Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [184]
Wolf Lodge Inn
12025 E. Frontage Rd.
Exit 22 off I-90
208–664–6665
Coeur d’Alene, ID
D | $$
Here are meat-and-potatoes meals of legendary scale. A vast red barnboard roadhouse just yards from the highway, this exuberant Wild West domain features oilcloth-clad tables and walls festooned with trophy animal heads, bleached bovine skulls, antique tools, old beer posters, and yellowing newspaper clippings of local-interest stories. It is a sprawling place with miscellaneous booths and dining nooks in several rooms; at the back of the rearmost dining area is a stone barbecue pit where tamarack and cherrywood burn a few feet below the grate. On this grate sizzle slabs of beef ranging from sixteen-ounce sirloins and filets mignon to porterhouses well over two pounds. (Seafood is also available, cooked over the wood.)
Cowboy-cuisine aficionados start supper with a plate of “swinging steak”—sliced and crisp-fried bull testicles, served with cocktail sauce and lemon wedges. We relished a bowl of truly homey vegetable beef soup that was thick as stew with hunks of carrot, potato, beef, green pepper, and onion. All dinners come with saucy “buckaroo” beans, a twist of krebel (fried bread), and baked or fried potatoes, the latter excellent steak fries, each of which is one-eighth of a long Idaho baker that has been sliced end-to-end and fried so that it develops a light, crisp skin and creamy insides. We split a forty-two-ounce “Rancher”—exquisite beef, not too crusty, but loaded with juice, well-seasoned with salt and pepper, and redolent of the burning wood over which it was cooked.
As we exited into the brisk autumn air, we noticed that whenever the Inn’s front door swings open, a cowbell clangs.
Montana
Candel’s Byway Café
36619 US Hwy. 87
406–566–BYWA
Stanford, MT
BLD | $
We arrived at Candel’s Byway Café mid-morning, just as the pies had come out of the oven. They are homely pies and each piece fell apart on its way from tin to plate, but the sour cream raisin pie turned out to be one of the best anywhere, with a wicked tangy-sweet character. The crust underneath the warm peach pie is the melt-in-mouth kind, so good we found ourselves hunting stray little slivers on emptied plates, gathering them up by pressing down with our forks’ tines.
“Why are these pies so good?” we called out from our counter seats, ecstatic about finding them. Sheila Candelaria, who runs the place with her husband, Mike, credited them to her mother, from whom she learned to bake growing up on a ranch seventeen miles south of town. But it turned out that pies aren’t the only reason to inscribe this place on the honor roll.
“We cut the steaks, we make our seasoning mixes, even our chicken fingers are from scratch,” Sheila told us, singing especially high praises of the chunky, garlic-studded salsa that accompanies the Mexican food Mike makes. At this point, post-pie lunch seemed essential.
Mike’s beef-and-bean burrito is smothered with orange-hued chili Colorado that tastes like nothing more than pure peppers and spice. We could hear our chicken-fried steak getting pounded tender through the pass-through window to the kitchen, and rather than coming sheathed in the typical thick batter coat and smothered under gluey gravy, this one has a thin, brittle crust. It sits atop a puddle of refined white gravy with a pepper punch.
Sitting at a table where the view out the front window is the fronts of pickup trucks pulled up in the lot and Highway 87/200 beyond them, a few everyday customers told us just how much they appreciate this place. Opened long ago as the Byway Café, it was closed for six years, reopened for one year as Bubba’s, then closed again until the Candelarias bought it, cleaned it up, and reopened it in 2004 as a family enterprise, with all four of their