Whitefish Lake Restaurant

The Restaurant

Whitefish Lake Restaurant occupies the original 1937 Whitefish Lake Golf Club clubhouse, a log-and-stone building on US Highway 93 a mile north of downtown Whitefish, on the only thirty-six-hole golf complex in the state of Montana. The restaurant has operated continuously under the Whitefish Lake Restaurant name since 1976, making it one of the longest-running fine-dining rooms in the Mountain West. The dining room is a romantic warren of small spaces — a main room with timber ceilings and a stone fireplace, a smaller library with banquette seating, and a garden patio that opens onto the eighteenth fairway in summer and is one of the most-photographed dining views in northwest Montana.

The cooking is the cooking of a classic Montana grand-hotel dining room executed at a level that has earned the room a reservation in every Whitefish wedding party for two generations. The menu opens with escargot in garlic butter, a chilled seafood tower, and a French onion soup with Gruyère. Mains rotate Montana bison steak, a filo-wrapped fresh Lake Superior whitefish in lemon-caper cream, a half rack of Montana lamb, a Cervena venison medallion with juniper, and a slow-roasted prime rib on weekend nights. The dessert programme — short, classical, properly executed — closes around a huckleberry cheesecake, a flaming bananas Foster, and a house-made gingerbread with peppermint ice cream that has been on the menu essentially unchanged since the late 1970s.

The wine list runs to over four hundred references and is one of the deepest in any restaurant in the state — heavy Napa, serious Burgundy, a strong Italian bench, and a respectable list of large-format bottles for serious special-occasion tables. Service has the practised confidence of a room that has been pacing proposals, anniversaries, and golf-day dinners for half a century: a captain to every three tables, a tableside Caesar built the proper way, and a small but generous custom — a complimentary glass of sparkling at the start of every reserved anniversary dinner — that the room runs without making a production of it. Book three weeks ahead for any Saturday in July, August, or December.