Coyote Roadhouse Inn
Ferndale, Montana

         
A stocky guy, white chef’s coat, puffed chef’s hat and jeans picks oregano and thyme from the garden. His braided gray-black hair hangs down his back to his waist. Hands full, he walks past the slashed poles of a teepee. Turns out this was one of his first homes—it’s where he delivered his kids. That’s Gary, Gary Hastings. Master of the bold stroke and mastermind of Coyote Roadhouse Inn and Restaurant.

The Roadhouse is in Montana, not far from Ferndale. Ferndale’s couple of buildings are four miles down the road from Big Fork. To the west of Ferndale, the Roadhouse sits on a wide bend of the Swan River. The Swan Mountains are to the east and the Missions to the west. Mostly, all the Roadhouse is Gary’s work—except the original Billy Moos homestead cabin. There are five rustic cabins perched on the river bank, the restaurant and the rooms over it, and the gardens—dahlias and larkspur, raspberries and lettuce. There are boats, fishing and the best kind of swimming on a hot summer day—in a slow, cool river.

Meeting Gary, his startling blue eyes stare as he takes stock. Makes me wonder if he remembers why I’m standing there. Next thing you know, a twinkle, kind of impish, lights up his face. Gary started cooking young. He’d perfected his chicken cacciatore, about the time the rest of us were figuring out how to put pop tarts in the toaster. By twelve, he was making dinners for his Portland, Oregon neighbors to help out his own family. At sixteen, he caught wind of the prestigious Culinary Institute of America, hitched to Connecticut (the CIA was still in New Haven) and talked his way into school. Worked restaurants to the pay the bills.

Back then, the CIA was staffed by Old World European chefs. They had definite ideas, stern ways and a "whole hog" approach to cooking. From butchering and knife wielding to whipping up pâte ŕ choux and from organizing a kitchen to organizing dinners for hundreds—they aimed their students towards Michelin stars.

The world, not stars, interested Gary. Opened his first restaurant in Mexico’s Yucatan, on Isla Mujeres, across from Cancun before it got to be CANCUN. He got to know the local Mayans They showed him how they cooked and how they used the foods they grew. Gary added Mayan fare to his stock.

Three countries and twelve restaurants later, Gary rode into southwestern Montana and opened Lookout. Gary’s of the ‘if you cook it, they will come’ school—the only way to get to Lookout was by boat. That was in ’76. In ’79 the local hospital pronounced Gary dead on arrival. Crashed on his way home from work. However, neither Gary nor his Maker thought it was quittin’ time just yet. He lost everything, was back to ground zero—learning to walk took years. The story of Gary’s recovery driven by his dogged efforts and stubborn will belongs in one of those "chicken soup" books. By 1982, he was back on one foot—the other propped on a stool—cooking his way to life. "The loss was so tremendous I got my mind set to get back here to re-accomplish what I was doing at the Lookout," Gary explained. Coyote Roadhouse opened in 1986 in Big Fork and a couple of years later moved by the Swan River.

Where Gary traveled, Gary learned. The Roadhouse menu reads like his travelogue, from the Southwest to New Orleans and from Mexico to Italy’s Tuscan countryside. The dining room’s also a trip. It’s two-storied, has Indian rugs and baskets, a bow and ten arrows, fine old fly rods and a 5’ fire-engine-red coffee grinder. A heap of well-seasoned cast iron kettles and fry pans frame the open kitchen where Gary rides rein. "I personally like to make sure I have my fingers in the soup and sauce pots all the time. That’s the only way to insure quality, really," Gary says. Perfectionism—may not be easy to live with, but it sure makes for fine food.

At an oak table with calico napkins, pink roses with little billows of ladies breath and a salt cellar with a tiny silver spoon, I wait for my fried green tomatoes. They ain’t no ordinary fried green tomatoes neither. Coated with Japanese panko bread crumbs—coarser than what we use—they fry up crisp and stay light. Each tomato slice has a blackened shrimp on top and floats in its own little river of ancho chili sauce. That’s the way Gary works, one flavor—like the sweetness in the cooked tomatoes—echoes another—the sweetness of the shrimp. Then those flavors are sparked off by something real different, like the smoky bite of the ancho sauce—its spirit bumped up by five different chilies—all direct from the Yucatan.

The Jambalaya with Scampi is rounded up the same way, but in a different tradition. Starting with the Cajun "holy trinity"—celery, green peppers and onions—Gary adds tomatoes and pinches of herbs and spices, fresh and dried. Then tasso, a cured and smoked New Orleans ham (ham is jambon in French and where jambalaya gets it name), chicken, scampi and fried rice for mix-up of spicy, robust flavors.

Big slices of sour dough bread come with good Italian olive oil. I like this bread, it’s not too sour and it’s got history. Gary’s sour dough starter came from a family in Chili. It’s around 100 years old. The only way for a starter to make it to 100 is to keep it going, adding equal parts of flour and water every couple of weeks. I like thinking about all the folks over the past hundred years who’ve fed on breads from this same starter.

Gary’s also been moored near several seas, so he knows his fresh fish. And he gets it too—real fresh. My petrale sole sopped in a day-lily yellow five-citrus sauce falls apart with the first nudge of my fork. Upping the ante, Gary adds lime, grapefruit, orange and tangerine to lemon and gets an intriguing sauce that still doesn’t overrun the gentle sole. The red peppers, pea green pods and sunshine yellow squash taste not far from the garden. The side of Italian pasta comes in three shapes. That’s so each can pick up the flavors of the sauce—sharp capers and rich, smoky Italian Marsala wine—in a mite different way.

Now, a glass of wine will enrich these flavors a mite more. Matching wines to such lusty, kaleidoscopic food was a challenge. To meet it, Gary was once again on the road, this time to Tuscany where he got to know the owners of some of Italy’s smaller wineries. The winemakers taught Gary how they made their wines and together they tasted the wines with food. Gary picked the best of these rarely exported wines made to match the zesty Tuscan cuisine. The combination of the Italian wines and Gary’s food is a sure sight bigger than the sum of its parts. Just like the Roadhouse itself.

"Why’d you call it Coyote Roadhouse?," I wondered.

"A roadhouse brings to mind an old country inn of the 16th century where you could get good down home cooking," Gary answered and he continued "It amazes me who comes into the dining room. People here range from cowboys with their hats on to business men with their suits on. And they’re all enjoying themselves."

"And why, Coyote?"

"I used to raise coyotes and wolfs. Someone shot them. So, I named the restaurant after my boys."

That’s Gary, Gary Hastings.

 By Kate Crawford  July 2003

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