INTIMATE, seasonal, FARM-TO-TABLE dining
Dining at Bistro 1907
Join us for a casually-elegant, rustic dining experience (indoor or patio dining)
Open: Thursday - Sunday 5 - 8 pm
Winter Hours: Starting Jan 3rd, 2025 Open Friday & Saturday 5pm to 7pm
Special events occasionally close the Bistro, call to ensure we are open
About Bistro 1907
Built in 1907 and opened in 1908, in its pre-Depression heyday, the Balch Hotel was the primary lodging and gathering place for salesmen, ranchers, timbermen, and passengers from the then-booming Great Southern Railroad station. The dining room – with its same footprint as today – was a thriving social hub for both travelers and locals. The late Frank Engels Jr, whose folks bought the hotel from the Balch family in 1913, remembered the days when the dining room was so well used, a rope had to be placed across the entrance to control the crowd.
The Depression era brought Dufur and Wasco County the collapse of wheat prices, a failure to irrigate the vast outlying apple orchards, a transition to trucking over rail, and finally the closure of the railroad in 1936. The Balch and its dining establishment would slip into obscurity for a few decades of mixed use and private residence, before a restoration in the 1980s and commercial re-emergence in the decades to follow.
Now ranked among the top travel destinations in Oregon, the Balch Hotel is a protected landmark under the National Register of Historic Places. Well-loved by a new iteration of traveler, Bistro 1907 is modern reinvention of a restaurant with century-old roots in hearty, rustic, local fare. Its original dining room and famous mountain-view patio are open 7-nights-a-week beginning Memorial Day weekend.
