Roadfood_ Revised Edition - Jane Stern [188]
The restaurant itself has a western theme, but there is something for everyone from morning to night: keno, weekend karaoke, and the strangest-shaped pool table we’ve ever seen. Lighting fixtures above the dining room are made of wagon wheels, the ceiling is stamped tin, and the walls are bedecked with painted wooden totem poles and spectacular murals of scenery along the 11,000-foot Beartooth Highway that leads from here to Yellowstone. The two-lane highway is closed by snow in the winter, but once it’s open, it is a spectacular trip. Charles Kuralt once called it “America’s most beautiful road.”
Rex Restaurant
2401 Montana Ave.
406–245–7477
Billings, MT
LD | $$
Montana Avenue in Billings has become something of a restaurant row with a handful of trendy places drawing people back downtown for dinner. One of the old reliables in the area is the Rex, a vintage hotel dining room that has been cleaned up but not drastically modernized to be one of the city’s most respected upscale eating establishments. Unless you sit on the breezy patio, accommodations are dark and clubby, all varnished wood, brass, raw brick, and cut glass under an old stamped tin ceiling.
Beef is king, and the prime rib we had was one of the best around: thick, juice-laden, and full-flavored. For those not intent on ingesting maximum red-meat protein, the menu includes pizzas made to order, sandwiches and big salads, shrimp, crab, and lobster. Lunch can be as inexpensive as a $7.95 burger or Vietnamese noodle salad; big beef dinners range to near $30.
We were introduced to the Rex many years ago by a local saddle maker whose doctor had told him he needed to eat less beef, so he ordered cream-sauced pasta, which looked to us like it was richer than a rib eye steak!
Sarah’s
310 N. 29th St.
406–256–5234
Billings, MT
59101 BLD | $
We hit Billings eager to have lunch at El Burrito, our favorite Mexican blue-plate lunchroom in Montana…and El Burrito was gone! We panicked for a moment until it dawned on us that the restaurant now occupying the same location, Sarah’s, looked a whole lot like the old establishment that used to call itself “The Working Person’s Eating Place.” In fact it is one and the same, renamed Sarah’s to honor one of the three sisters who founded it back in the 1980s, but passed away six years ago. It is still in the family, though, Sarah’s two sisters running it efficiently and cordially, even if meal service is a little strange.
Here’s the way it works. Upon entering, go to the back of the room to an order window. At the right of the window is a large posted menu. Choose your burritos, tacos, or enchiladas and tell the nice lady who steps out of the kitchen what you want. Then go to the cash register and pay for it. Now move over to the condiment bar and help yourself to Styrofoam cups full of hot sauce or mild sauce, onions, or jalapeños to carry to a table, where a basket of chips is set out along with lots of napkins. When you are halfway through the chips, the meal arrives.
We especially love the taquitos, which would be called flautas in much of the Southwest: tightly wrapped, crisp-fried tortilla tubes containing moist shredded beef. They are served with a cup of garlicky guacamole.
The order-taker grinned broadly when we said we wanted a red smothered beef burrito, telling us it was the most popular dish in the house. It is a monumental meal, the burrito loaded with big hunks of beef. Our one complaint is that the plastic forks provided are only barely up to severing the tortilla wrap and beef inside.
Sarah’s is a hangout for locals, young and old. It is open for three meals a day, and at high noon, it is mobbed. As the lunch-hour crowd cleared out, one table in the center of the room was occupied by a group of teenagers carrying skateboards. Toward the front of the room was a family having a quiet discussion with each other in a language that sounded like Spanish, but wasn’t. And we were busy plowing through some fine Mexican meals, grateful