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

In the 1970s, at the intersection of State Highway 85 and Interstate 90 in Belgrade, there stood the light towers and grandstand of the original Gallatin Speedway, the tall dark pyramid of a sawmill smokestack, and the two long plastic quonset greenhouses of my grandparents’ tomato farm.Â? The screaming stockcar races and the soot-belching pyramid disappeared from the intersection years ago, but those greenhouses remained.Â? Until sometime last month, apparently.

My grandparents built Belmont Gardens from scratch in the late 1960s as a semi-retirement project after decades of dipping candies and jerking sodas at their fountain on Main Street in Bozeman.Â? It was a state-of-the-art climate-controlled hydroponic operation at the time, densely packed rows of tomato vines pollenated by some sort of walking reverse-vacuum my grandfather referred to as “bee machine”.Â? Inside the greenhouses was hot, moist, and almost pungent with the fragrance of tomato plants.Â? Outside in the shop the perfectly red and sweet tomatoes lined the shelves in row after row of flat boxes, 24 or so per box, prices indicated in my legally-blind grandfather’s large felt-tip script.Â? There would always be a few spare fruits on the table by the cash register for my brother and me, and a rusty salt shaker filled with sugar (not salt) to season them.Â? It must have been the sugar that got me started on a lifetime tomato habit.

I would join my grandmother for deliveries in her station wagon, with her little dog, a bag of stale Cheetos, and an oldies station punched in on the a.m. radio.Â? We drove a circuit that started at Lee & Dad’s in Belgrade, then head to Bozeman for stops at Van’s on North 7th, Heeb’s on East Main, and Thriftway in Livingston.Â? (Amazingly, all of these family supermarkets are still in business, though it’s a little harder to get local produce at them.)Â? Along the way, she recited with me the names of the mountain ranges as they appeared over the dashboard:Â? Tubacaruts, Bridgers, Spanish Peaks, Hi-lights, Ubsorkees.Â? I didn’t learn the spelling at the time, and that helped me with the pronunciation.

Almost twenty years ago, my grandparents sold the tomato farm and moved to a new development on what was then the outskirts of Bozeman, in a modest rambler that at the time had a clear view of most of those ranges I learned about.Â? As the years passed, my grandfather died, newer and bigger houses sprung up between the rambler and the ranges, and my grandmother eventually moved back to her childhood home of Livingston and into a rest home.Â? But every time I drove I-90 through Belgrade on my way to see her, those greenhouses stood sentry over our memories of the place, surrounded first by a farm implement dealer, then a used car lot, then a housebuilder’s model homes.

This past Mother’s Day weekend I found the greenhouses torn down.Â? It was the model homes that eventually conquered those greenhouses, of course.Â? Belgrade is Montana’s fastest growing city, adding more than 20% to its population in the last few years as variations on those model homes begin to fill in the I-90 corridor to Bozeman.Â? Demand for housing is so high that my grandparents’ house and shop stood braced on trailers, ready to be dropped into some new cul-de-sac.Â? Maybe if someone could have moved into those two long plastic quonset greenhouses, they would still be standing at the intersection of State Highway 85 and Interstate 90 in Belgrade.

The Montana Club, the oldest social club in the Northwest, was founded in the 1880s on the legendary site of Helena’s first gold discovery. In 1903 the bartender’s son burned down the clubhouse. So in 1905 the Club invited the great architect Cass Gilbert–whose credits include the Minnesota State Capitol, the Woolworth Building in New York (at the time the world’s tallest building), and the United States Supreme Court Building, as well as Montana’s Original Governor’s Mansion and a wing of the Old St. Peter’s Hospital in Helena–rebuilt the current Renaissance style clubhouse in 1905.Walk through entrance–tiled with true swastikas, which are eastern mystical symbols opposed to the backwards swastika used by the Nazis, but are offputting nonetheless–and down the stairs to the the Rathskeller. Yes, more German, but the Rathskeller dates to the middle ages and literally means “city-hall cellar,” a bar built below goverment buildings in old Germany. I imagine that when it opened many of Helena’s burghers clanked mugs at our Rathskeller, possibly sneaking in and out through Helena’s network of tunnels. (Interestingly, Cass Gilbert built a proper sort of Rathskeller in the basement of the Minnesota State Capitol. I don’t know whether they pour beer there in Minnesota, but we could sure use a bar here on Montana’s Capitol Hill. I’ve also read about a Rathskeller in Gilbert’s Woolworth Building. What was it with him and bars in basements?)

The Rathskeller no longer serves members regularly, but anyone can rent it out for a special occasion.Â? I’d say the chance to enjoy a drink down there with a few friends and Helena’s ghosts qualifies.

Except for the neon star luring burger lovers near and far, Matt’s Place (PDF) is a nondescript house backed by a railroad, down the hill from Uptown Butte on the far side of the interstate. Still, it has managed a designation on the National Historic Register, it being a prime candidate for Montana’s first–and now oldest–drive-in.

Drive-in may not be the right word. I pulled around back to park, and while menus were posted outside, your best bet at placing an order is to walk through the front door and grab a seat at the original horseshoe dining counter. On the menu, my eyes immediately gravitated toward a single enticing word: nutburger. That, an order of fresh-cut fries, and a bottle of Coke on the rocks would be lunch for today.

In a lot of newer joints, a nutburger would be, say, “a Nut and Vegetable Pattie on a Toasted Whole-Wheat Bun, Baked with Raw Cheddar Cheese, and Topped with Sprouts, Tomatoes, Pickles, Vegenaise, and our Special Sauce.” But at Matt’s, nutburger meant one of their old-fashioned quarter-pound beef patties slathered with an exotic mixture of chopped peanuts and mayonnaise (no “Vegenaise” in sight) and your choice of toppings on a standard bun, all tucked into an old-school folded paper pocket to keep every drop of greasy nuttiness beside the burger.

The burgers are tasty enough to stand on their own, but the nuts add a roasted saltiness straight from the sundae bar. And those old-school handmade fries are as good as they get–even better with a few drops of nut sauce. You may not be able to literally drive-in to Matt’s, but since it’s right off of Montana’s two interstates, there’s no excuse not to stop by.
Matt’s Place Drive-In
2339 Placer Street
Butte, Montana
(406) 782-8049

A couple of months ago, while pulling together some garden paraphernalia at our local hardware megastore Power Townsend, I happened upon a curious little snackbar just inside the door by the grills, mowers, and patio furniture. It was called “Big Dog Chili Dog,” and its young proprietor served monstrous yet succulent polish sausages and garlicky beef franks, accompanied by no fewer than five different hot mustards. It was just the meaty meal a guy needed before embarking on a hardware safari, but sadly the snackbar did not survive the summer.

So I’m not taking any chances with waiting to report my recent discovery of Good Dog, an honest-to-goodness hot dog cart camped on the northeast corner of the Capitol lawn. You won’t find it there every day, but if you do, cancel any other lunch plans you may have and enjoy a locally made sausage from the Real Food Store served on a locally grown-and-baked bun from Wheat Montana. (Real Food doesn’t make frankfurters–yet–so Good Dog gets those from a ranch in North Dakota.)

This is the kind of food cart I would run if I could get out of the office enough. Real Food makes the best sausage around, and with a few return visits you can taste all of them at Good Dog: bratwurst (solid and subtly seasoned), andouille (mace and allspice notes punctuating a hot cayenne baseline), italian sausage (zesty fennel and red pepper), chorizo (deep red chili seasoning with garlic and oregano), and chicken apple sausage (slightly sweet with sage).

Good Dog offers three sausages a day, including the basic frankfurter and one each of hot and mild sausages, grilled to order over a gas-powered hibachi mounted to the side of the cart. There’s organic lemonade and root beer to drink, and homemade chocolate chip cookies for dessert. My walk home to let Lena out brings me past Good Dog’s location, and I haven’t yet been able to turn it down when the cart is set up. (Here’s to hoping it stays open into the cooler months, or at least reopens for the Legislature.)

Food carts, like roadside stands and the odd hardware store snackbar, deserve our attention because they provide a cheap way for people to offer diverse foods (don’t take my word for it–listen to an economist). For my money, Montana’s most distinctive, most “local” food comes from such unorthodox outlets like Good Dog. So attention Helenans and visitors to the Capitol: Go there now. (And let me know about any of your favorite Montana street food.)

Good Dog
Southwest Corner of Sixth Avenue & Roberts Street
(across from the Montana Historical Society)
Open for lunch, closed occasionally.

Just beyond the glare of the stadium lights at Kindrick Field sits a modest yellow house. Inside its plain front door are a handful of small tables flanking an open kitchen. In the kitchen is Terry Swope, who along with his wife (and voice of the Montana Taxpayer’s Union, incidentally) Mary Whittinghill, host the Carriage House Bistro.

The wine list offers a half-dozen wines by the glass, and another 15 by the bottle, fairly priced.Â? We started with creamy artichoke dip touched by mild green pepper, perhaps an inspiration by their former Mexican hometown of Puebla. (We would love to see them try Mole dishes, which were born in Puebla.) Then came the entrees.Â? First, the polenta with mushrooms and tomatoes, covered in melted mozzarella. Next, their specialty Bistro Chicken, a breast padded in hazelnuts, stuffed with brie, and pan-fried. Both dishes were quite rich.

With the cozy room and luscious menu, the Carriage house is one of the better spots in Helena for romantic meals, with its quiet room and Mary’s unobtrusive service (at the end of our meal, she held off on bringing the check to let us continue our conversation without interruption). But when there’s a game on, don’t park to close to the foul pole.

Carriage House Bistro
234 1/2 Lyndale
Helena, Montana 59601
(406) 449-6949

John Harrington of the IR reports:

The 2.5 million red-blooded American men aged 18 to 34 who buy Maxim magazine each month will likely drool even more than usual at the September issue. In addition to the magazine’s standard fare of scantily clad models, “actresses” and NFL cheerleaders, there’s a feature on “America’s Top 10 Meat Hogs” – artery-clogging sandwiches piled high that only a carnivore could love. And checking in at No. 2 on the list: The Nuke, a longtime staple at Helena’s own Staggering Ox.

(For some reason the article doesn’t appear on the IR’s website, and the Gazette’s headline refers to a “Helena burger,” which would come as a surprise to the folks at the R&B, Rialto, and Stinkyburger.)

The Staggering Ox, a ferny deli with other branches in Missoula and Spokane, is gradually taking over a local strip mall with its sprawling two-story dining hall cum art gallery–a big improvement over empty retail space. (They once advertised wi-fi, but I don’t whether they still have it.) The Ox calls its sandwiches “Clubfoots,” and they come in hefty cylinders of white bread baked in coffee cans. The winning Nuke (Ham, Turkey, Roast Beef, Swiss, Provolone, Sharp Cheddar, Lettuce & Sauce) actually is on the tamer end of the Ox’s topically-named (and apparently trademarked, but I haven’t figured out the html for the tiny “tm” symbol) Clubfoot sandwiches, which range from the “Yo Momma Osama” (Gyro Meat, Bacon, Black Beans, Gorgonzola, Pepper Jack, Onions, Salsa and your chioce of sauce) to the “Mount St. Helens” (Ham, Turkey, Roast Beef, Pepperoni, Turkey Pastrami, Swiss, Provolone, Sharp Cheddar, Monterey Jack, Mozzarella, Onions, Green Peppers, Mushrooms, Black Olives, Sunflower Seeds, Lettuce & Sauce).

The Clubfoot bread doesn’t add much to the sandwiches other than extra dough, but it’s worth tearing out some of the relatively bland bread to get to the Ox’s daunting selection of ingredients (often from Montana, including roast bison at times) and tangy homemade sauces. You might say that the fresh deli-style Clubfoots don’t belong with true “Meat Hogs” like first place winner the Fat Darrell at R.U. Grill & Pizza in New Brunswick, N.J., which Harrington describes as “a gut bomb featuring chicken fingers, fried cheese sticks and french fries stuffed into a hoagie roll.” Maxim’s Meat Hog article isn’t yet online–and I personally don’t subscribe (honest!)–though I’d be interested in what else made it on this list.

The Staggering Ox
400 Euclid in the Lundy Center
(406) 443-1729

Lauren Etter and Janet Adamy report ($) in the Journal about the morel rush now happening along the Whitefish Range west of the divide. A fascinating local market develops around the wild crop, with impromptu buyers popping up along roadsides to pay the pickers who roam last year’s wildfire burns in search of the fungal delicacy. There’s plenty of incentive:

Pickers here are selling a pound of fresh morels for about $3.50, which is low, they say. Wholesalers are selling fresh morels for as little as $8 a pound, not quite half last year’s going price. . . .

Cooks love morels, which have a spongelike appearance, because of their nutty taste and extraordinary ability to soak up sauces. A pound of morels sells for as much as $40 at fancy food stores like Dean & DeLuca in New York.

On the production end, the forest service charges $100 for a season harvesting permit and $500 for a buying permit in National Forests (commercial harvesting is banned in wilderness areas and Glacier National Park). For those prices and the cost of a tent to live in, one picker-buyer profiled in the Journal article said he could earn $800 a day all season, but he also faces high theft rates and vigilantism by armed pickers protecting “their” territory. It’s no place to raise a family, but he does: his wife and three young children share the tent.