thelocaldiner.com

602 Main Street
Miles City, Montana

This is a classic Montana supper club, in the dusty river town that was the end of the line for the great cattle drives that inspired Lonesome Dove. Main Street Miles City, lit by old neon bar signs, was where we would dine on our first night in Montana.

The Hole in the Wall is anything but. After the darkened entrance, a long, high, mahogany bar looms to the left. This is the kind of massive woodworked bar that would be a treasure in a big city tavern, and you’ll find them up and down Main Street in an old cowtown like Miles City. The dining room is an afterthought, tucked in the back under ornate tin ceilings and cavernous brick walls covered with cowboy murals and taxidermied animals surrounding a central fireplace. It was filled with families, known by name to the staff.

A newcomer to Montana might wonder why we had to get up and go to the bar to place our drink order, and why the food came from the lunchcounter kitchen at the 600 Cafe next door. Montana is tight with its liquor licenses–long story–so bars and restaurants often team up to provide a complete food and drink experience, with separate bills for each. I’m not quite sure how I financed it, but they made a tasty Pauline.

Let’s cut to the food. The distinguishing feature of a Montana supper club is steak bookended by endless accompaniments. For Autumn that meant, well, endless accompaniments: a salad bar where everything but the lettuce had dressing preapplied. Good chicken soup though, but that might be a reflection of eating road food for five days on the way from New York.

But you don’t see value like this in New York. Lobster tail (which made Autumn suspicious) for twenty bucks with everything. I had a decent 12 oz. T-Bone (one of the smaller cuts), with saucy salad bar, mashed potatoes topped with perfect brown gravy thick with mushrooms and bacon, fettucine al fredo (are you kidding?), all for $12. That would have cost at least $60 at Peter Luger, and–a sad Montana irony–the beef would have been much better in Brooklyn.

Still, a fitting first meal in Montana.

The first drink I ordered after entering Montana was a Pauline: equal parts gin, vodka, and dry vermouth, on the rocks, with a olives. I had to spell it out for the bartender at the Hole in the Wall in Miles City, because the Pauline is a rare drink–in fact, I think I am the only one who calls it that, and one of only two people who drink it.

The Pauline takes its name from my grandmother, a tough old Scot born on the flanks of the Crazy Mountains, my mother’s mother. When I came to visit her after some time at college, at the appointed cocktail hour, as she was mixing me a Squirt and maraschino cherry juice, my mom let slip that I had started drinking harder stuff. At that, Pauline promptly walked over to the sink, poured out my pop, and topped off the pyrex measuring bowl of liquor she was mixing. That night I’d start drinking martinis.

This cocktail was no fancy gin with some postmodern whisper of vermouth, or even the cold war vodka version. This cocktail was a shot each of gin and vodka from a plastic bottle (Lewis & Clark, I recall), topped off with a generous shot of vermouth.

An ounce and a half of vermouth: You would think it was a superfund pollutant, the way otherwise sensible liquor drinkers avoided it. But vermouth dates the drink, takes it out of the age of artisan gins and quadruple-filtered vodkas, back to when bartenders struck a balance between high-proof rutgut gin and the finer, more dilute vermouth. Vermouth–not just a whisper, but enough of it to flavor the drink–makes it a cocktail and not just a shot of booze. And when some apparently tough bartender rolls his eyes at my order, like I’m one of those who wants his gin spiced with organic juniper, or his subliminal vermouth atomized, I tell him that my grandmother’s been drinking that mix for twice as long as either of us has been alive.

Someday I’ll train a bartender to make a Pauline by name, but until then I’ll suffer the sideways glances, take my gin and vodka and vermouth and ice and olives, and toast my dear old grandmother.