads and soups, a specialty lineup of grilled cheese, and a dedicated street dog menu round out the core offerings. There's also a grab-and-go cooler stocked with quick-serve items and house-made desserts for anyone who wants to grab lunch on the way to the park rather than sit down for it.
The deli runs Monday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., which covers both the midday trail crowd and the after-work crowd heading out for an evening walk before the loop closes to cars at dusk. Delivery is available through DoorDash and UberEats for the days when the walk happens but the errand doesn't.
None of the three owners are attached to a larger restaurant group. This is a straightforward local fill-in: three people saw an empty storefront on the road everyone already drives to reach Presque Isle, and they opened a deli there.
Earl E. Byrds tells a different story. The diner spent five years building a following in Munising before expanding west to Marquette, a 40-mile move that owners Tom and Ana Dolaskie describe as a natural next step for a restaurant that was already popular. The Marquette location serves all-day breakfast and lunch, seven days a week from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., with skillets, classic breakfast plates, and sandwiches and burgers made with local beef. The kitchen sources from Case Country Farm and LaBar Poultry Farm, and the coffee on the table is the restaurant's own Breakfast Blend, roasted by its sister company, Gallery Coffee Company, back in Munising.
The address matters as much as the menu here. Earl E. Byrds sits in the Harlow Block, at the corner of Front and Washington, in a space that previously housed the Steinhaus. That's not an isolated lease. It's one piece of a corner that the same ownership group has been building out for over a year.
Earl E. Byrds is owned by Deployed Capital, the hospitality company behind a growing list of Upper Peninsula businesses: The Brownstone Inn in Au Train, Tracey's, Roam Inn, Eh! Burger, and Slabz Bar & Grill, which opened inside the Ramada Marquette in December 2024. Gallery Coffee Company, the Munising roaster supplying Earl E. Byrds' coffee, is also part of that portfolio, and it's preparing to open a second Marquette location in the same Harlow Block, in the space formerly occupied by Boomerang Retro on Washington Street.
That means the corner of Front and Washington will soon hold two concepts from the same operator, sitting a few doors apart, both selling coffee, one of them also selling breakfast and lunch. This is deliberate clustering. A single hospitality company already running a bar and grill inside a downtown hotel is now stacking a diner and a coffee shop onto the same block, betting that proximity between its own concepts draws more traffic than spreading them across town.
Compare that to the near end of the loop, where three independent owners opened one deli to fill one gap. Same season of growth, same route, two entirely different mechanisms behind it. One end is corporate density. The other is a straightforward neighborhood fill-in. Reading the loop for what actually opened, rather than assuming all new openings mean the same thing, tells you which end of Marquette's food scene is expanding by design and which end is expanding by opportunity.
For anyone who already treats the Presque Isle loop as a fixed route, the practical shift is straightforward. Heading out toward the park in the late morning or early evening, Presque Deli is now a legitimate stop, not just a storefront you pass. Its Monday through Saturday hours line up with both a midday break and a pre-dusk walk before the drive closes to vehicles.
Heading the other direction, toward downtown, Earl E. Byrds covers the early half of the day. Its 7 a.m. start means it catches the same window as an early bike ride or a walk before work, and its 2 p.m. close means it's a breakfast-and-lunch stop, not a dinner one. The menu itself carries some local specificity worth knowing before you order. Alongside the skillets and sandwiches, look for the Mighty Mac Cheeseburger and a cudighi, the U.P.'s own sausage tradition, worked into the lunch side of the menu.
The two businesses don't overlap in hours or in ownership, which means they function less like competing options and more like two separate stops on the same route, each useful at a different point in the day. A loop that used to have zero food stops now has two, on opposite ends, run by entirely different kinds of owners.
The easy version of this story is "two new restaurants opened near Lakewood Lane this year." The more useful version is that Marquette's downtown core is consolidating hospitality concepts under fewer, larger operators, while its residential edges are still being filled in one independent business at a time. Deployed Capital's stacking of Slabz, Earl E. Byrds and a second Gallery Coffee location onto adjoining downtown addresses is a bet on density. Presque Deli's three-owner opening on Presque Isle Avenue is a bet on a gap nobody else had filled.
Both bets are paying off in the same calendar year, on the same loop, which is a useful thing to know if you're trying to read where Marquette's food scene is actually headed rather than just where it happens to be growing.
If you're weighing what a stretch of road like this means for property nearby, or you want a read on how these kinds of local shifts affect value on Lakewood Lane specifically, Team Erin Wasik knows this corridor block by block and is glad to talk through it.
Whether you're buying, selling, or investing, Team Erin Wasik provides personalized guidance backed by local expertise and modern marketing. We take a strategic, client-first approach to ensure every decision supports your long-term goals. Let's create a successful real estate experience together.
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