New distillery and tapas restaurant opens in Whitefish

A group of friends might lounge on the leather sofas, gather around the pool table, or head out to the patio to keep warm by the fire — there’s a relaxed atmosphere that asks you to stay awhile at Whitefish Handcrafted Spirits.

It’s exactly the feel owners Tom and Danette Sefcak were hoping to create when they envisioned the distillery and restaurant.

“This is what we hoped for as an experience,” Danette said. “We want you to feel like you’re a guest in our home — like you’ve come for a cocktail party or to eat at a friend’s house.”

The Sefcaks recently opened the restaurant on Wisconsin Avenue and plan within the next month to begin operating the distillery and serving their own spirits.

The menu focuses on more than a dozen tapas served family style. Dishes include a variety of options from duck and beef tenderloin to a Caesar salad and winter vegetable curry. There’s a crisped parmesan potato gnocchi and a fresh mozzarella stuffed meatball. There’s also a dessert and kids menu.

“We want you to have a bite together and it turns into an experience,” Danette said.

The drink menu for now features their fresh-made sodas with flavors like lime-ginger, pomegranate and root beer. Once they receive final approval, they plan to make and serve five main spirits and prohibition era style cocktails. The planned spirits include an orange clove rum, cranberry moon, Montana wheat vodka, botanical gin and huckleberry liquor.

Their orange clove rum is described as the perfect drink to warm up with on a cold night with a “warm hug of citrus, cinnamon and clove.” The Montana wheat vodka is planned to be crisp and clean, “like freshly melted snow flowing down the Flathead River.”

“The spirits are the basics,” Tom said. “But they are also infused for sipping on and enjoying. We hope later to do an aged whiskey and bourbon.”

Outside the remodeled building that once served as LaChance Builders, is a large patio with seating and fire pits for staying warm or making s’mores. Planned for later construction is an outdoor heated smoking gazebo that will give customers a place to light up one of the many premium cigars also available for purchase. Summer plans include raised garden beds open to the public and a dog treat menu served on the patio.

“We want to have something for everyone,” Danette said. “We want this to be a community-friendly place.”

The Sefcaks drew inspiration from Tom’s heritage when seeking to open the distillery that they hope can be passed down to their children. Tom’s grandfather was a bootlegger in Texas during the Great Depression. He would distill his own spirits at home and then travel around selling them, and playing his guitar while others drank.

“It’s what got him through the Depression,” Tom said.

In honor of his grandfather, the Sefcaks have plans to introduce an apricot spirit to their line. His grandfather was known to bury apricots in his yard until he deemed them ready, then he would dig them up and distill them.

As they look around at the building they remodeled and the 20 employees they hired, the couple say it’s surreal to see their dream become reality.

They spent the last five years working in Williston, N.D., saving “every penny they made” for the business. They lived apart in “man camps” while commuting back to the Flathead. Danette is now focusing full-time on Whitefish Handcrafted Spirits, but Tom continues to split his time working four weeks in North Dakota then returning to Whitefish to work at their business.

“For the last two weeks before we opened, I was on my hands and knees every day scrubbing up construction dust,” Danette said. “To have customers come in here and love what we’re doing, that’s pretty cool.”