Traveling Feast

Polson, MT: A tip from a friend in Spokane sent me out Highway 35 to hook up along the east side of Flathead Lake.  The mission?  Taste the smoked Prime Rib at the East Shore Smoke House.  It was out of my way, but the friend in question has opened and managed more restaurants than some people will visit in their lives.  If he suggests a place, I’m willing to go out of my way.

The low-slung Smoke House now looks nothing like the pale blue building that used to house a German restaurant before Jim Bassett bought the property.  “I don’t think there is a single thing in the restaurant that you can see that we haven’t redone,” Jim says with a grin.  “I didn’t intend to do this much.  Originally I planned to just open a hambuger joint.”

I, for one, am delighted Jim got carried away.  The restaurant… both inside and out… invites you to forget what is beyond the gate and settle in for a meal in a space designed to be both visually intriguing and down-home comfortable.

There is bar and dining area outside and both are completely enclosed with tall log slab fences.  The eating area offers welcome shade in the summer – much of it from trees and bushes carefully built around rather than removed.  In fact, if you spend any time looking around before you dive into the menu, you’ll notice careful details and quality everywhere.  The corrugated metal up in the eves was salvaged locally with Jim and his family digging much of it out of the ground where it was buried.  And Jim designed and built just about every light fixture in the restaurant.

In addition to using this steer skull, he created another wall fixture using the old boiler door from the Lake City Home Bakery in Polson.  Next time I come I might ask to sit inside near said boiler fixture for reasons of pure nostalgia.  I worked as a short-order cook at the bakery during high school, and occasionally had to venture down in the basement near the old boiler for supplies.

Yet all the architectural love in the world can’t keep a restaurant open if the food is forgettable.  Thankfully, Jim and his staff seem to know this.

Bassett did his homework for the barbecue, and Chef J.R. Daniels is turning out some great, straightforward food that begs for a cult following.  Three days out and I’m already wishing I’d smuggled out several bottles of the their house-made rum barbecue sauce.  It provides a sweet-savory counterpoint to the each of the meats I tried.  This included their (1) chicken (2) chopped pork and (3) St. Louis style ribs as well as (4) their smoked Prime Rib.  All four were cooked perfectly, still moist, and touched with a distinctive smoky tang.

The prime rib sandwich ($13.95) comes with whipped cream horseradish sauce, but the barbecue sauce was close enough to addictive that I felt compelled to slather it on the Prime Rib as well as on the chopped pork and St. Louis style rib.

The spot probably isn’t the place to host a convention for vegetarians, but feel free to drag along a couple friends who are avoiding charred beast.  There are several good options absent the meat even if the most compelling culinary reasons to show up come out of the smoker.  I plan to try the brisket next time, convince someone with me to order the smoked Prime Rib so I can steal a bite or two, and then I plan to turn my attention to the generous number of microbrews offered on tap.

By the time I reach St. Regis (Exit 33 coming down off of Lookout Pass in Montana) I’m usually hungry.  The Travel Center promises fudge, ice cream, slot machines, a full-service restaurant with the word “huckleberry” in the title, and a massive trout tank in the shape of a moat that you can actually crawl inside.  It also offers almost as much travel kitsch as the 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar a few miles back up the road.

It is true that the St. Regis Travel Center can’t match the 50,000 Silver Dollar Bar in the area of medieval swords and black ops knives.  Yet unless you want a replica of Excalibur in the trunk or a Chinese knock-off of a Navy Seal blade under your car seat, I recommend stopping in St. Regis.

Particularly if your destination is the Flathead, actually leaving the freeway at Exit 33 feels like real progress rather than just caving into the tourist trap pressure of a bar surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of silver dollars with a life-sized carving of an Indian chief guarding the door.

St. Regis is the place to stop, but where to eat has never been settled to my satisfaction.  The seasonal trailer hocking fresh Montana cherries at highway robbery prices is an viable option.  The Travel Center restaurant isn’t.

I still haven’t mustered the courage to go into the restaurant in the center.  The word “berry” in the title combined with a cave-like entrance is part of it.  Bad experiences at similar places next to other exits in other states is also a factor.  Then there is the urgency to keep moving.  Junk food from the racks near the register might not be heart-healthy or wholesome, but it can be eaten in the car.

Yet there is something more that has kept me out of the restaurant all these years.  For absolutely no rational reason I can identify, the place feels sinister.  I may be missing the best buffalo meatloaf on the planet cooked by some rising truck-stop star who will win Top Chef. But if I am, you’ll have to tell me because the place makes me nervous.

This has presented a problem in the hunger-for-hot-food department until now.

Now another option at Exit 33 takes credit cards.  Frosty’s Drive In isn’t new, but for years they’ve been a cash only spot.

No longer.  They take credit, and offer at least the pretense of fast food with their drive-up window.  Realistically you probably want to park and walk in.  Frosty’s isn’t the place for your burger in a minute or two.  Try six.  Or ten.

Neither is it the spot for a culinary revelation.  You can, with confidence, skip the banana shake.  The handmade sign made me hope for actual banana.  Instead, the syrup they use produces a color not found in nature and a taste to match. But the Mushroom Burger was a surprise in the other direction.

It has personality.  The beef appears to be food service standard, but the bun is fresh, grilled slightly, and comes with a smear of special sauce.  They include a cheese product without advertising it on the menu and the cook takes the time to slap the canned mushrooms on the grill.  She is also generous with the hand-torn lettuce.

Frosty’s isn’t In-N-Out, Fatburger, or Shake Shack, but it does give me a place to stop when I’m hungry in St. Regis and not in the mood for kitsch and travel center sinister.  I count this as progress.

People in the know will travel for hundreds of miles for a pizza at Moose’s Saloon.

Is it because you can’t get a better pizza closer to home?  Probably not.

I’ve tasted better pizzas all around the country.  But I still love Moose’s.

Maybe it is the sawdust on the floor.  Or the thick frosty goblets for beer (or soda).  Or the fact that most of the tables and booths set back from the bar exist in almost absolute dark.

The decades of names carved into the tables, walls, beams, and other wooden surfaces provide both character and reading material while you wait.  I recommend a flashlight to ease your eye strain if you go looking for the name I carved into the beam above booth seven or eight during a bachelor’s party seventeen years ago, but squinting at the walls and table top is more than adequate for the casual student of saloon patrons with pen knives.

Maybe I keep returning because of the massive bag of peanuts still in their shells behind the bar that the bartender serves up in paper french fry baskets.  I know I love the expectation you to throw the shells on the floor, and should note that this fact alone moved Moose’s to the top of the list of my twin boys’ favorite restaurants in the known universe.

And the pizza… competent bar pies with fairly standard toppings.  It probably won’t put the kitchen up for a James Beard award, but it does stick in your memory as satisfying food.

No…  the truth is that Moose’s is worth the pilgrimage to Kalispell Montana not for any one reason alone but because of the rare combination of many.  I’ll most likely be back in a booth the next time I visit the Flathead and the next and the next.  I may even let Peter order shrimp out of can on one half of one pie again.  This most definitely is not for any defensible culinary reason, but simply because it has turned into something of a tradition and what pilgrimage doesn’t rest on sacred tradition… even if that is something as curious as shrimp in a can.

If you have a Moose’s story, please share.  Or if you have a place that has inspired a culinary pilgrimage for you, do tell.

Mr Cheese, Mr Shrimp, and Mr Canadian Bacon