What happens to a building that a town relied on for sixty years once the trucks are gone? On Lesley Avenue in Somers, the answer is starting to show. The old Somers Fire Hall #51 at 27 Lesley Avenue now has a new name, Farmer Meets Foodie Café, and the café's web page still reads "Coming Soon to Somers, Montana."
Most coverage has called it a new café. The business's own description puts it the other way around. The space is "home to our catering kitchen" and is also meant to be "a daily stop for grab-and-go meals, coffee, speciality drinks and thoughtfully curated Montana-made goods." So the building is going back to work. The café counter is how the public will get in the door.
Sixty years of volunteers, then a building the department outgrew
According to NBC Montana's 2020 report, Somers volunteer firefighters worked out of the Lesley Avenue hall for more than 60 years. The station is about 4,700 square feet, and the fire chief told the station the department had "officially outgrown" it. The sources disagree on its age. NBC Montana gives 1959 as the build year, and a 2019 Daily Inter Lake story on the replacement proposal says 1960.
The replacement went up at 784 Somers Road. The side-by-side numbers show how much the job had grown:
| Old hall, 27 Lesley Ave. | New hall, 784 Somers Road | |
|---|---|---|
| Built | 1959 or 1960, depending on the source | Under construction in 2020 |
| Size | About 4,700 sq ft | About 12,000 sq ft |
| Cost | Not reported | About $3.7 million projected, against a $4 million approved bond |
| Spaces described | Fire hall | Six truck bays, training center, offices, community room and kitchen, four upstairs bedrooms |
In August 2020, both NBC Montana and Firehouse reported a November move-in target. Neither report confirms the actual move date, and we found no public record of when or how the Lesley Avenue building changed hands, or what it housed in between.
The new hall now does the civic work the old one used to hold. Flathead County's calendar listed a Lakeside Community Council meeting at the Somers Fire Hall at 784 Somers Road on Sept. 29, 2026. The meeting room moved down the road. The old hall on Lesley Avenue is getting a different public role.
Who is moving in
Sarah Manuel is the chef and owner of Farmer Meets Foodie. In 2024 the state named it Montana's Best Farm-to-Table Company, according to an April 22, 2026 Bigfork Eagle profile republished by Flathead Valley Community College. She trained at the Culinary Institute of Montana at FVCC under Chef Howard Karp and worked as a line cook at Split Rock Cafe. She then went back to her family's ranch in Havre, where her parents raised grass-fed cattle and organic grains.
Her business began about eight years before that profile as a food truck called Streatery, selling food sourced from nearby farms. It grew into a catering company that now works with more than 50 local food producers around Montana. Wedding work kept bringing her to the Flathead Valley. She moved the business here in June 2025 after a three-year search for the right kitchen space. Until the Somers storefront is ready, she has been working out of a former formal dining room in Bigfork.
That three-year search is the reason this building matters. A caterer who usually serves events of 80 to 100 guests, and can handle more than 250, needs production space before anything else. A former fire station with room built for trucks and crews is a working building by design, and the plan uses it as one.
How the kitchen feeds the counter
The planned soup and salad bar ties the two halves of the business together. Manuel told the Bigfork Eagle she often has vegetables left over after preparing a catering menu, "like brussels sprouts or beets." The soup and salad bar is how she plans to use them and cut food waste. In practice, Lesley Avenue's daily menu would partly follow whatever the weekend's weddings and fundraisers left in the walk-in.
The café page lists what the counter is meant to offer:
- Coffee and specialty drinks
- Seasonal pastries
- A soup and salad bar
- Grab-and-go meals
- Hearth-baked artisan pizza
- Montana-made gifts
The profile adds detail. The coffee is planned with dairy from local creameries and syrups made from real food ingredients instead of sugar and artificial flavoring. The pizza oven came out of Manuel's travels in Italy and is meant for European-style personal pizzas. Her stated approach is to "see what we have access to locally and then let the food tell me what we're making," instead of writing a menu first and adding local ingredients around the edges.
"To taste the place where you are."
That line is how the profile describes her guiding philosophy. In Somers, that place includes North Shore Farm, one of the producers on her list.
The producers already on her list
Farmer Meets Foodie publishes a producer directory that it says lines up with its catering menus. Several entries are close to home:
- North Shore Farm, Somers
- Kalispell Kreamery, Kalispell
- North Soul Coffee Roasters, Kalispell
- Flathead Lake Cheese Company, Polson
- Big Sky Honey Berries, Whitefish
The directory doesn't say which of these, if any, will supply the café. Still, the list shows a supply circle running from the north shore to Polson. The planned café coffee calls for local creamery dairy, and a Kalispell creamery and a Kalispell roaster are both on the list. The café's own suppliers have not been announced.
Manuel has also said she wants to bring back the ticketed farm dinners she has hosted before, built around a menu made with specific farmers and ranchers. The business's farm-to-table events page currently says "No events at the moment."
Where things stand in October
The April profile said the storefront would open "at the beginning of the summer." As of early October 2026, the café page still says "Coming Soon" and lists no hours. We found no dated announcement of a soft opening, a new target date, or a ribbon cutting. Until the business posts hours, the best sources are its own website and the Lesley Avenue door.
The business also has a separate fall menu page with tacos, a beef sandwich, and a roasted-roots salad. Its order link points to the Streatery food truck, so it may not reflect what the café will serve.
Meanwhile, Somers already has a breakfast-and-lunch spot. Somers Bay Cafe opened in 1997 and serves breakfast and lunch. It sits at 47 Somers Road. The two plans serve different needs. One is a sit-down breakfast and lunch restaurant. The other is a production kitchen with a coffee counter, a soup and salad bar, and a pizza oven up front. With both open, Somers would have two places to eat built around very different kinds of work.
When the café opens, the building on Lesley Avenue will again be a place where people work long hours to serve a crowd. The crowds will just be wedding guests and morning coffee customers instead of fire calls.
Intuitive Real Estate follows how older buildings around the north shore find new uses, from fire halls to family homes being prepared for their next owners. If you own a Somers property with its own history and are wondering what its next chapter could look like, we're glad to talk it through calmly. Contact Us.
