Louise's Garden: The Source Story Behind Red's Tavern

When a restaurant calls itself farm-to-table or garden-to-table, the practical truth is usually a few seasonal items on the menu and a relationship with one local farm. There's nothing wrong with that, but the gap between the marketing language and the actual sourcing can be wide.

Red's Tavern, the restaurant at Watson's Lakefront Resort in Cataldo, Idaho, is set up a little differently. The source story starts on the property itself, in Louise Rice's garden. Louise — who, with her husband Bill, owns Watson's — built and tends a working kitchen garden on the property, and what grows there ends up on the menu at Red's a hundred feet away.

The garden is laid out in raised beds and traditional rows, with a mix of vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers. The exact planting changes year to year, but in a typical season you'll find tomatoes and peppers running the high beds, zucchini and squash filling the lower rows, sunflowers and cosmos drawing the pollinators in, and pots of herbs — basil, mint, rosemary, thyme — close to the kitchen for the line cooks to grab handfuls.

There's a melon vine on a trellis some years. Pumpkins in the fall. Roses along the edges. It's a working garden, not a showpiece — though it happens to be photogenic enough that we end up walking guests through it.

Red's Tavern is anchored to Louise's garden as the source story. In practice, the garden supplies a meaningful share of the produce that reaches the tavern's plates in season — herbs, vegetables, edible flowers, the occasional flowering centerpiece. The rest of the menu is built from local and regional sourcing: beef and other proteins from ranches in the Coeur d'Alene region, breads baked in-house, and seasonal items from producers across the Inland Northwest.

We try not to overclaim. We don't grow our own steaks, and we don't pretend to be a from-scratch homestead. What we do is name the source: Louise's garden is the anchor for the produce side, and everything else is regional whenever it can be.

Because the garden is small, what's growing dictates what's on. In early summer, the lettuces and herbs go onto the lighter plates and the seasonal salads. Mid-summer brings the tomato and pepper run — caprese salads, garden tomato sides, peppers worked into the bar program for infused liquors. Late summer is for melons and stone fruit. The pumpkin and squash come into the kitchen as the menu turns toward the fall roasts.

This is why the menu at Red's changes through the year rather than holding the same lineup all season. It has to.

For everything the garden can't supply — and that's most of the calorie count of any given plate — Red's leans regional. The beef and other proteins come from ranches in the Coeur d'Alene region. Cheeses and breads come from local producers when we can get them. The bar program leans on Idaho wines, regional craft beers, and infused liquors made in-house using fruit and herbs from the garden when they're in.

Food sourcing isn't something most diners ask about, but most diners notice the difference even when they don't ask — in the ripeness of a tomato, the snap of a fresh-cut herb, the way a steak from a ranch a few hours away tastes versus one trucked in. The point of Louise's garden isn't to make the menu more romantic. It's to make the menu better.

Guests staying at Watson's are welcome to walk through the garden — it sits between the lodging and Red's, and most paths between the units and the tavern cross past it. If you're curious, the staff at Red's are happy to point out what's in the ground that week, and on slower nights Louise herself is sometimes out there pulling weeds.

Red's Tavern is open to both Watson's lodging guests and the public — no reservation needed. Red's is walk-in only. The best seats are on the lakefront deck overlooking Rose Lake, and the garden walk is a five-minute detour from your table back to your cabin. If you'd rather skip the wait, join the online waitlist through Toast Tables before you arrive.