Salad and steak

Bozeman, Montana, June 9, 2014—

WE READ ABOUT this place on the Internet somewhere, and decided to give it a try, thinking that it sounded as if it were concerned about the quality (and therefore, one hopes, the soundness) of its ingredients. And the first taste of this salad confirmed the hope: nice greens, ripe citrus, carefully sliced fennel, a well-balanced sherry vinaigrette, and really good salt — and the right amount of it.

With that salad I had "gin and juice:" gin infused with kaffir lime leaves, grapefruit juice, and ginger-flavored simple syrup. Just the thing to end a day spent driving across Yellowstone Park.

We went on to flatiron steak, and here I'll just quote from the menu:

local beef, honey thyme spoon bread, roasted strawberry rhubarb relish, chipotle compound butter.

The spoon bread was quite piquant, nothing like what my Oklahoma grandmother would have spooned up, and had a tendency to overrule the delicate fruitiness of the relish. But the meat had a very nice flavor and was cooked exactly as I'd ordered it: rare.

Dessert: lemon-infused cheesecake, layered rhubarb panna cotta, roasted-almond crust, rhubarb-lemon compote, and a rhubarb "tissue" — in fact, a chip, like a potato chip: don't ask me how they do that. The cheesecake was made with goat cheese from the local Amaltheia (organic) dairy, and if the entire dish was a bit on the heavy side, well, that's in the nature of mountain cheesecake, I guess. I ate it, every bit.

House red

•Plonk Wine, 29 East Main Street, Bozeman, Montana; 406.587.2170