The Bigfork Inn Opens This Month. Only Half of It.
For nearly five years the plywood on the front of 604 Electric Avenue has been part of the walk into town. You noticed when it went up. You stopped noticing after year two. Some weeks the crew was on the roof, some weeks the windows were out, some weeks nothing moved and you assumed the whole thing had stalled.
It didn't stall. It just took that long. The Inn is finished, and part of it opens to the public this month. The part you were probably picturing, the dining room with the log beams and the German menu and the bar you took your in-laws to in 2019, is not the part that opens.
Cup O'Soul, the Columbia Falls ice cream shop from Jesse and Duane Schrade, is opening its second location inside the new west-side café at the Bigfork Inn. If you've been to a Flathead Valley event in the last few summers, you've almost certainly seen their red trailer. That trailer is how most of Bigfork already knows their ice cream. The café is the permanent version.
The café itself is not a corner of the old Inn. It's a new build on the west side, roughly three times the footprint of the snack shop that used to occupy the same wall. There's a new deck attached with a direct view of Bigfork Harbor and the top of Flathead Lake, which is the kind of harbor view that has never actually existed as public café seating in that spot before.
A short and non-exhaustive look at what you can order:
The Schrades source ingredients from Montana farms for the ice cream program, which is the "farm to table" part of the name they've been running in Columbia Falls on Nucleus Avenue for several years now.
The main restaurant, the space most residents mean when they say "the Bigfork Inn," is not opening in July. It's not opening in August either. Owners Michael and Kelly Couzens Brooks are still looking for an operator.
That is a deliberate choice, not a delay. Michael Brooks told the Flathead Beacon in mid-May that the couple is looking for someone with real restaurant experience who will "integrate with the community," and who understands the building's role as a gathering place going back to the 1930s. They held two catered soft-opening events on May 14 and 17 to show the finished space, including a sold-out fundraiser for the grassroots effort to preserve River View Place above the Swan River. Then they closed the doors again.
"Once we open it, and we put so much passion into it, it's not ours anymore."
That is a founder-owner talking about handing off a landmark, and it explains why the search is taking as long as the restoration did. The building is ready. The operator is the last variable.
If your last meal at the Inn was in 2020 or 2021, the room you walk into will not be the room you remember. The bones are the same. Almost everything touching those bones is new.
| Before restoration | After restoration |
|---|---|
| Suspended acoustic ceiling tiles over the dining room | Original wood ceiling exposed and stained |
| Original 1937 electrical, plumbing, HVAC | Fully rewired, replumbed, new HVAC and sound system |
| Older kitchen equipment, undersized footprint | New 2,000-square-foot addition, state-of-the-art kitchen, bar, and entertainment space |
| Upstairs hotel rooms sitting mostly unused | Private fine-dining room and a rentable suite with a balcony over Bigfork Harbor |
| No elevator, limited accessibility | ADA-compliant ramp, restrooms, and elevator |
| Old snack window on the west wall | New west-side café (Cup O'Soul) with attached deck |
The log beams stayed. The original brass door handles stayed and got reused on the new doors and windows the couple installed to match the historic character. Upstairs, the private dining room uses cut-glass pieces from a company Brooks's grandfather owned, which is the kind of detail that only exists because the owners are the ones doing the restoring.
Two things are happening at the same address, and it is worth separating them.
The first is a landmark restoration finishing on its own schedule. That is a story about one building and two owners who bought it in 2021 specifically to keep it from being torn down for condos.
The second is a Columbia Falls small business opening a second location at the northern tip of Flathead Lake. Cup O'Soul chose Bigfork over any number of other Flathead Valley towns, and they chose a permanent storefront over expanding the trailer operation. That decision is a small but real signal about how Electric Avenue is being valued as a year-round retail address, not just a June-through-August one. The café is set up to run beyond peak season, with coffee and baked goods carrying the weaker months.
For residents, the practical result is that Bigfork now has a dedicated ice cream and coffee stop with harbor seating, walkable from the Playhouse, from the Wednesday farmers market, from the Sunday concerts at Riverbend, and from any of the galleries on the north end of Electric Avenue. That did not exist here last summer.
The Bigfork summer is a fixed schedule, not a rolling one. The Playhouse curtain is at 7:30, Monday through Saturday, June 1 through September 5, and the four-show rotating repertory this year is Newsies, Young Frankenstein, Mean Girls, and The Music Man, plus a July benefit revue and a decades concert night. That schedule has not moved.
The other anchors haven't moved either:
Where the Inn slots in depends on which half you mean. The café gives you a place to end a Playhouse night that isn't a bar, which the corner has been missing since 2021. The deck gives you a farmers-market Wednesday landing spot with a view. And for the residents who have been asking every summer whether the main dining room is coming back, the honest answer is that it is coming back, but not this year. The building is ready when the right operator is.
The best way to read the July opening is not as "the Bigfork Inn is back." It is as the first door of the Inn opening again, five years after the last one closed, and the community finding out what a walkable ice cream and coffee stop with a harbor deck does to the shape of an Electric Avenue evening.
If you are thinking about what a summer in Bigfork looks like from a different address, closer to the harbor, closer to Electric Avenue, or on one of the quieter roads out toward Swan Lake, Tyree Real Estate knows this village and the way its calendar actually runs. Reach out when you are ready to have that conversation.
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