Hard Times Come Again No More Yo Yo Ma
It would make for a pretty lame T-shirt: "I went to Bozeman, and didn't once prepare human foot on a hiking trail." On a recent visit, I avoided this mortifying distinction by scrambling up Drinking Horse Mountain Trail, a two-mile loop that starts in town. But there is and so much going on in the paved parts of this idyllic town that you could hands become days without finding time to take in the natural splendor that surrounds it, which includes a one-half-dozen mount ranges and a niggling park called Yellowstone.
I wanted to become to Bozeman considering I'd spent a decade falling in dear with—and dreaming of relocating to—Large Sky Country, as it's known. I had recently been hired to teach writing at the University of Montana in Missoula, the state's laid-back alternative to what Missoulians run into as Bozeman's glitz.
But I felt like I'd ended up with the wrong partner. Despite having virtually twice Bozeman's population, Missoula seemed to vibrate with one-half the energy. Many Montanans prefer that. But I was moving from New York City, and it was Bozeman that offered the singular satisfaction of enjoying a world-class meal on the manner from one barren rock face up to some other.
The Yellowstone River winds through Paradise Valley, due south of Livingston. | Credit: Matthew Johnson
Winter comes early to Bozeman, which sits at an top of about a mile, and my visit last October coincided with the surface area's final week of autumn. Information technology was a pageant: the paper birches and Ohio buckeyes blazed with such fire against the tawny humps of the Bridger Mountains, a subrange of the Rockies, that I had to shield my eyes. Bozeman is all of xx square miles, and wherever you look, you lot run across peaks.
Simply I was headed downtown: 15 blocks with hardly a chain store in sight. Bozeman has never lacked lodging with personality. Several years agone, the Element past Westin, near Primary Street, had been good plenty not only for my wife, simply the members of Osculation. (You lot haven't lived until you've chatted upwards Buss over continental breakfast.)
On this trip, I was staying at the newly opened Kimpton Armory Hotel, a ix-story reinvention of a National Guard regiment's headquarters that started almost a decade agone, when the head of a Bozeman-based take chances-travel visitor saved the structure from the wrecking ball.
Bozeman offered the singular satisfaction of enjoying a globe-class meal on the mode from one arid rock confront to some other.
The Arsenal is the latest mark of Bozeman's transition from "sleepy cow town" to a budding urban center with sashimi confined and cocktail lounges that could concord their own against San Francisco'south and Seattle's. My Bozeman acquaintances maintain that this hasn't changed the soul of the place: people yet say hullo on the street, they insist, and businesses funnel profits dorsum into the community.
Still, I wondered whether the arrival of another global hospitality brand—not to mention all the transplants who relocated here during the pandemic—could enrich Bozeman without changing the best things almost it.
From left: Celeriac ravioli with chimichurri-butter sauce at Little Star Diner; the Murray Hotel, in Livingston. | Credit: Matthew Johnson
Here'due south a test for whether a place has gotten too big too quickly: Do they honk at you if you're going downwardly Main Street at 10 miles an hour?
I was riding along with Jasmine Lilly, a self-described "creative hummingbird" who had offered to give me a tour of a town she's called home for 27 years. She was being generous with her time: later that morning, she had her very starting time appointment in the bridal shop she had just opened on the due east side of downtown every bit the natural extension of her wedding-planning business organization.
Over the past decade, passionate locals have revitalized Bozeman's commercial districts, and to drive around town with Lilly is to realize that many of the nearly passionate are millennials. In the Mill Commune, in northeast Bozeman, Lilly'due south friend Shaw Thompson has transformed an onetime grain manufacturing plant into the Misco Mill Gallery, a furniture workshop, fine art gallery, and vacation-rental apartment.
A block abroad, her friend Thompson Limanek runs Green Seam Designs, a furniture maker and high-terminate upholsterer that takes eco-consciousness very seriously and blueprint very playfully (call up 20-foot-broad sheepskin headboards). Lilly had a pivotal function in the transformation: in 2015, she cofounded the Bozeman Flea, which became an incubator for start-ups.
"Information technology'south a very entrepreneurial community," she said, adding that this quality may exist a reflection of the times in which her generation grew upward. "In that location weren't jobs lined up for us." Only even as rents have risen steeply, for Lilly there is no question of going elsewhere. "I've invested my life here," she said.
From left: Dennae Tirrell, founder of design collective Biome Slow Craft; pizza preparations at Blackbird. | Credit: Matthew Johnson
Lilly had to leave for her engagement, but not earlier she pointed out the Ugly Onion, a mobile wood-fired pizza popular-up that had scored perhaps the nearly prized gastronomic real estate in all of Bozeman, between Wild Crumb, a bakery, and Treeline Coffee Roasters, which serve the town'due south best pastries and coffee, respectively. "The Onion's pizza is as good every bit Blackbird'due south," Lilly said, "and then yous know that's saying something." Blackbird is the Chez Panisse of Bozeman's reinvention. Since 2009, information technology has been serving flawless Italian-inflected American nutrient on Main Street.
Like whatsoever small boondocks, Bozeman is a place of serendipities. Like few pocket-size towns, at that place is sometimes besides much to do to be able to take reward of all of them.
Blackbird shows no age, only Bozeman'south development means that you lot tin can now find a high-quality meal in more than ane eatery in town. Afterwards, I made my fashion to the nigh persuasive contender for Blackbird'southward mantle: Niggling Star Diner, opened a block off Main Street (just across from Lilly'due south bridal shop) in 2017 by hubby-and-wife team Charley Graham and Lauren Reich. Graham cooked at Blackbird for five years, only in subtle means he was heading in his own direction: Kamut noodles with Bolognese sauce, parsley, and aged sheep-milk cheese; fried light-green tomatoes with spicy grilled peppers, chimichurri mayo, feta, and cilantro. The latter, followed by a Kamut-noodle soup and rutabaga ravioli in butter sauce, set this traveler right on what had turned into a rainy day.
Kamut, otherwise known equally khorasan wheat, is a Montana mainstay, cheers to a pioneering family that seized on the grain'southward health benefits thirty years ago and at present farms 85,000 acres of it organically. Its ubiquity on Graham's menu tells you how comprehensively locavore he aims to be in his sourcing. Reich grows about all the eatery's summer vegetables on an 11-acre plot in the Gallatin Valley—no small achievement at 4,800 feet to a higher place sea level.
"It's fun to conceptualize how season works," Graham said. "But more and more I'm interested in limiting my cooking to ingredients that are from here. There are enough to make food that'south unique."
From left: Drinking Horse Mountain Trail, in Bozeman; Carry Canyon Trail, only exterior Bozeman. | Credit: Matthew Johnson
Like any small town, Bozeman is a place of serendipities. Like few modest towns, there is sometimes too much to do to be able to have advantage of all of them. 1 afternoon, I looked in on the Emerson Center for the Arts & Culture, a onetime elementary school that has been converted into artists' studios and performance spaces. In the beginning room I walked into, I chatted with the painter LeeAnn Ramey, who asked whether I wanted to bring together her at a happy hour upstairs, where a musician with the improbable name Thomas Thomas was going to rehearse a Brahms concerto while his supporters from other Emerson studios availed themselves of shrimp and champagne. Ramey's friend Carrie Lawrence was going to join, too. Lawrence, it turned out, is one of the owners of the Kimpton Arsenal.
I was eager to come across her, non least because the hotel had quickly become a sanctuary as I dashed from one place in boondocks to the next. The Armory is spiffy and new, but novelty is just gloss if it lacks the Arsenal's subtlety and restraint.
In addition to being a welcome upscale lodging suggestion in Montana—a four-to-five-star hotel in a state of three-stars and resorts—it felt like a place for grown-ups, with works by 13 local artists hanging around the hotel, including a massive painting depicting the Montana State University band (which used to do in the basement of the Arsenal) by the painter Hannah Uhde, a sixth-generation Montanan. Information technology's prominently displayed in the hotel'south music hall.
From left: The Farmer'due south Daughters Café at the RSVP Hotel; Dash Rodman, co-owner of Map Brewing. | Credit: Matthew Johnson
But I was due at Map Brewing, on the northward border of town. I was craving a Märzen, the fizzier, crisper German language version of an American Oktoberfest beer, and I wanted to run across Nuance Rodman, a co-owner. There are a dozen breweries in Bozeman alone. In the five years since opening, Map has go the state'south largest self-distributing brewery and i of its busiest taprooms. It was easy to spot Rodman—he stopped shaving his beard when he stopped working for someone else, and its length today is a testament to Map's success.
Rodman told me that Map ended up throwing a community fundraiser on its first day as a business concern. "Only it pays dividends," he said, cradling an IPA. "Over 20 years in boondocks, I've built relationships. We just had a raffle because of the wildfires—nosotros raised $28,000 in a week. I called people and said: 'Twenty-9 houses were lost, people's lives were turned upside down.' And people were sending me $x,000 worth of product to raffle off. At that place's so much of that."
He went on: "When I got here in 1998, information technology was all Carhartts and fleece. At present you've got Audis and Porsches cruising downward Main Street, and construction all over the identify." Just Rodman is unfazed by the influx. "The underlying community feeling is potent. I recall people are moving here because of what it is, not because of something they want to plough it into."
He added: "The backcountry is ours. The trailhead may be decorated, but 1 mile in, you're not seeing anyone." Even that trailhead is inappreciably tame country—I saw a black behave cavorting in Bridger Creek, at the base of operations of Drinking Horse Mountain, when I came downwardly.
What Map does is as well representative of other businesses in town. 2 days a week, Feast Raw Bar sends x percent of its sales to local nonprofits. The pattern commonage Biome Dull Arts and crafts hosts free clothes-mending and repair workshops for kids in the Large Sky Youth Empowerment program. Fork & Spoon, Montana's get-go pay-what-you-wish eatery, brings in chefs to serve things like local-beef stew over cheddar grits. By some counts, Bozeman has the largest number of nonprofits per capita in the country.
"It'southward a hard identify to go out," Lilly had said when we were standing in her shop, eating pears from a tree in her lawn. "There'south so much going on, but what keeps people here is community."
Some Bozemanites do go out—to have dinner in Livingston, 25 miles abroad. Livingston (population vii,000) is to Bozeman as Bozeman is to the balance of the world: the most unexpected of oases. "As we say sometimes, the best restaurants in Bozeman are in Livingston," one local acquaintance told me, mayhap being a trivial unfair to a town where I had but had kimchi fritters and bison carpaccio.
But there'south some other reason people go to Livingston. The dazzler of Paradise Valley, which lies south of the town, transports visitors to a different spiritual plane. The offset time I went, information technology took me near an hour to drive 10 miles because I kept stopping and trying to fit what I was seeing into the viewfinder of a camera: the Gallatin range on one side; the Absaroka range on the other; the Yellowstone River, i of the earth'southward smashing fishing destinations, tracing the valley.
That trip was a pilgrimage. Livingston is domicile to every bit many writers equally ranchers, all living in generally peaceful coexistence. It was ane of those writers—the novelist, poet, and gourmand Jim Harrison—whose books had made me want to go a author myself. Having crossed paths briefly in 2003, when I was working atThe New Yorker, I wrote him in 2008, during a disoriented moment in my writing life, asking what I should do.
That question ended with me driving across the country to drink vodka with Harrison at the bar of the Murray Hotel, which is equally iconic equally information technology is synonymous with Livingston. (Moving picture director Sam Peckinpah lived in that location in the belatedly 1970s and, equally the story goes, would occasionally burn down bullets into the ceiling of his suite.) Harrison and I became acquaintances after that—he brought this kind of lite and hope to the lives of many immature writers.
Harrison died in 2016, and for some years I couldn't quite bring myself to set foot in Livingston, as I didn't know if information technology would make sense without him. But, due to urban flight, tech coin, and the possibility of remote work, things are changing rapidly here—listings in the existent estate office windows now oftentimes showtime at seven figures. I decided to take a mensurate of the identify before information technology became unfamiliar.
Wanting to talk to someone who'd seen all of it, I stopped in at Mustang Fresh Food. Carole Sullivan, the restaurant's proprietor, got her offset in Livingston fine dining 25 years earlier. The painter Russell Chatham, known every bit the godfather of Livingston food and a friend of Harrison'south, sent Sullivan three $100 bills to pay her airfare from Minnesota to come interview for a task at his Livingston Bar & Grille, which is still going stiff.
I asked Sullivan what she idea of the many young faces, many clearly transplants from elsewhere, wandering the streets. Were they violating the spirit of the place in some way? I had been to a brewery slash sushi pub, with a colour scheme that crossed a Greek taverna with a millennial Brooklyn bazaar, and thought I'd felt the basis move a petty as Harrison turned in his grave.
Sullivan gently fix me straight. "The sense of community is as strong as ever, if not more than then," she said. "These young people intendance about where they live, and they don't mind paying taxes for the things they believe in. Nearly i hundred per centum of the reason they came here is the land. And this area needs protection." (Sullivan's religion in the side by side generation is such that in July, after many years of running Mustang, she sold it to new owners. She now advises the county on healthier dining options for schoolchildren.)
Across the street I found perhaps the well-nigh meaningful example, in the dining category, of what Sullivan was referring to: Campione, a new Roman-style restaurant opened by 3 young friends who had converged in Livingston from New York, Australia, and Taiwan. Unfortunately, information technology wouldn't open up for dinner for 2 hours, and I had to get back to Missoula. In the restaurant'south window, they had posted an interview that Jeff Galli, one of the owners, had given to a local paper.
He said he and his partners, Anthony Sferra and Josh Adams, had decided to pale the restaurant'south reputation on the meatballs—"We felt that if nosotros tin can't brand meatballs correct, then nosotros really shouldn't open an Italian restaurant."
One did non take to go inside to tell they had succeeded—the staff must take been prepping them then, because the odor was so rich that it was wafting out into the street. I consoled myself past inhaling as much as I could and remembering a saying that Jim Harrison, who was as well a dedicated wanderer, ancestral to me: dissimilar an eater, the wise traveler always leaves something on his plate.
The Best of Bozeman and Livingston
Where to Stay
Kimpton Armory Hotel: This 122-room property has redefined luxury lodging in Bozeman.; Doubles from $430.
Murray Hotel: A Livingston establishment with perhaps the best restaurant in town, the Second Street Bistro. Doubles from $160.
RSVP Hotel: A old Bozeman motel transformed into a boutique temple of distinctive pattern. Doubles from $160.
Where to Eat & Drink
Blackbird: Casually elegant New American food with an Italian emphasis, in Bozeman. Entrées $14–$26.
Campione: Roman-inspired dishes in Livingston. Entrées $xv–$22.
Devil'south Toboggan: An upscale Bozeman bar with archetype cocktails and small bites.
Feast Raw Bar & Bistro: A festive, seafood focused alternative to Bozeman's downtown dining scene. Entrées $15–$50.
Little Star Diner: This superb Bozeman spot is scrupulous most using only local ingredients. Entrées $xvi–$24.
Map Brewing: This Bozeman institution has a postcard view, a beer selection that ventures far beyond IPAs, and a potent customs spirit.
Ugly Onion: Wood-fired pizza from a Vermont transplant to Bozeman. Pizza $16–$20.
Wild Crumb: This Bozeman bakery's breads, pies, and pastries justify ascent early and braving the line.
What to Practice
Bozeman Symphony: With a new, ascension-star music managing director, Norman Huynh, the symphony specializes in eclectic programs.
Where to Shop
Biome Ho-hum Arts and crafts: Jewelry, textiles, and crafts from Bozeman-area artisans.
A version of this story first appeared in the October 2021 issue of Travel + Leisure under the headline Moving Mountains.
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Source: https://www.travelandleisure.com/trip-ideas/just-back-from-new-york-city-yo-yo-ma
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