Whitefish chef starts restaurant here

A former chef from two highly regarded restaurants in Whitefish has started a restaurant in Columbia Falls.

Ian Moore opened the Teakettle Café on Halloween at Nucleus Avenue across from Smith’s Food and Drug. Moore and his small staff have an impressive culinary background and an interesting menu that is healthy, reasonably priced and harkens back to his roots.

Moore is a graduate of the Northwest Film Center in Oregon but never made a career out of the craft. He’s been cooking his whole life, however, and like most college students needed to eat, so he turned to restaurants.

“When you cook, you get to eat,” he said. “I got to work with some really talented chefs.”

One influential mentor was Phillipe Boulot, the James Beard award-winning culinary director of the Heathman Restaurant in Portland, Ore.

Moore went on to become the head chef for about five years at the Tupelo Grille in Whitefish and then cooked breakfast at the Buffalo Café for three years while he worked evenings on his own catering company and food truck, “Ian’s Healthy Table.” He cooked private dinners for clientele in Whitefish as well as taking on traditional catering, like parties and weddings.

Moore said he plans on continuing his catering business but using the restaurant kitchen as a base of operations.

“You have to wear a couple of hats in Columbia Falls,” he noted.

The Teakettle Café menu draws on Moore’s family roots. His grandmother lived in India and his mother in England. The menu features Indian curries, “buttered chicken,” Thai inspired dishes, quesadillas, pot stickers, rice and noodle bowls, pulled pork, and slow cooked beef brisket.

It’s all prepared in a healthy way with no MSG, corn syrup and other artificial ingredients, and Moore uses local sources whenever possible. There are also a host of gluten-free items on the menu. Customers can also custom-design a dish by adding their protein of choice and a wide variety of sauces that Moore makes in-house from scratch.

“I make the best pulled pork in the valley,” he said.

The menu is modestly priced, with prices ranging from $3 for light fare to $10 for a full meal. The restaurant is open from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., seven days a week. He also has plans to sell fresh and frozen fish through Flathead Fish and Genesis olive oils and other products at the store.

Moore sees his restaurant as a complement to the Three Forks Grille, which specializes in the dinner crowd.

“I want to grow the food scene they’ve started here,” he said.