Drive the short stretch of Peace Pipe Road through the middle of Lac du Flambeau this month and you will pass two buildings that look, on the surface, like unrelated stories. One is a bar and grill on Long Interlaken Lake that just went through a very public remodel. The other is a storefront a few blocks up where a husband and wife sell prints and clothing built from Anishinaabe design. Treat them as separate items and you get the kind of roundup piece that says nothing a local doesn't already know. Look at them together and a different pattern shows up: two different mechanisms, the same underlying shift, both happening on the same few blocks in the same year.
What actually happened at The Flame
The Flame at 717 Peace Pipe Road has been a fixture on the Flambeau chain for decades, the kind of supper club where regulars know the servers by name. Last August, ownership changed. The Lac du Flambeau Business Development Corporation, the tribe's own economic arm, acquired the property, bringing a well-known commercial parcel right in the heart of downtown back under tribal control. The new owners spent months working through the unglamorous parts of a turnaround, staffing, food consistency, wait times, before holding a grand reopening in October.
LDF BDC's CEO, Larry Turner, was direct about why the acquisition mattered beyond the balance sheet. Getting the land back downtown, in his words, meant getting it back "really in the heart of the town and village." The mechanics behind that are worth spelling out because they are unusual for a small-town restaurant sale. Profits from The Flame now flow into the tribe's general fund, and part of the corporation's charter is explicitly to create job opportunities for tribal members. A fish fry night at The Flame is, structurally, a different kind of transaction than it was two years ago.
The reception has been genuinely mixed, which is its own kind of local intelligence. Reviewers praise the new docks that let boaters pull right up to the restaurant, the Old Fashioneds, the golf simulator added for the off-season crowd. Others miss the old supper club's warmth and find the reimagined industrial-style interior a harder fit for a building that sits on tribal land. That tension, between a modern renovation and a space's older character, is not a knock on the ownership change. It is the kind of texture you only get by actually eating there this year instead of reading a press release about it.
A few blocks up, a different kind of change
Walk further into downtown and you reach 581 Peace Pipe Road, an address with its own small history. In 2022, this was where Blend & Brew opened, a coffee and boba shop that its owner said was filling a real void: locals had been driving out of town just to get a cup of coffee. That same address now also carries the name Adaawe Place, a small shopping district anchored by Adaawe Design Collective.
The collective was founded by two Anishinaabe artists, Biskakone Greg Johnson, who is Ojibwe, and Alexandria Sulainis-Johnson, who goes by AnungoKwe and is Potawatomi and Odawa. The name itself is a small piece of language lesson: Adaawe refers to the Odawa people in Ojibwemowin. Their work moves between traditional and contemporary Anishinaabe design, and the storefront has become a regular stop on the powwow vendor circuit, including the Bear River Powwow held right in town and the weekly mini-powwow at the Indian Bowl. In interviews, Sulainis-Johnson has talked about the business less in retail terms and more in community ones: the goal was never really about volume, it was about creating and being part of the place.
Nobody has claimed that Adaawe Place is owned by the same corporation that bought The Flame. It isn't, as far as any record shows. But that is exactly why the two stories are worth reading side by side rather than as competing headlines. One is a tribal corporation reclaiming a commercial building through acquisition. The other is two Anishinaabe artists building something of their own, one storefront and one powwow booth at a time. Different mechanisms, same direction: more of downtown's daily commerce is being authored by the community that has always lived here, rather than by whoever happened to hold the deed.
Why a few storefronts carry more weight here than elsewhere
It helps to know the scale of the town these changes are happening in. Lac du Flambeau's year-round population runs around 3,004 people, and that number nearly quadruples once summer visitors arrive. In a town that size, a restaurant sale and a new storefront are not background noise. They are close to the entire visible commercial core changing character in the same season, which is a different thing than the same story playing out in a city with a hundred restaurants to spare.
That scale is also why the museum matters to this same conversation, even though it predates both of the other changes by decades. The George W. Brown Jr. Ojibwe Museum and Cultural Center has been owned and operated by the Lac du Flambeau Band since it was chartered in 1988 and opened its doors in 1989. It has drawn more than 200,000 visitors over its life, and this summer it is running extended hours through September 4, with Monday through Friday hours from 10am to 4pm and a longer Tuesday evening slot tied to the town's powwow nights. The museum was never a private business to be reclaimed. It has simply always been the town's own institution, which makes it a useful baseline for what The Flame and Adaawe Place are now moving toward rather than a separate story entirely.
The weekly mini-powwow at the Indian Bowl, which ran its short summer series on July 28, August 4, and August 11 with gates opening at 5pm and dancing at 6:30, has already wrapped for the season by the time you read this. That rhythm, a few weeks of dancing in high summer, then quiet, is the kind of detail a longtime resident recognizes without needing to be told. What is newer is watching that same rhythm show up now in who owns the restaurant and who runs the shop next door.
What this means if you already live here
None of this changes what a visit to downtown looks like on a Tuesday night. You can still get a fish fry at The Flame, still walk down to Adaawe Place for a print or a piece of beadwork, still time an evening around the museum's longer summer hours. What has changed is the accounting behind those visits. More of what you spend downtown this year is staying local in a more direct way than it used to, whether that is through a tribal corporation's general fund or through two artists building a business on their own terms a few doors down.
It is worth sitting with the mixed reviews of The Flame's remodel a little longer, too. A community reclaiming a building it lost is not the same thing as automatically getting the character of that building right on the first try. The tension some longtime patrons feel between the new decor and the old supper club's warmth is a real part of this story, not a footnote to it. Downtown Lac du Flambeau is working that out in real time, one dinner and one storefront at a time.
If you are already spending your evenings on this stretch of Peace Pipe Road, none of this is news exactly. But it is the kind of thing worth naming out loud, because a town this size rarely gets to watch its own commercial center change hands twice in one year and still recognize itself in the result.
If you are thinking further down the road about a lakefront property here, whether for your own family or as part of a longer-term plan, this is the kind of local detail that tends to matter more than a spec sheet ever will. Kelly Cooper has spent years working alongside Northwoods owners who care as much about a town's character as its square footage. Let's Connect if you would like to talk through what a home in Lac du Flambeau actually looks like to live with, season to season.
