Restaurant plan shifts from town to golf course
Truby's Wood Fired Pizza will not open a stand-alone restaurant in Columbia Falls as planned, but it will take over the restaurant business at Meadow Lake on the north edge of town.
Truby's at Meadow Lake Resort should be open around the end of April, owner Kristin Voisin said Wednesday.
"I'm super excited about it," Voisin said of her plans to bring back the status the golf course/hotel's restaurant had years ago as Tracy's. She also will take over The Shack, a course-side barbecue stand just outside the restaurant.
Truby's gained popularity at its Central Avenue location in Whitefish during the 1990s for its pizza baked in wood-fired ovens, and its menu of unique entrees, appetizers and salads. Those items all will return at Meadow Lake, with one modification.
"The wood-fired oven - that's the kicker," Voisin said. "At this moment we're not putting in a wood-fired oven because of building aesthetics. But we are putting in a brick pizza oven to cook pizzas just as good if not better. And we'll be able to do a lot more takeout."
Her former chef in Whitefish, Kevin Mallary, will be back on board, and Meadow Lake bartender Clay Mitchell will stay on. She said she will employ up to 40 full- and part-time workers, the same size staff she had in Whitefish.
Voisin put a mobile wood-fired pizza kitchen into play with last summer's start-up of the Columbia Falls Farmer's Market. She organized and hosted the market on vacant land she bought a year ago just west of Nucleus Avenue; one rental house stands on the east side of that land.
Her plan was to build a new Truby's Wood Fired Pizza on the site. The city approved rezoning to allow the restaurant and Voisin had finished building plans in hand, but she said the building process got too cumbersome with parking and infrastructure requirements on top of construction costs.
Although temporarily disheartened as she realized that she could not move forward with the development, "different opportunities came up," Voisin said. She and Meadow Lake have been negotiating details for the new restaurant for some time.
Renovations are under way at the hotel, next to the newly opened Remedies Day Spa which expanded to Meadow Lake from its Whitefish base.
The remodel will bring "that Truby's feel from the bar over to the restaurant," she said, and continue to the outside deck seating. The restaurant will serve lunch and dinner and add an espresso area in the lobby for light breakfast fare.
Voisin continues to operate the mobile pizza unit, which will serve area events throughout the summer.
It will set up at the Columbia Falls Farmer's Market when it resumes on June 18, and be there for the market every Thursday from 5 to 7:30 p.m. The farmer's market will move a block north and east to the new Glacier Discovery Square, the community center uptown that formerly housed Bank of Columbia Falls, First Citizens Bank and Glacier Bank.
Reporter Nancy Kimball may be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com