Diners enjoy Tree Top food, view
Jonathan Knutson
The Forum - 12/11/1999

For nearly half a century Moorhead's Tree Top restaurant has been one of the area's most prominent upscale eateries.

But the proprietors of the restaurant, located on the seventh floor of the building at 403 Center Ave., hope to change its glitzy image.

"We don't want to be known as the fanciest restaurant in Fargo-Moorhead. We want to be known as the best, in terms of quality, price and presentation," said Mike Weaver, co-owner and general manager.

He and his partners, who have extensive and successful restaurant experience in Minnesota lake country, have been running the Tree Top since 1997.

The Treetop currently employs about 20 people. It offers lunch (typically about $6 or $7 per person) and dinner (typically about $15 or $16 per person).

The lunch menu is changed every two weeks. The dinner menu is changed every week.

"We're not an elegant restaurant where you only go once or twice a year for special occasions," Weaver said. "We have a much broader appeal than that."

The Tree Top restaurant - sometimes known as the Treetop - opened in 1975. But its history began a quarter century earlier.

In the late 1940s, a group of investors, including Frederick Martin, began building a downtown Moorhead hotel, which was known as the F-M Hotel when it opened in 1950. Contrary to what many people believed, the initials stood for the Frederick Martin Hotel, not the Fargo-Moorhead Hotel.

The hotel operated a restaurant - the precursor to the Tree Top - on its top floor.

The hotel restaurant enjoyed one of its finest moments in 1952. Eighty gourmets from around the nation, known as Les Amis d'Escoffler, or friends of Escoffler, a prominent 19th Century French cook, gathered at the F-M Hotel for a fabulous feast. Four chefs, 40 kitchen staffers and 25 specially trained servers were required.

A Forum article at the time previewed the meal like this:

"There will be a 'prelude du dinner' that includes such delicacies as caviar, fois gras (goose liver) and water chestnuts in bacon. ... Then the guests will settle down to the first course, the lobster bisque accompanied by sherry wine."

"Next will come pompano, the fish course, with sauterne, then calf's sweetbreads, glace Virginia with Madeira sauce and burgundy wine and following that the meat course, roast beef, stuffed tomatoes and fondant potatoes, plus champagne.

"A salad is served next. Afterward there is dessert - the bombe glacee Africaine - fruit, petits fours, cheese, coffee, liqueurs and, finally, cigarets and cigars."

There's no record of how long the gourmets needed to recuperate.

From 1950 to 1975, the hotel went through several ownership changes. Through them all, however, the restaurant continued to operate on the top floor.

In the early 1970s, the hotel was converted into an office building and The Tree Top opened in 1975. The name, apparently, is a reference to giving its patrons a bird's eye view of downtown Fargo-Moorhead.

One of the original investors in the Tree Top was Ron Erhardt, the former head coach of the North Dakota State University football team who went on to a long, successful career as a professional football head coach and offensive coordinator.

The Tree Top quickly established a good reputation. A staff writer with the Winnipeg Free Press ate at the Tree Top in 1978 and described it in her newspaper as "probably the area's best. It's a casually elegant, seventh-floor aerie with a lovely view (ask for a window table) and some excellent food."

Since it opened, the restaurant has gone through several owners and had its ups and downs. It closed in 1986 before new owners renovated and reopened it a year later.

In 1989 the Tree Top began its Thursday Jazz Night, which proved popular with area jazz fans. But apparently there weren't enough of them: jazz night ended in 1993 because the Tree Top was losing money on it.

The Tree Top struggled financially after Weaver and his partners took over in 1997. "But we're making progress and we can see the end of the tunnel," he said.

Weaver said the Tree Top receives about five phone calls a day "from people asking if we're closed."

The establishment did close part of its lunch operation not long after Weaver and the new owners took over.

"But we're still open for both lunch and dinner," he said. "And we're here to stay."