Food & Drink in Bay City

Roxy’s Beauty Bar began as a popular Bay City tanning salon and has since expanded into a full-service salon, offering everything from trendy cuts to airbrush makeup. Stylists help heads adopt a new shade with coloring and highlighting services or add bling in the form of hair tinsel, hair crystals, and feather extensions. Nail artist Xaviera dresses fingertips with intricate designs, such as zebra stripes and Burberry-inspired plaid, and eyelash extensions pump up each wink’s flirt factor with semi-permanent strands by Reese Robert. Staying true to its tanning roots, Roxy’s also continues to bronze bodies with airbrush tans, which are sprayed on by a trained technician instead of by a machine or an artistically trained elephant.

Though Macy's is primarily known for its clothing and home decor, the renowned department store is just as adept at feeding its customers as it is at fashionably clothing them. Inside the retail haven's many locations, casual eateries welcome shoppers with classic American dishes updated with fresh ingredients. Lighter plates, such as chopped salads and turkey sandwiches, are served up alongside favorites including grilled burgers and Alaskan cod and chips. Hearty, homestyle entrees of oven-baked meatloaf, chicken pot pie, and macaroni and cheese complete the menu.

Combining various fitness disciplines with solid nutritional counseling, Seung-ni Fit Club's trainers send bodies through a muscle-maintenance assembly line that leaves them trim and fit. Sweat sessions can include the fat-blasting Aerobic Kickboxing class, which sets self-defense, dance, and kickboxing techniques bouncing to a choice of upbeat contemporary music or mash-ups of 18th-century Scottish funeral dirges. Plyo Pump's high-intensity jumps and bounds condition bodies to explode with greater speed and power, and lean muscles surface with Body Sculpt's non-impact dumbbell workouts. Zumba sessions fuse energetic Latin dances with resistance training. Motivational instructors provide students with personalized nutrition programs and weight-loss tracking charts for settings goals and marking progress. Flexible schedules at both locations allow all challenge-accepters to get their muscles' worth in eight weeks, much like the two-month mail-order process for purchasing mussels from a shady internet sea captain.

Third Street Station’s priority is introducing patrons to tasty sandwiches and coffees made from local products. Its menu overflows with 20 types of sandwiches that burst with Michigan-made cheeses and produce from Michigan farmers markets. The PBLT stacks traditional BLT ingredients on top of medium-sharp Pinconning cheese, and the Traverse City Cherry Festival salad sprinkles dried Traverse City cherries, toasted walnuts, and blue cheese crumbles on top of a bed of mixed greens with grilled chicken.

Third Street Station also brews fresh, Michigan-roasted coffees that make their way into cappuccinos and iced mochas. Patrons can enjoy the coffee drinks, sandwiches, and beer and wine outside on the patio during warmer months.

While cigarettes from Smoking Vapor curb nicotine cravings, they never emit a puff of smoke. The electric cigarette's LED tip lights up as it releases customizable doses of nicotine in time with users’ drags, stripping the smoking experience of tobacco, toxins, and smoke itself. Long-lasting rechargeable batteries or strikes of lightning power each of the cigarettes, which immediately detect users’ puffs via a microprocessor and sensor, with no button pushing required. Smokers can select from traditional or flavored nicotine cartridges. A variety of flavors are available in stores, including Grape, Coffee, and Strawberry.

When Mike Busley walked into Julian Pie Company, he found something unexpected—a sense of purpose. Returning with a dream of opening his own café with his wife, Denise, Mike convinced Julian’s owner to show them how to make pie so flavorful that it could alter a person’s life, just as it had theirs. The couple found themselves armed with newfound know-how, leading them to quit their careers in defense and medical sales, have a tough but healthy breakup talk with San Diego, and venture to Michigan to open Grand Traverse Pie Company.

Though now a franchise throughout Michigan and Indiana, Mike and Denise continue to run the original shop, and each location adheres to their vision of favoring ingredients from Michigan growers. Each day, chefs bake more than 25 flavors of pie, which have received attention from publications such as O, The Oprah Magazine. They also prepare an extensive selection of comfort fare for breakfast, second breakfast, lunch, and dinner.