thelocaldiner.com

This St. Patrick’s day many Montanans lamented the closure of the M&M Bar after 113 years of 24-hour service. So here’s some great news (on the 100th Anniversary of Bloomsday, no less):

BUTTE — The M&M Cigar Store, a landmark here for more than a century but closed 14 months ago in a bankruptcy case, may be reopening soon.

Bud Walker, a real estate agent and Butte-Silver Bow commissioner, said he hopes to reopen the bar by late summer.

He said the family partnership deal with owner Patty Lisac, including its liquor license, may close in July.

So raise a toast to Commissioner Walker for taking up the mantle of a Butte institution!

And if you missed the opportunity to buy the M&M (asking price $195,000, but some construction needed to bring it up to code), you have several other chances to own a piece of history, from the Irish Times (the M&M’s St. Patty’s day stand-in), to the Anaconda Company’s pay office, to the Dumas Brothel (”America’s Longest Running House of Prostitution”). Let’s hope they all end up in good hands.

Our foodie friend Jen posts about supporting local agriculture. Helena’s local food partisans shop at the Real Food Store, which recently won organic certification from the Montana Department of Agriculture.

Helena is lucky to have such a large locally-owned market as the Real Food Store, organic or not. With few exceptions, it features some of the best of Montana-made foods, from Willy D’s Sweet Hot Mustard to McAlpine Ranch Pork. Real Foods boasts a wall of nearly one hundred different spices in bulk (including several strengths of chili powder and curry), and the best sausage selection I’ve seen anywhere: from chorizo to merguez to bratwurst to hot italian turkey sausage (which we ate last night), their butcher has a way with the spice rack and meat grinder. These cheese selection at Real Foods beats Safeway and Albertson’s. Their deli and hot food bar serves up organic turkey sandwiches and shepard’s pie, as well as pizzas baked on nutty whole wheat crusts. And, true to their base constituency, they peddle a couple dozen granolas by bulk.

All that, combined with long business hours and prices that often meet the national chains (and beat them during their regular and widespread sales), proves that a home-grown grocery store like Real Foods can not just keep up with the big boys, but thrive.

Wheat Montana, a vertically integrated seed-to-sandwich grain operation based in Three Forks, is a “Buy Montana” success story. We always stop there on drives between Helena and Bozeman for a sweet roll or sandwich and to top off the gas tank, then drive past the fields that fed us along Highway 287. Their bread selection has something for everyone: Multi-Grain, High Fiber, Low Carb, and even No Wheat.

James Larcombe reports in the Tribune that the proprietors, the Folkvord family, shared some of the secrets of their success in Great Falls recently. One of the secrets is distribution and marketing through mega-corporations:

Wheat Montana is working on a deal that could bring Starbucks products to its retail deli operations. A trial run in a Kalispell operation boosted sales by 40 percent, Folkvord said.

The small Montana company also has found success in working with Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer. In fact, about 40 percent of the company’s bread sales take place in Wal-Mart.

“They actually found us,” Folkvord said. “They are always interested in regional products.”

The Three Forks man traveled to Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., to make a presentation to corporate officials. The meeting went well, with Wal-Mart simply asking Wheat Montana to price its products as low as possible.

“These guys welcomed us in, without any slotting fees or upfront money,” Folkvord said, noting the Wheat Montana’s allotment of space on Wal-Mart shelves has grown. “They’ve been very easy for us to deal with.”

Wheat Montana also learned the value of lean operations and reducing overhead from Wal-Mart. Controlling costs helped the company weather a significant sales slowdown in 2001, which came after a boom in flour sales apparently driven by Y2K millennium concerns.

I would rather see Wheat Montana partnering with homegrown businesses, selling Montana Maid coffee and distributing bread through the Real Food Store. But love them or hate them, a small business can learn a lot from Starbucks and Wal-Mart. If some of that discipline and know-how helps Wheat Montana grow profits and jobs here, then is a deal with these corporate devils really so bad? We’ll see.

Thanks to Ed for the kind mention on his blog, which is as close to big media as we may ever get. Close observers notice from his Sleeping Giant Brewing Co. hat that Ed’s a crypto-Helenan.

Speaking of beer, Ed drew my attention to the brewing feud between a St. Louis liquor distributor and Yellowstone Valley Brewing Co. When I lived in Billings, some friends and I dropped by George and Jay’s unassuming warehouse brewery–back when they were still building their taphouse bar–and they treated us to a short tour and brewing lesson. These are excellent Montana microbrewers who view beer as a celebration of local ingredients:

Milled under the Cretaceous Rims of the Eagle Sandstone – A paleo beach in Montana!
Brewed from waters of the Yellowstone River – the last free and wild river.
Fermented in the shadows of the majestic Breartooth Mountains.

Who doesn’t love a poetic geochemist brewer?

Well the David Sherman Corporation, purveyors of Everclear grain alcohol and Rebel Yell whiskey, does not share George and Jay’s appreciation for the unique Yellowstone river landscape. According to David Sherman, Yellowstone Bourbon was developed in 1854 by Kentuckian J.B. Dant; it’s name came from one of Dant’s salesmen who visited Yellowstone Park in its inaugural year of 1872: “He had the idea that if the name Yellowstone were put on a bottle of good whiskey, chances were good that the folks out West would buy it, and since the park was receiving publicity, the name would stick in everybody’s mind.” I can’t tell if the “folks out West” buy much Yellowstone Bourbon, and I haven’t seen it in many bars here.

Trademark law is more complicated than it should be because each case depends on a particular court’s view of what may or may not confuse consumers, which is hard to predict. Unfortunately, this uncertainty drives many bigger firms to threaten smaller ones, because judges see a plaintiff’s diligence in enforcing a trademark as evidence of the brand’s value. While the article notes several examples of Montanans successfully standing their intangible ground (Montana Knits of Dillon beat Claude Montana, and the Golden Nugget of Troy beat Las Vegas’s Golden Nugget), the costs of a trademark infringement lawsuit often force the little guy to give up his brand. In the end the dynamics of trademark law probably lead to overprotection of brand names in circumstances when no reasonable consumer would be confused.

If Yellowstone Brewing can’t afford to defend the lawsuit, it would be nice to see someone take up their cause pro bono, or for a public interest group or law school clinic to jump in. That may sound strange, but clear and evenhanded enforcement of intellectual property law benefits the public as much as robust real property law; there are all sorts of nonprofit conservation groups that champion the property rights of the small landowner–how about the intellectual property rights of the small brandowner?

We knew when we found piles of deer scat in our small fenced yard that we would have trouble eating food from our garden before the deer did. I saw a family of three deer on the way to the supermarket a while ago. And last week, as I walked home from work, two fully grown does stared me down from the middle of the sidewalk, one block from our house in the middle of Helena.

According to a recent New York Times article (reg. req.), there are 50 times more deer in America–25 to 30 million of them–than there were a century ago:

Across the country, deer cause 1.5 million traffic accidents, $1.1 billion in vehicle damage and 150 deaths a year, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, in Arlington, Va. The highest populations occur where guns are banned.

“Back in the early 1970’s, Princeton banned the discharge of firearms, and deer-car collisions went up 600 percent,” said Susan Martka, a wildlife biologist for New Jersey’s Division of Fish and Wildlife.

Now the gardeners are getting even–they’re hiring sharpshooters and bowhunters to protect their greens. Do they make gardening aprons in blaze orange?

A few months ago some friends took us on a drive out of town to the shores of Hauser Lake on the Missouri. The destination was a classic Montana roadhouse, and in the late winter dark beyond the bar service lights illuminated pleasure boat docks. We blew through the smoke and the din of video poker machines and entered a glassed door to a small sanctuary on the north end of the building. This place had a story behind it: Cody Smith, a young Californian who was introduced to the restaurant business at his uncle’s place in the Madison Valley, and later came to the Lakeside Resort for a year-round clientele.

The timbered walls gave way to a quiet whitewashed gallery of food-themed prints, and about eight tables topped with linen. A pleasant server presented us with our table, and a short menu and wine list. The selection of entrees were what you might find at the kind of supper club you’d expect on the county road we took–chicken, salmon, lamb–but the preparations were inspired, eclectic, even delicate. I can just remember the calamari, and salmon in broth (tomato?). I also remember looking forward to exploring the rest of the menu in future visits, maybe when summer came around and the lakeside deck at the end of the dining room opened.

But before I made it back to Hauser Lake, Smith left and the Lakeside returned to a tavern. I wasn’t too surprised, since it was all so unlikely to begin with: an inventive and ambitious chef, dedicated to great ingredients and paired with a room with a view, serving year-round at a summer season lakeside bar fifteen minutes outside of Helena. Still, at a roadhouse on some county road far from the resort towns, another Cody Smith will come along. Let me know if you find him.

Some friends and former colleagues came out from New York last week. I have tried to continue in my role as Montana evangelist for them when they visit, imploring them to give up yet another weekend at the office to stay here an extra day or two and visit Glacier, Chico, or at least give up the Holiday Inn’s broadband internet access long enough to stay at the Sanders or the Barrister. So I was eager to introduce them to the Tap Room; though its 7pm closing hour may be impractical for the business traveller, the beer and the crowd more than compensates. They loved it, and after last call we headed to the parking lot to plan our next move.

Earlier, I had introduced them to growlers, though when we brought our two growlers in for a refill they only had one lighter beer (not “light beer”, just something other than a stout, porter, or scottish ale), a bitter. By the time we left they had run out of that beer, and could only offer us the dark stuff for our growlers–we took a jug of scottish ale, but passed on the rest and left with an empty jug. But as we stood there in the parking lot with the forlorn empty growler, Sarah from the Tap Room ran out to catch me, apologized for running out of the bitter, and offered me another growler filled earlier with a pale ale–perfect! She had a deal. The thing was, she wouldn’t let me pay for it.

That’s right, someone from a bar chased after me to offer us a jug of free beer.

The New Yorkers stood speechless for one rare moment, wondering again why they work eighty-hour weeks to live in apartments smaller than our kitchen.

The growler isn’t really a drink, it’s a vessel for a drink, and that drink is freshly brewed beer. Growlers have been around for more than a century, when they were tin cans or pitchers. Though it is unclear where the word originated, I like this explanation:

[A]n early reference, in the Trenton Times for 20 June 1883 said “It is called the growler because it provokes so much trouble in the scramble after beer”.

At the turn of the last century, the growler was associated in tenements of New York with the unsavory practice of sending boys to fetch beer for men who were either too industrious, lazy, or mindful of their reputations to enter a bar themselves. Jacob Riis described the practice in his How the Other Half Lives:

I doubt if one child in a thousand, who brings his growler to be filled at the average New York bar, is sent away empty-handed, if able to pay for what he wants. I once followed a little boy, who shivered in bare feet on a cold November night so that he seemed in danger of smashing his pitcher on the icy pavement, into a Mulberry Street saloon where just such a sign hung on the wall, and forbade the barkeeper to serve the boy. The man was as astonished at my interference as if I had told him to shut up his shop and go home, which in fact I might have done with as good a right, for it was after 1 A.M., the legal closing hour. He was mighty indignant too, and told me roughly to go away and mind my business, while he filled the pitcher. The law prohibiting the selling of beer to minors is about as much respected in the tenement-house districts as the ordinance against swearing.

We’ve been to a few Mulberry Street saloons (you occasionally see our favorite, which sat around the corner from Autumn’s apartment, on the Sopranos), but growlers are harder to find there. While there is one small brewery in New York that brews beer worth taking home with you–today, most of New York’s breweries are chain restaurant tourist gimmicks–that brewery lies in the far reaches of Brooklyn, so I never had the opportunity to fill a growler with Brooklyn Lager.

Growlers more common in Montana’s local breweries. They are now glass jugs, not tin cans, and they can keep beer drinkable for up to two weeks–though I’ve never owned a half gallon of beer that long, and once you open a growler you’ve got only a day or two to get to the bottom of it. Take home a growler of Montana beer and a friend or two, and that won’t be a problem.

47 East Broadway
Butte, Montana

There’s a website called Chowhound that inspired me to write about good local food on the internet. The Uptown Cafe in Butte is the most famous restaurant in Montana, Chowhound-wise. Autumn and I came through Butte the Saturday before St. Patrick’s Day, and hoped to find some pre-parade revelry. But Butte was quiet that night, so we passed the bars and dropped into the Uptown.

The Uptown cooks creative, upscale take on traditional Montana supper club cuisine. (While I have heard that they pride themselves on seasonal entrees, the special was the same (delicious) maple and whiskey pork loin I enjoyed in the fall a couple of years ago.) You can start with a cocktail, wine from a short list of standards, or local or domestic beers, and they are all about as inexpensive as you’ll find in a restaurant this good. While the interior is simple and neutral, the walls displayed several large-formate black and white WPA-ere photographs of Butte, on loan from the Montana Historical Society.

The menu offers several lavish steak and seafood options, and we dove right in with Beef Wellington and Coquilles St. Jacques (scallops backed in a gruyere white sauce). But remember the supper club theme: first you have a bowl of cheddar soup or a salad, then cheese-breaded “clams maison” on the half-shell, then a side of undistinguished linguine, and then your main course. Had we been hauling ore all day, we might have still been hungry after these opening courses (and we didn’t even have appetizers), but by the time the entrees came, we felt defeated. All of the entrees should be big enough to stand on their own without the supper club-style excess. Still we plowed through, and the Beef Wellington managed to contain a tender filet inside the flaky pastry, although the brown gravy was more of a reduction that I could have used more of. Autumn’s scallops were small, and baked in a savory but not smooth gruyere sauce; between the two of us we could only finish half the dish, but it would have made a tasty appetizer as a smaller portion.

Dessert was out of the question, though their cheesecake varieties sounded just as over-the-top as the rest of the meal. We’d hate to miss out on one of the other rich entrees, so next time, we’ll just waive the first three courses in hopes of making it to the cheesecake.

529 South Higgins
Missoula, MT

The University of Montana’s steady influx of visitors favors Missoula restaurants, and makes the city a home of eclectic, quality cuisine. For our first trip to Missoula, we asked our Grizzly graduate friends for places where we could treat ourselves before my legal ethics exam. Scotty’s, settled among several other popular restaurants in a row of turn-of-the-century storefronts, made everyone’s list.

A dramatic glass-walled entrance greeted us, but the architecture soon gave way to a cozy bar and a room next door with stylish, comfortable banquettes. Our servers were as helpful as we have had anywhere, prompt with an explanation of the specials, and knowledgable about ingredients and the wines. The maitre d’ even offered us a halibut special he had tried, even though the kitchen was saving it for a later seating. The menu was impressive for a small bistro, with a mix of standard steak and fish dishes, along with the kind of fusion and vegetarian dishes you expect to find in a college town. Every item emphasized fresh, often organic, ingredients, and the wine list focused on smaller American wineries.

We ordered a representative meal, me with coq au vin, and Autumn with a mediterranean chicken dish. First we shared a slice of coarse country pate, seasoned enough so we didn’t miss the mustard. The coq au vin was a comforting classic: thick, smoky mushroom gravy on top, and pleasantly lumpy garlic mashed potatoes. My only complaint was the rooster (chicken?) itself: more skin and bones than meat. Maybe I got the leftovers when they prepared Autumn’s boneless grilled chicken breast with an herb rub. We didn’t get a chance to share much after filling up on our own dishes, but Autumn had no complaints.

I had to get a little more ethics cramming in, and we were too full for dessert, so we had to pass up the cheesecake. But we hope to get back to Missoula enough to work our way through more of the menu.