Idaho Highway 95 heads south from I-90, hugging the shore as Lake Coeur d'Alene's blue water glimmers to the west. It's a pretty drive, but with one tight curve after another on the two-lane road, and the occasional surprise of an oncoming logging truck, there's not a lot of time to relax and enjoy the view. That's probably at least partly why Chason Walsh, executive chef and owner of Latitudes at Carlin Bay, says about 90 percent of his customers arrive at the location by boat. The other reason is that it's just fun to boat up to a food truck.
That's right. Latitudes is a semi-permanent food truck Walsh has installed at Carlin Bay. In 2017 Walsh bought the 5-acre plot that was the longtime home of The Lodge at Carlin Bay. But the Lodge turned out to be irreparably worn.
"My first experience with the building was I turned on a light switch, and the wall started to catch on fire," says Walsh.
So the old resort had to come down, though it may still show up on your GPS as "permanently closed." Walsh didn't want hungry folks to forget about the location — and he still plans to build a resort there someday — so in the meantime, he got the idea of moving his Post Falls food truck out to the lakeshore property.
That first summer, business was slow. Walsh and Latitudes' head chef Alec Tompkins, a chef Walsh met while working at Beverly's, decided to offer prime rib dinners on Thursdays and Fridays to spark interest. They began with just 14 guests per night, but the event quickly grew to 54. The prime rib dinners are now served on the covered and heated dock, with full table service. There's even a sommelier on hand to help diners choose from the surprisingly high end wine list.
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"We've sold $2,000, $3,000 bottles," of wine, Walsh says.
At press time, the prime rib dinners were mostly sold out for the summer, but there are plenty of menu options at the truck window for hungry arrivals. The coconut shrimp is a top seller.
"I created that dish long before we opened," Walsh says. "It's dairy-free and gluten-free. But it's got this awesome coconut sauce that I just made up on the fly one day and it worked."
The lobster roll is the menu's other top seller, settling in among a group of hand-helds like the whiskey burger and a pesto chicken wrap. After 5 pm, teriyaki steak and half-chicken dinners are available, as well as dessert.
Patrons seem clear on one thing: The food at Latitudes is worth a trip. Walsh estimates that they serve 1,500 to 2,000 customers a day during the summer. Front-of-house operations manager David Martin and his team of runners keep the food and beverages, including beer and wine, flowing smoothly.
Live music frequently completes the summer-y ambiance. On Thursday and Friday nights, solo musicians are lined up to entertain the prime rib crowd, with music spilling over into the food truck picnic area.
"On other random days, musicians will just message me and say 'Hey, can I come out and play?' And I'll say, 'Yeah, absolutely. Come on out!'"
After growing up in Spokane, Walsh's path to owning a wildly popular food truck on the edge of a North Idaho lake actually began in Las Vegas. He and his then-girlfriend (now wife) enrolled at the Las Vegas Le Cordon Bleu, where he arrived without a lot of background in cooking.
"I actually went in not knowing what a simple thing like a roux was," he admits.
His wife ended up as a sous chef for Thomas Keller, while Walsh worked as a sous chef for Jose Andres. It was a prestigious post, though he credits chef Shirley Chung — among her many other accomplishments she was the runner-up on Season 14 of Top Chef — with being the "one that taught me everything I know."
With extremely demanding jobs, the couple realized that they needed to consider their priorities.
"In Vegas, it's an all or nothing if you want to live in that world. There's no real room for family, for kids. So we had to make a decision on whether or not we wanted to have kids or whether our career was going to be our kid," Walsh says. "And we decided we wanted to have kids."
Two kids later, and back in the Northwest, Walsh is happy with the success of Latitudes, in part for its role in cleaning up the somewhat-rowdy former reputation of Carlin Bay and making it into a place he says is now comfortable for families. But he still has culinary ambitions for Latitudes.
"This year we're gonna get to a little bit more of our passion which is doing high-end modern food," he says. "We'll do a Chef's Day — 12 guests that's it — and about 15 courses of our culinary expertise. You get to interact with us while we're doing it. And then we plate in front of you, and you get to eat it right there."
The Chef's Day dinners at Latitudes are sold out for the summer, but this fall Walsh plans to open a restaurant in Post Falls that he's calling Accendo, which will feature chef's dinners for 12.
"Accendo means to illuminate. So our plan is to take food that you see every day and change it in ways that you've never seen before," he says. "I'd like to show you that food can be done in many different ways."
Accendo is scheduled to be open starting sometime in October, offering seating for 12 guests a night, three days a week.
