thelocaldiner.com

As the summer grilling season approaches, the New York Times recently surveyed the best hot dogs in New York. The surprising secret of hot dogs in Gotham is that all the classic franks, from the grills of Katz’s Deli on the Lower East Side all the way up to Papaya King on the Upper East Side, and every food cart pot of “dirty water dogs” in between, is that they all come from the same place: Sabrett’s of New Jersey. Even better you can order them shipped five pounds at a time–a critical service when your pregnant wife’s most discernable craving is macaroni & cheese with hot dogs. (Once, when I asked her if I should make three hot dogs for dinner, she asked, “three each?”)

Montana’s counterpart to the svelte Sabrett Frank is the fat and smoky Beer Baron, made in Oregon for the Bielen family of Great Falls. Where the New York sausage is thin, salty, beefy, and snaps back when you bite it, Montana’s monster sausage is an inch-thick, coarse ground, smoked, and squirting with savory juices. Each link weighs in at one-third pound and, thanks to unabashed mention of beef hearts as the fourth ingredient on the label, carries a 30g dose of saturated fat that should meet your weekend quota. Last time I checked, you could find Beer Barons at a White Sox game and some supermarkets, though the purest way to enjoy this monster sausage is at the humble Beer Baron Market at 2nd and 2nd north of downtown Great Falls, where you can sit at an outside table next door and wash it down with a 32-ounce pop.

Beer Baron
203 2nd Ave N
Great Falls, MT 59401
(406) 453-7123

Helenans are celebrating the opening of their second health foods market, the StrawHouse Market. Its building is both a technological marvel and a work of art. We first noticed it going up last year, when stacks of Gallatin Valley straw started to form walls in a field among new housing developments off of North Montana. In its finished state, solar panels and less conspicuous efficiency features complement its colorful adobe/prairie-style exterior. Here’s how its website, which contains an impressive collection of architectural and engineering detail, puts it:

The synergistic integration of interdependent energy saving systems incorporated as well, set the building apart from the norm.

1. Passive solar gain through fenestration at the south elevation to admit and retain solar heat to the interior.
2. Grid-tied photovoltaic power generation to offset utility supplied electricity and help to manage peak electrical load requirements and used as shading for the passive solar fenestrations during the summer months.
3. Ground Source Heat Pump (GSHP) technology for heating, cooling, and ergonomics.
4. On site rain/snow capture, harvest and storage for landscape irrigation requirements.
5. Permeable customer parking area in place of paving and Ashlar (recycled) concrete paving substituted for monolithic concrete patio areas allowing vegetation growth significantly reducing the Heat Island affect on site and at building perimeter resulting in increased comfort and decreased energy requirements for cooling during summer months.

You can tell that its proprietor, Dirk Ellis, has a background in mechanical engineering. Oh, and that last “permeable customer parking area” item means that you park your car on a grass boulevard that drains into a recycled water irrigation system. (I can’t help but wonder how that will fare in the next spring storm, or under the snowplow next winter.)

Inside, the StrawHouse is much smaller that it appears (blame it on the bale-thick walls), and features less than half the selection of its uptown competitor the Real Food Store. And while customers might not miss Real Food’s score of bulk granola varieties, other omissions such as tiny sprouts, chile pepper, and cheese assortments put the StrawHouse somewhere between an elegant organic convenience store and a full-fledged health food supermarket. Valley residents would find that even the inorganic gas station Bob’s
Valley Market, down Montana on Lincoln Rd., boasts more shelf space (no solar panels, but great hams).

The smaller selection still has potential. While I have not yet tested their butcher, the StrawHouse expands our local selection of grass-fed Montana beef by offering cuts from Beaverhead Meats in Dillon, adding to Real Food’s McAlpine Ranch meats from Valier. And many Real Food fans frustrated by its teetotaling management hope that Ellis will seriously consider selling Montana and organic beer and wine.

The StrawHouse shines in pure design and comfort. Its welcoming two-story cafe, with deep-hued walls and warm wood flooring, is the kind of place you could spend a morning with the paper or meet for lunch, and a major improvement on Real Food’s utilitarian food court. And its deli wrap menu, ranging from portabello to roast pork, is more inspired than its rival’s wheat-bread and luncheon meat sandwiches.

My only serious complaint about the StrawHouse is its location amid the sprawling cul-de-sacs of North Montana Avenue. I have no problem with that in itself–suburbanites deserve natural foods too–but the big box store neighborhood is incongruous with all of its other conservation efforts. Real Foods is a little less central in its current location, but still walkable; the StrawHouse is within walking distance of the aforementioned cul-de-sacs, Shopko, and little else. Your average in-town Helenan will burn an extra pint of gas to drive past Real Foods (Van’s, Safeway, and County Market too) to get to the StrawHouse’s environmentally correct grass parking spaces and back; I’m no engineer, but my back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that it would take only a dozen-or-so customers driving those extra few miles to burn the same amount of energy all those photo-voltaic cells generate in a day (53 kWh, 180,000 BTUs, or 1.5 gallons of gas).

Given Ellis’s attention to detail, I suspect he considered the importance of location, and land costs and zoning restrictions drove him to North Montana. (Maybe the next new grocer will be more geographically efficient.) That aside, Ellis deserves credit for building Helena’s most architecturally and technologically intriguing new business.

StrawHouse Market
1050 Road Runner St
Helena, MT 59601
(406) 457-1050

Ingomar was the biggest town on the Milwaukee Road between Roundup and Forsyth, with a population exceeding three hundred in the 1930s and the self proclaimed title of “sheep shearing capital of North America” according to Don Spritzer’s Roadside History of Montana.

Nowadays its claim to fame is the most famous bar in Montana most people have never visited, the Jersey Lilly, established in the former home of the failed First National Bank of Ingomar in 1933. Doug Ardary’s canonical (and apparently out of print) reference work, The Pub Crawler’s Guide to Montana’s Small Town Taverns calls the Jersey Lilly “one of Montana’s most famous and most loved taverns . . . worth going 100 miles out of your way to spend some time there.” For those of us taking U.S. 12 due East from Helena to Miles City, however, the Ingomar turnoff came up just in time for dinner.

We arrived at dusk during a break in a daylong rain storm, and as we pulled up we feared the darkened bar had already closed. But as our headlights shot past the hitching posts and over the boardwalk into the dining room, we spotted a dozen faces seated around several tables. So we walked in and heard from the hostess that the storm knocked out the power, but if we didn’t mind eating in the dark she would be happy to serve us dinner. (It turned out the faces belonged to some local ranchers who were on their way to ride in the Bucking Horse Sale parade.)

This would be an especially rustic Jersey Lilly experience, with an absence of electricity supplementing the usual shortage of indoor plumbing (outhouses stood off the boardwalk around the corner). The emergency exit floodlights shone on a table in the corner, so we pulled up some chairs and used the light to read the menus. One item we could order without a menu: Bill Seward’s renowned beans. An order of those and chicken fried steak would make the meal for most of us.

Our server brought out a knit potholder with our silverware and bowls, then set down a well-worn saucepan filled with a deep brown bean stew. After a day of roadtrip jerky and trail mix, we greedily ladled the stew into our bowls and supped. These were pot beans, a staple of chuckwagon cooking, in their own thick gravy flavored with chunks of smoky ham, a little salt, and a balance of secret spices for body. It was as simple and perfectly satisfying a dish as exists in high plains cooking, and for that reason a rare find in fancier kitchens.

Just as I was finishing my first bowl of beans and reaching for seconds, the chicken fried steak arrived. I didn’t bring a ruler to the table, but I’d guess the flour-and-pepper dredged chopped steak measured almost half a square foot. Four inches in, just as I was starting to fill up, I discovered the bean gravy made a good steak sauce. One bowl later I had cleaned my plate.

As we were paying up, the lights came on and we could see the beautiful and enormous back bar. We also got a closer look at the mounted moose head on the opposite wall–at first we thought it was just the bad lighting, but it actually had a cigarette in its mouth. It was time to hit the road before we could ask about the smoking moose, but we’ll be back to the Jersey Lilly. Even if it takes us 100 miles out of our way.

Jersey Lilly Saloon & Eatery
NW Corner of 1st Ave & Main St
Ingomar, MT
(406) 358-2278