The address gives almost nothing away. Red Haven sits at 4480 S. Hagadorn Rd. in Okemos, and from the outside it looks like any other strip-mall storefront in mid-Michigan. Inside, on a Wednesday night in late October, it is supposed to look like the Addams Mansion.
On October 21, 2026, Red Haven hosts "A Wednesday Night with the Addams," a four-course dinner built around characters from Charles Addams's famously creepy family. Doors open at 6 p.m. and dinner begins at 6:30. The menu reads like a joke told in courses: Thing's Charcuterie Toast, with pumpkin butter, chèvre, prosciutto, pickled blackberry and poblano on pumpernickel; Pugsley's Chicken & Waffles, a fried chicken confit drumstick over a cornmeal waffle drizzled with hot maple butter; Wednesday's Wild Hunt, a venison rack with purple potato-blood sausage hash and charred red wine demi glace; and Gomez & Morticia's Death by Chocolate, a chocolate ganache cake with chocolate crumble, boozy cherries and blackberry coulis.
It is a Halloween dinner that happens to fall on a Wednesday, which is presumably the entire point. The event is open to anyone who books a table, and Red Haven takes reservations through Resy, its online booking service, or by phone at 517-679-6309.
To understand why a farm-to-table kitchen in Okemos is plating blood sausage hash in character, it helps to know how Red Haven got here. The restaurant was the work of Nina Santucci and Anthony Maiale, a married couple who had spent years cooking and managing restaurants around the country before coming back to Michigan. Santucci grew up in East Lansing. She met Maiale while both were students working at a fine-dining restaurant near Villanova University, and the two later worked together at Marigold Kitchen in Philadelphia, where she was general manager and he was chef de cuisine. Maiale, a Pennsylvania Culinary Institute graduate, had studied under Michel Richard at Citronelle in Washington, D.C., and had also served as chef de cuisine at 333 Belrose in Radnor, Pennsylvania, Hudsons on the Bend in Austin, Texas, and the Tabard Inn in Washington, D.C.
Before the restaurant, the couple ran The Purple Carrot, a food truck serving dishes made with locally sourced ingredients. Red Haven grew out of that, and it was one of the Lansing area's most visible farm-to-table kitchens, known for shareable small plates and a menu that followed what Michigan farms were actually harvesting.
Then came the pandemic, and a hard decision. In June 2022, after almost ten years in business, Santucci and Maiale announced on Facebook that Red Haven would close, with June 18 as its final service. "I think the pandemic just really beat us down in a lot of ways," Santucci told the Lansing State Journal at the time. "Obviously, it was financially difficult, but more than anything, it was just like this constant renewing and refreshing and adapting. Since my husband and I own the restaurant together it all falls on us."
But the closing was not the end. The couple wrote that "there is a Red Haven 2.0 in the works," and described what came next: "Over the summer we are making upgrades to our restaurant space and revamping our business model. The next phase of Red Haven will focus on private events, cooking classes and pop-up dinners." The name stayed. The tagline changed.
That pivot is the reason a dinner like this one exists at all. Red Haven reopened with a different concept: small, themed, reservation-only dinners built around a single idea rather than a standing menu. The restaurant now describes itself as mid-Michigan's premier farm-to-table event and pop-up dining experience, offering seasonal cooking classes, private dinners and ticketed themed nights. Recent and upcoming themes on its calendar have included a Pacific Northwest Night, a Mother's Day Eve Dinner, a Wild Leek Wednesday and a Fired Up for Summer Dinner.
The format has become a small signature in the region. Red Haven has also staged interactive dinners where each course carried a clue, turning the meal into a puzzle. A character-driven menu like the Addams dinner is the same instinct applied to Halloween: take a theme seriously enough to build real food around it, then let the naming do the entertaining.
The food itself is not a gimmick. Venison rack, chèvre, pumpernickel, pumpkin butter and pickled blackberry are the kind of ingredients that fit a kitchen whose whole identity was built on sourcing close to home, and the four courses read as a coherent autumn menu first and a costume second. The joke is in the titles. The cooking is the reason to book.
The Addams connection has deep roots of its own. Charles Addams's macabre cartoons began appearing in The New Yorker in the 1930s, and the family he drew there was adapted into the 1964 television series that gave the characters their names and their pop-culture permanence. Wednesday Addams, in particular, has had a second life in recent years, which makes a Wednesday-night dinner in her honor a reasonably current joke for a restaurant in a suburban Michigan plaza.
What the evening actually looks like inside is between Red Haven and its guests. The listing promises a step into the Addams Mansion, dark and delicious delights, and a menu that is, in its own words, creepy, cooky and mysteriously delicious. For a restaurant that closed its dining room in 2022 and rebuilt itself as a series of one-night events, that is a fitting shape for October: a single evening, a fixed menu, a room dressed up for the occasion, and then gone.
Seating is limited and reservations are required. Same-day bookings can be made by calling the restaurant; online reservations must be made at least a day in advance.