FEATURED JOB OPENING: Chef and Front of the House - Whitefish, MT

Seeking a motivated couple to manage, staff and grow a small but successful Mediterreanean-themed dinner restaurant and event venue in the picturesque northwestern Montana ski town of Whitefish.  Shares building with art gallery for full gourmet and sensory experience and both are run by family business. Owners are unable to work evenings of 4-5 night/week restaurant so are seeking service industry professionals to work for wages and, after 3-6 month trial period, potential ownership of business.  Nearby areas available to rent for a tiny house or camper.

Our current restaurant described above is what we created to satisfy the minimum requirement for our state-issued Beer and Wine license which we own in the small but vibrant town of Whitefish, Montana. In recent years, the ski/lake resort town has shown substantial growth as one of the gems of the “last best place” (Montana!) Aside from the wonderful character and charm of the town, nearby Glacier Park attracts millions of visitors every summer and Whitefish Mountain Resort was recently named #3 in Ski Magazine’s top ski resorts in the country. The potential is great.  

Initially, we primarily saw the alcohol license as a vehicle to build our Event Venue business, allowing us to add bar sales to our event revenue and streamline the booking for clients. As time went on, we realized that the restaurant has a higher cap on potential sales, since probably 75% of event sales take place June-Sept. and there are limited weekends in that time.  

The original restaurant concept was charcuterie, soups and tapas/small plates, and we’ve added a few heartier dishes but it is still a small menu.  The choose-your-own charcuterie is popular and often called the best in town, as well as having the benefit of keeping very well and avoiding wastage with little prep required.  We bake our own wild yeast whole wheat sourdough several times per week. Our family and team loves to provide outstanding customer service and high-quality food, wine and beer, locally sourced when possible, and we pride ourselves in creating a welcoming and comfortable atmosphere where customers feel at home.

Our sweet spots for events are rehearsal dinners, smaller weddings, and lots of private (and corporate) parties and fund-raising events with an average attendance of around 75, but with groups up to 150.

When we started this project in September of 2017, we leased our kitchen to a very talented young executive chef who was ready to start a catering business.  The chef was clear that he didn’t want to run a restaurant again. He and his partner have built an extremely successful business from this kitchen, serving the majority of events we host as well as offsite.

In the past two years, we always recommended the in-house catering company – and allowed a few outside caterers to provide their services for clients who wanted to use those other lower cost catering services.   

In the past five months it became clear to us, the owners, that we needed to expand our simple lounge/bistro to become a full-fledged restaurant, and that to do that we had to reclaim the kitchen in order to operate at full capacity in peak season June-Sept. We must find a team with a talented chef and their own vision to develop a restaurant that could be successful and also provide most of the catered food for our events.  To succeed, the restaurant needs a chef/manager/owner with a clear and consistent vision, good leadership skills, careful accounting and consistent hours that customers can count on.

We will no longer allow outside caterers except the one who has been our in-house caterer (who already has scheduled a few events at our venue in 2020) and a few other previously booked events.

We need to find the right chef first and hopefully a partner who can handle the front of the house (bartender or waiter) and attract and manage an assistant cook, dishwasher and one other for the skeleton crew to handle seating for a total of 80-90 seats. As we grow, the team would have to find and retain 1 to 3 more staff. We will most likely bring in J-2 visa staff for the summer from overseas due to the shortage of qualified workers.

We currently operate our winter hours which are Wednesday-Saturday from 2-8 p.m. plus Sunday Brunch 10-2 for the winter season.  June through September we would be open 7 days a week with all the tourists and visitors in town.

During the summer, we are considering being open primarily for dinner from 4-9 Sunday through Thursday (as well as Brunch on Sunday).  For Friday and Saturdays, we would use one small area next to the kitchen with outside entry for the restaurant since most of those days are booked for some event.  The kitchen staff would need to both have the catering for the parties handled as well as any walk-in folks for the restaurant.   That is one of more interesting considerations for the team we choose.

Whitefish is booming and expanding.  There is a small downtown area with several good restaurants – and they do a bustling business!  Visitors often can’t get a reservation during the summer.

Our 4000 sq. ft. building currently houses a fine art gallery that represents 19 artists.  Outside we have two and half city lots (50,000 sq ft) of patios with umbrellas and a lawn which is used during the summer for events and al fresco dining. As a whole, we offer fine art, fine wine and beer, and great food for a complete sensory experience!

Whoever we select will have the opportunity to buy into the Cypress Yard business after a structured trial period and even buy out the owners.

Challenges include:

• Establishing and defining the restaurant with regular hours and increasing local following while reaching tourists.
• Finding and keeping good staff in a seasonal resort town with a relatively high cost of living (think Jackson, WY 20 years ago).
• Increasing event sales in the off-season (Nov.-April), or booking more acts and other events to bring people in.

Kitchen specs:

• 330 sq. ft. plus 100 sq. ft. prep area
• Dish pit with dishwasher
• 2 coolers and sandwich prep cooler
• Blodgett gas convection oven
• Southbend 6 burner range with flat top
• Prep island with warming lights

We have a long-term lease with the owner who is very, very supportive and helpful to us.  We need to find someone to start ASAP, and definitely no later than March/April 2020.