![]() ![]() ![]() She fills out her menu with smartly composed salads and, because the locals ask for it, several meat dishes - maybe a Montana sirloin steak with roasted potatoes or leg of lamb with Carolina gold rice and salsa verde. Carina Lee Lampkin would find success with her delicate pastas and crackery-crusted pizzas in just about any city in the nation. Make reservations early for Blackbird Kitchen. I’ll say upfront that I easily grasped Bozeman’s reputation: If you travel to eat, it had the best food by far of the towns I visited (and also a convenient airport). If you travel to eat, Bozeman had the best food by far of the towns I visited ![]() In a land whose climate is unforgiving for much of the year, they’ve become snugly woven into the structure of local lives. I didn’t get the feeling that any of these restaurants would be closing their doors soon. Some have been around for a few years, a lot of them for decades. Each cafe and joint and finer-dining stalwart revealed a facet of their town’s culture. Even more than a sense of place (much of the food falls within the broadly appealing spectrum of Americana), these businesses reflect a sense of community. Instead, I quickly learned to embrace the restaurants that thrive in Montana as features of the landscape. I knew from research ahead of time not to sweep through expecting undiscovered gems or some as-yet-unreported culinary movement out of the Northwest Rockies. I was genuinely curious: What would the eating establishments be like in a state whose residents total less than the population of Dallas, Texas? It seemed appropriate at some point this year to swerve - to visit a remote corner of the nation, some place out of reach from the buzzing moment in popular restaurant culture. I’m on the road three weeks out of the month, mostly in major or up-and-coming cities, chronicling what’s essential and what’s trending in dining scenes around the country. People come to explore Glacier National Park and the northern edge of Yellowstone, to hunt or ski, to absorb the immensity of the American West and its prairies, rivers, and peaks. Montana, the fourth largest state in the U.S., has a populace of 1.02 million and receives over ten times that number in visitors annually. ![]()
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