The Columbia Bar Closed in 2024. Two Years Later, Its Pieces Are Running Half the Food in Town.

For sixty years, if you lived in Columbia Falls and someone said "meet me downtown," there was a good chance the meeting ended at the Columbia Bar. It was the dive that anchored the middle of Nucleus Avenue, and by the last few years it had also become the place people went on Tuesday nights for Mike Scallen's tacos. Then, in the fall of 2024, it closed.

Most towns lose a fixture and the story ends there. Columbia Falls lost this one and the pieces went in three directions. The building is now a breakfast counter run by a family who moved here from Las Vegas. Taco Tuesday moved eight miles east into a Hungry Horse bar and grill. And the pattern the closure exposed, a downtown block turning over one storefront at a time, is still playing out on Nucleus a year and a half later. If you want to know what changed about eating in this town, you have to track all three.

What actually happened to the building

The Columbia Bar building is over 100 years old and once served as both a dance hall and a Chinese restaurant. In 1965, the Finberg family bought it and operated the Columbia Bar for nearly 60 years. In 2023, the bar was sold to a local developer, who kept it open for another year before deciding to close it in the fall of 2024.

The storefront sat empty through the winter and spring while rumors moved around town. The people who ended up buying it were not, at first glance, an obvious fit. Johnny and Judy Truong moved to Northwest Montana about 10 years ago, seeking a calmer, slower pace of life than they had in Las Vegas. They initially worked at local nail salons while looking for a community where they wanted to put down roots. Eventually, they chose Columbia Falls and opened Posh Nails and Spa on the north end of Nucleus Avenue in November 2020. A few years later they opened Teriyaki Kitchen, a fast-casual Asian and Japanese restaurant, just down the street.

Tommy Truong, Johnny's brother, came up from Las Vegas in the summer of 2025 to help run Teriyaki Kitchen and scout a location for a second Asian takeout spot elsewhere in the state. Then the Columbia Bar hit the market. The family started to look into the building and saw it as a good opportunity to expand, although with a different concept than their first restaurant. In mid-2025, the family purchased it and decided to open a new breakfast and lunch spot called Columbia Cafe.

"We did all of the remodeling work ourselves, and that's probably why it took so long for us to open," Tommy Truong told the Flathead Beacon in April 2026.

Columbia Cafe now occupies the same footprint the bar did, but the room reads nothing like it did before. The dance-hall bones are still there under the drywall, but the surface is a daytime restaurant, not a nighttime bar. Which matters, because Columbia Falls did not have a downtown breakfast spot on Nucleus of that scale. Outlaw Diner sits over on Highway 2, Montana Coffee Traders runs light, and the Community Market is a Thursday-only thing. The old bar space filled a gap the town did not know it had.

Where Taco Tuesday went

Mike Scallen, the cook who built the Columbia Bar's food reputation in its last decade, did not go with the building. Scallen went to culinary school in Portland, where he met his wife, Andrea. The pair moved to the valley 15 years ago and had been operating the Columbia Bar's kitchen for around a decade before it closed. When the bar shut, they had to land somewhere.

They landed in Hungry Horse. Scallen and his wife Andrea ran the kitchen at the old Columbia Bar for years in Columbia Falls, heralding a reputation for good food and a much-celebrated weekly taco Tuesday, a tradition the pair carried over to Tex and Jerry's Eatery this summer. The Hungry Horse restaurant, which owners Steve Arons, Neil Curtis, Ted Thovson and Jeff Johnson acquired last summer, opened at the beginning of July. The place sits next to Bob's General Store and the Hungry Horse Liquor Store, and the origin story of the name reaches back to the town itself: two local legends, Tex and Jerry, freight horses who vanished in the winter of 1900-1901. They wandered the wilderness for a month until locals found them starving, but still alive. Nicknamed the "Mighty Hungry Horses," their story is the namesake for the town of Hungry Horse.

The practical read for a Columbia Falls resident: if you want the tacos you remember, you drive east on Highway 2 for eight minutes and you find them under a different roof. Scallen hopes to grow the menu into a classic bar menu, highlighting simple food that everyone loves, made well. From juicy burgers to spicy wings to flavorful sandwiches and fresh salads, the team behind Tex and Jerry's Eatery looks forward to the future flavors they'll be able to provide. The Taco Tuesday tradition is intact. The zip code changed.

The other half of the Truong footprint

The interesting thing about Columbia Cafe is that it is not a standalone bet. It is the third property the same family runs on the same stretch of Nucleus.

• Posh Nails and Spa, north end of Nucleus, open since November 2020.
• Teriyaki Kitchen, 510 Nucleus Avenue, fast-casual Asian and Japanese.
• Columbia Cafe, breakfast and lunch, in the former Columbia Bar building.

That is three storefronts within a few blocks, all under one family, all opened inside about five years. In fact, when Flathead Living visited on a recent Friday morning, Johnny and Judy were out of town working on Posh Nails' new location in Bozeman. The Bozeman expansion tells you something about the ambition, but the density on Nucleus tells you more about the town: three concepts stacked this close together only work if the foot traffic is real. In 2020 that was a bet. In 2026 it is a footprint.

Reading Nucleus Avenue in 2026

Columbia Cafe and the Truong footprint are the visible part of a bigger shift on the street. Commercial real estate has been moving. There's been a surge of commercial real estate available on Nucleus Avenue in the past few months, with several properties listed and contracts in the works for at least a couple. From a sheer size standpoint, the Glacier Lanes Bowling alley is for sale with a list price of $900,000 for the 7,600-square-foot building built in 1961, adjacent to Smith's Foods and Drugs. The Hungry Horse News reported this in April 2026, and another listing is the former North Valley Hospital Community Building, which was absorbed by Logan Health when the two entities merged years ago.

A rough map of what's moving and what's not, as of mid-2026:

The point of the table is not the individual entries. It is the density. Half a downtown block is either in transition or has already transitioned inside the last twelve months. Some of that is family expansion. Some is a bowling alley owner cashing out on a building put up in 1961. But together it is a rate of storefront turnover that a resident who left Columbia Falls in 2023 would not recognize when they came back.

Fitting it into the rest of the week

The reason all of this matters at the granular, this-week level is that the summer calendar has not changed. The Thursday Community Market still runs. Every Thursday evening from May through September at the Columbia Falls Community Market, running from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM, brings together local farmers, artisans, and food vendors, with live music on the central stage, handcrafted Montana goods, and dining options like fresh produce alongside locally-brewed beer and delicious food truck offerings. The Blue Moon Rodeo still runs Thursday nights out on Highway 2. And Marantette Park still hosts the Chamber's Movies in the Park series, with Zootopia 2 on August 8, 2026 at 8:00 PM and The Parent Trap on September 12, 2026 at 7:00 PM at 233 13th Street East.

What changes is where you eat around the anchors. A Thursday night before the market used to mean a burger at the Columbia Bar. Now it means either the Truong family's new breakfast-and-lunch counter closing up around the same time the market opens, Teriyaki Kitchen three doors down, or the drive east for Tex & Jerry's if what you actually wanted was the old menu. In September, the Cedar Creek Marathon supports Logan Health and local organizations, takes place in late September, offers a full marathon, a half marathon, a 10K, and a 5K, each culminating in the heart of Columbia Falls. Whichever finish line food you're chasing after that race, it is being served by different people than it was two Septembers ago.

None of this shows up in an aggregate "best restaurants" list. It shows up in the specific fact that Mike Scallen is now cooking eight miles east, that the building he cooked in is a breakfast spot, and that the family running that breakfast spot also runs the Japanese place down the street and the nail salon further north. The Columbia Bar closing was a subtraction. What replaced it is a distribution.

If you're weighing a move to Columbia Falls, or already own here and are watching the block turn over, the pattern on Nucleus Avenue is worth paying attention to. It is what a small downtown looks like when demand outruns the buildings and operators start playing multiple positions at once. When you're ready to talk about what that means for a specific property or a specific street, Tyree Real Estate works this ground week in and week out. Work with us to start your Montana property search.