Head west from Marquette, the biggest city in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, population: 20,394, and you reach Negaunee, where around 4,627 people live in a town, like so many near Lake Superior, with deep ties to iron.

Here you can find the Iron Ore Trail and the Iron Industry Museum. There are towns called Iron Mountain, Iron River and Ironwood, an Iron County. And, in Negaunee, the main road is named “Iron Street.”

This summer, Iron Street looks like an excavation from the mining heydays, its surface torn up to be rebuilt from dirt, part of an overall revitalization designed to attract and hold onto new businesses.

“Negaunee’s having a renaissance,” said Rachael Grossman, 34, owner of Strega Nonna, an Italian restaurant that opened at the end of Iron Street in March.

But wait, you might be asking, why are you reading about a Michigan town on an Oregon news website?

That’s because Grossman also owns Artigiano, a seasonal Portland food cart that has developed a cult following over the past decade or so for the epic dining experiences conjured from its ketchup-red trailer on Southeast Division Street.

Grossman isn’t the first or last person to travel between the Upper Peninsula and Portland. My family, for example, spent a month in Marquette this summer. My husband was born there and the vast majority of his family still lives there. That, the sandy beaches of Lake Superior, and the mint Mackinac Island Fudge ice cream at Jilberts brought us to town just in time to visit Strega Nonna, arguably the biggest culinary news of the year, at least so far as Negaunee is concerned.

Also, my daughter is named “Nona” and is well-acquainted “Strega Nona,” the Tomie dePaola classic children’s book about a magic pasta pot. Last summer at her “Yooper” dinner at Artigiano, where she served elevated U.P. fare, Grossman told us about her plans to open Strega Nonna. We knew we had to go.

This isn’t Grossman’s first brush with the benefits — and frustrations — of major urban revitalization. She opened Artigiano when she was 21, after culinary school and time in Italy, with the goal of bringing authentic Italian food – not the “Frenchified” Italian food she was cooking in Oregon wine country – to Portland.

During one of its early seasons, Artigiano found itself in the middle of a streetscape project for the first time, the sidewalk in front of her business ripped up, foot traffic diverted away from the cart.

While the project was a temporary setback and Division Street wasn’t the bustling commerce and dining district it is today back in 2012, said Grossman, “You could see the potential.”

Pok Pok was there. Salt & Straw was on the way.

In 2013, Artigiano made headlines by becoming the first food cart in Oregon to obtain a liquor license.

Once the sidewalk was rebuilt, Grossman’s business started to grow organically. She focused on the experience for each table, adding one employee, then another, and another.

“What we used to do at Artigiano was name your price, anywhere from $35 to $100 a person,” Grossman said, “and we would make a menu based on your table, improvised.”

Ultimately, Grossman landed on a fixed-price meal, with available wine pairings, where she acts as the nonna in the kitchen, cooking a shared meal for each table, highlighting simple, good ingredients and often including scratch-made pasta.

Grossman developed a following in Portland because the experiences she created were different and special and the food she was making from a truck was delicious.

But her roots were in Negaunee, a town small enough where anyone you talk to might know her father, a retired family practice doctor, or her mother, a retired high school teacher (both now help out at Strega Nonna). When she was home, Grossman would host pop-ups in town that sold out almost immediately.

“I originally learned to cook in my grandma’s kitchen just up the road from Strega,” Grossman said. “She was my inspiration as a kid in the kitchen.”

In fact, 2013, Grossman started doing pop-ups at her grandma’s house.

“She always dreamed to turn her home into a little restaurant so one winter we just did that,” Grossman said. “We invited the community and ‘played restaurant,’ and a little supper club was formed.”

Grossman’s grandma died around 2015.

When Grossman decided to bring the Artigiano experience home, she was, in a way, expanding on her initial premise of “grandma in the kitchen.”

You wouldn’t know it until you visit, but Yoopers have plenty of opinions about Italian food, and they don’t always correspond with those of Portlanders.

Italians began immigrating to the Upper Peninsula in the late 1800s to mine iron and copper. Many of their descendants stuck around, even after the metal business mostly dried up. The region has several annual Italian festivals, Italian American eateries and its own version of sweet Italian sausage called “Cudighi” (pronounced “coo-da-gi”) that you won’t find anywhere else.

But Grossman, who is Jewish, not Italian (she says she’s converted to Italian though), is bringing something completely different to the area. And with it, there’s a learning curve.

She explained the journey she’s taking patrons on with a story.

“The other night we did a Sicilian dinner,” Grossman said, laughing as she spoke. “And one of my employees went to this table, and this group of guys, they had asked for Parmesan cheese to put on their fish pasta.”

Grossman said her employees know there are two rules at Strega Nonna: No meatballs on pasta and no cheese on fish.

He came back to the kitchen and told her what happened. What was he supposed to do? But Grossman stuck to her guns.

“People like it when you teach them,” she said. After walking out with the server, she told the table, “So here’s the thing, in Sicilian culture, you really can’t put cheese on a fish dish.”

She also made a joke out of it.

“And, you know, this guy here, he was risking getting fired and 25 years of bad sex by giving you the cheese,” Grossman said, inventing a Sicilian curse on the spot. “Y’all can take it home and do what you want with it, I can’t control that. But in this place, we’re not going to be doing that.”

There are differences between her two businesses. Strega Nonna has a lot more space, for one. Grossman said she can fit 100 people on the patio and 100 inside, noting there’s “room for growth,” unlike at the 12-table corner food cart.

And while a set-price dinner in Portland costs around $95, in Michigan she only charges $45. Grossman says that’s too cheap; she’s still buying high-quality local ingredients, but she’s also educating people about her project and enticing people in the door.

(She might have her work cut out for her — despite being half the price of Artigiano, the general consensus among locals seems to be that Strega Nonna is very expensive, even if those locals pay a similar price for appetizers and a main at one of the more upscale eateries in Marquette.)

Other than three nights of pop-ups in late August and some events during the spring, Artigiano is mostly closed this season. Grossman is still deciding the long-term fate of her Portland cart, but doesn’t plan to close it down completely. And no matter what happens, she still expects to hold some of her ambitious dinners when she’s in town.

“Maybe I’ll put in an oyster bar,” she said, among other ideas for businesses she could put in the space while she works to get Strega Nonna self-sufficient enough to come back to Portland for longer periods.

Like many Yoopers, she doesn’t seem to mind having one foot in the Midwest and one on the West Coast.

Impressively, Grossman has managed to bring the feeling of the cart, that special but not pretentious mood, to her restaurant. The pasta is handmade and there’s always live music. Sure, Strega Nonna has a la carte options and a full bar with specialty cocktails, but the main attraction remains the personal touches given to the food and space by this 34-year-old nonna.

And once Iron Street is a street again, with new sidewalks, lights and spaces to gather and enjoy the social district, Grossman will once more, hopefully, have a front-row view of real urban realization. There might never be a Salt & Straw, but maybe somewhere along Iron Street they will start scooping Jilberts again.

Details: Artigiano will hold pop-up dinners Thursday, Aug. 24-Saturday, Aug. 26 at 3302 S.E. Division St. for $95 per person, artigianopdx.com. If you happen to be traveling through the Upper Peninsula, Strega Nonna opens 5 p.m. to 11 p.m. Thursday-Saturday at 432 Iron St., Negaunee, strega.fun.

— Lizzy Acker

503-221-8052; lacker@oregonian.com; @lizzzyacker

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