Montana
18 April 2024
Everyone knows about Tapas, snacky little bits and bobs that every bar in Spain serves along with drinks. Tapas is why I don’t think I’ve ever seen a catatonically pissed Spaniard as they won’t drink unless they can eat at the same time. In the North Western corner of Spain, they have Pintxos, essentially the same thing but don’t try telling this to a Basque.
I wasn’t expecting to find either in Missoula and wasn’t looking. It kind of found me as I was wandering to where the bartender of the Tamarack Brewing Company had recommended for dinner.
Bar Plata advertises itself to the world as serving Pintxos. It seems a brave commercial move, given the town it’s in is somewhere in middle-America, an area not famed for its cosmopolitan tastes. There is a long narrow bar, with a counter fashioned from edgy, polished concrete, replica Tolix stools and is true to its Bilbao and Barcelona influences.
The staples are all here but with a New American gloss. Their Pan con Tomate features a Miso butter and tomatoes made into a rich jam. The Chouriço à Bombeiro, is locally made and finished off flambé style, in front of me. They have a special earthenware dish that suspends the sausage so the flames can lap around it, crisping the skin until the spirit burns off, leaving it sizzling. Too hot to eat but too delicious not to.
Best - and most surprising of all - canned, pickled scallops in a Galician sauce. They may look like the wizened gonads of some poor beast that has surrendered its life for a 4th Form Biology lesson, but they taste sensational. The Cantabrian coast, garlic, paprika & olive oil in a can. Bliss. I mop up the remains with more bread and wash them down with an orange wine from Washington State.
The Crochettas were very OK but no more. Only the Datiles Rellenos (dates stuffed with bacon and blue, Cabrales cheese) were a bit below par and should be more correctly called Datiles Los Alamos. They’d effectively been nuked and had the panicked whiff of an authentic, Iberian-style kitchen cock-up about them. They apologised and took them off the bill even though I wolfed them down regardless.
Open this place on Frith Street in London’s Soho on a Monday morning and the local New Media Slags, the forty and fifty-something men dressed in expensive scruff they can’t quite get away with, would be forming a disorderly queue by lunchtime, trilling to each other about how they heard about it first.
Three men lurch into the bar, mid-way through a cocktail-tasting marathon. One is a Cyber Security specialist, one a Sommelier, the other an Accountant. They are going at the drinks like students, but then again, they almost are as all three are just twenty-eight years old.
Despite the industrial quantity of booze they are hoovering up, they are excellent company. Informed, articulate and funny, they seem much older and wiser than their years.
All live in Missoula having studied here and chose to stay. It’s America’s best-kept secret, they say. Not hugely expensive and so they’re all buying their own houses. One even has a boat. All but the sommelier work remotely and their skills are in such demand, they can dictate terms and are unlikely ever to demean themselves by working in an office.
Missoula has great restaurants, a vibrant live-music scene, skiing nearbyish (a couple of hours) for winter day-trips and hunting and fishing in the summer months. It also has the Lolo Pass and other epic roads on its doorstep. I can understand why they want to keep it quiet but the word, apparently, is out…
19 April 2024
Next morning, the bike reluctantly coughs its way into life for the third morning in a row. To compound matters, the zip of my jacket has broken completely.
Modern motorcycles are mysterious beasts and, without the correct diagnostic tools, beyond the capabilities of an enthusiastic amateur to fix. And as I don’t fancy a seventy-mile-an-hour wind-chill effect, combined with the minus 4 degrees ambient temperature on my delicate chest, I seek out the services of BMW Big Canyon of Missoula for some running repairs.
A replacement jacket is easy enough to source and they give some helpful pointers about the starting problem: connect the booster pack I bought along in case of a flat-battery. If it starts properly, the battery is on the way out. This is what they would expect, given it’s never been changed and the bike is now six-years old.
Late, but sorted, I finally get on the way to Livingston, 230 miles to the east and understand why Montana is called Montana. Everywhere you look, there are mountains and big ones at that, getting ever more impressive as Yellowstone hoves into view on my right.
Livingston is on the route for one reason only. The late, great Anthony Bourdain made one of his travelogue TV programs, Parts Unknown, in Butte & Livingston. Careening from bar to bar, restaurant to restaurant, brimming with avuncular charm, he seemed to be having a ball.
As we now know, his life could not have been the unalloyed joy it appeared to be as he chose to end it in 2018, in a hotel in the Alsace region of France, while making Parts Unknown in Strasbourg.
But his portrayal of Livingston is spot on. The rib-eye at the Mint Bar & Grill has the open-range, grass-fed texture, juiced with melted fat, that only USDA beef seems to deliver. Their Bullet Whisky-based Old Fashioned as a precursor is a force to be reckoned with.
Later, at the Murray Bar, in the historic hotel of the same name, a five-piece alt-country band has a Friday residency. Featuring acoustic guitar, fiddle, double-bass, drums and dobro (that odd thing played sat down that makes the sweetest guitar sound imaginable; David Gilmour of Pink Floyd uses one frequently), they captivate a bar packed with locals and visitors.
Five women from Orange County, south of LA, are here for a Bachelorette Party. They are a bit naughty, in cowboy hats, jeans, boots and clearly out for a good time but super well-mannered. Probably because they think I sound like King Charles III. I sense it could get messy for them later.
Montana might be a bit of a backwater for us Europeans, but mix it in with Wine Country Washington and the incomparable Lolo Pass, it starts to make a lot of sense for a more focussed trip. Maybe two weeks, incorporating the mountainous areas around Banff and Calgary I had to abandon because of weather.
