Seth Doud is playing the patio at Ernie's on Gull tonight, a three o'clock set on a lake that will be full of boat traffic by the time he finishes. It's the kind of evening that repeats itself all summer on Gull Lake, easy to take for granted until you notice how few of the places hosting it have actually been around long enough to matter.
Ernie's has. So has the kitchen a few miles south at Cragun's. Both reopened for another season the way they do every year, and both are named after a specific person who once stood behind the bar or the stove. That's not a coincidence worth skipping past. On a lake surrounded by resort development and seasonal turnover, the businesses still standing share a pattern: an actual family's name on the door, not a concept dreamed up for a menu refresh. Once you see it, you start reading the whole dining scene differently, including the one closure this year and the one expansion.
Ernie's Has Been the Same Family Since Woodrow Wilson Was President
Ernie Ritari, a Finnish immigrant, moved his family to Squaw Point on the east side of Gull Lake in 1917, back when getting there meant a half-day ride by horseback through jack pine and hazel brush. He rented out ten boats to families mostly from Minneapolis and Iowa, his wife Edna tended bar and cleaned cabins, and the two of them were among the only residents who stayed on the lake year round. The building has worn a few names since then, including Ron's Steak House and the Butcher Block, before it became Ernie's on Gull.
The restaurant today is run by brothers Chris and Mike Foy, who grew up around East Gull Lake and graduated from Brainerd High School. That detail matters more than it looks. A resort concept can be franchised or sold to whoever wants to run it next season. A restaurant carried by two brothers who spent their childhoods on the same shoreline is a different kind of business, and it shows in the fact that it's still called Ernie's more than a century after Ernie himself first pulled a boat up to the dock.
Irma's Kitchen Just Reopened, and the Building Remembers Everyone Who Ran It Before
A few miles south at Cragun's Resort, Irma's Kitchen opened for its 2026 season on June 16 and will run into the fall. The name belongs to Irma Cragun, who purchased the property with her husband Dutch in 1988, but the building itself goes back further. Walter and Lena Frampton built it in 1926, and Lena cooked three hearty meals a day, lumberjack style, for the guests who stayed there. Ben and Eleanor Curry bought the place in 1946 and expanded the dining room using timbers hauled in from the Pine Beach Peninsula. The property changed hands a few more times before Dutch and Irma Cragun took it over, and the current restaurant keeps the original Pastry Cooks cupboard on display, salvaged and refinished rather than replaced.
That's a century of the building passing between a small number of named owners rather than a corporate operator, and traces of each one are still visible today, from the salvaged cupboard to the name on the door. Compare that to how quickly a themed restaurant concept can appear and vanish in a resort market like this one, and the pattern gets harder to ignore. The places on Gull Lake built around a person tend to outlast the places built around an idea.
Not Everything Lasts, and That's the Point
Sherwood North, which sat along Interlachen Road near Nisswa, now shows as closed in current business listings. There's no scandal in that. Restaurants close for all kinds of ordinary reasons, and a seafood spot on a Minnesota lake was always working against the grain a little. What's worth noticing is what grew instead. Chocolate Ox, the candy and ice cream shop with locations on Main Street in Nisswa and inside Grand View Lodge, added a third storefront on Pelican Lake this past May. That's not a chain expanding into new territory. It's a business that already belonged to this lake system adding a second front door, the same slow, additive growth pattern that kept Ernie's and Irma's around this long.
If you're trying to guess which restaurant on Gull Lake will still be serving dinner in five years, skip the menu and look at whose name is actually on it.
Tomorrow's Other Long-Term Investment Isn't a Restaurant
The same instinct shows up somewhere you wouldn't expect to find it. On August 9, the Gull Chain of Lakes Association holds its annual Lakes & Libations gala from 4 to 6 p.m. at the Gull Lake Center at Grand View Lodge. It's the organization's only fundraiser of the year, and the money raised funds buoy installation and maintenance, the Lake Steward program, loon conservation, and work to identify and prevent aquatic invasive species. This year's program includes a presentation from University of Minnesota researcher Jeff Marr on wave safety and its effect on shoreline integrity and water quality, alongside a live auction and a 50/50 raffle. Tickets run $65 through gcola.org, and membership in the association isn't required to attend, according to the Brainerd Dispatch.
No county agency or state department is running that research. It's a volunteer association funded by the people who actually live on this water, and that's the same logic that keeps Ernie's family-owned and the Pastry Cooks cupboard on the wall at Irma's. Gull Lake's most durable institutions, whether they serve dinner or study shoreline erosion, tend to be the ones built and paid for by residents rather than handed down from an outside authority. If you own dock frontage or a retaining wall on this lake, Marr's research on wave safety is worth more attention than the auction items. Shoreline integrity isn't an abstract concern here. It's the physical thing holding up your property line.
What This Means for the Rest of Your August
None of this requires a decision from you beyond how you spend the next couple of weekends. Catch the set at Ernie's tonight if you're free, since the Foy brothers still run the same patio their family has kept open since 1917. Get a table at Irma's before the season closes if it's been a while. And if you've got a stake in what happens to the shoreline itself, tomorrow's gala is a two-hour window to hear directly from someone studying it, funded by the same neighbors who'll be sitting next to you at dinner all month.
That's the version of Gull Lake that doesn't show up in a listing description: a lake where the businesses that last are run by families who never left, and where the science protecting the water is paid for by the people who swim in it. If you're thinking about what it actually means to own a piece of this shoreline long term, or you're weighing a move here against another lake in the area, the team at Polovitz Group knows this water and the families who run it. Start your lake-home search or market your property with our team.
