Every Fourth of July my family goes down to the Livingston Roundup and we stand on bleachers and watch men get thrown off animals that outweigh them by fifteen hundred pounds. The broncs. The bulls. Best of all, clowns jumping over livestock and making fun of riders. None of this is exotic to us here in Montana. It's just July.
The food is hot dogs; burgers slapped together by a kid who would rather be anywhere else; beer in a plastic cup that has gone warm by the second rider. I love every second of it, because nobody is lying to you about what it is. Fuel. It simply gets you to the end of the night, and it does not ask you to think about it.
For most of my life that was Montana on a plate, too. You could guess a menu in this state with seventy percent accuracy: steak, burgers, a couple of salads, and if you're lucky some fish and chips. It was good, but it was also the same in every town with a stoplight.
That has been changing for a while now. More and more kitchens here started building around what the season actually gives them, rotating menus instead of laminating them, pulling meat and produce off ground you can drive to in twenty minutes. Bozeman can feed you in half a dozen directions on a Tuesday. Most impressively, it comes from our own backyard.
But the rodeo was never going to move in this direction. That was the one thing I would have bet on. Maybe a food truck with better beef. Sloppy joes with a pedigree. Mac and cheese, shaved ice, get in line, enjoy the show.
Then I met Emily Hahn.
Chef Em is a Top Chef alum and owner of Mountain Provisions based here in the Gallatin Valley, and she is the architect of something I didn't think was possible: a legitimate food and wine experience in the middle of a rodeo. A few years back she cooked an event for Outlaw Partners, the team behind Big Sky PBR, and saw an opening. "There's such an opportunity here to make this more about the community and local food," she told me. So she pitched them on it. Their answer, in her words: "Hell yeah."
Now in its second year, the VIP culinary experience at Big Sky PBR looks like nothing I have ever seen at a rodeo. Emily hand-picks a roster of chef friends, most of them fellow Top Chef alumni, and installs them in Big Sky for the weekend with other local chefs and one rule welded into the concept: almost all ingredients are sourced from what Montana grows and raises.
Here is what that looks like in weight. One whole bison from North Bridger Bison, nose to tail, tongue and kidneys and liver included. Three hundred pounds of Wickens Ranch beef. More than a hundred and fifty pounds of local lamb. Five hundred and fifty chicken leg quarters from Living River Farm. Aurore French Bakery baked two hundred and seventy-five baguettes and more than thirteen hundred mini brioche buns. It was produced using ingredients from Chance Farm, Amaltheia, and Gallatin Valley Botanical.
"What a full opportunity for this many chefs and this many local purveyors to be in one spot at a f***ing rodeo," Emily said.
The part I did not expect is who was cooking it.
This is not a brigade of culinary school kids with knife rolls and opinions. It is locals from Bozeman and Livingston working a second job on their weekend, standing in the heat behind a bull-riding arena because, as Emily puts it, "we just want to be around this culture and these people."
All of these people were there because they wanted to be there, not because they were told to be, and it showed. Everyone was enjoying themselves, listening to music and indulging in the creative process of making food.
"I take any of these folks over cocky culinary kids any day," Emily told me.
Walk the line behind the tent and the first thing you notice is that nobody is making festival food. The second thing you notice is that nobody is making anything you could not picture eating while standing up, in the dirt, with one hand.
Chef Jamie Lynch, for example. He runs six restaurants across four distinctly different culinary concepts back east; his signature room, Church and Union, is modern American with, as he puts it, no boundaries. For his first dish at a rodeo, he made a roast beef sandwich.
"I'm doing a freaking roast beef sandwich," he laughed. "But I guarantee you it's going to make your jaw drop. Anybody can make a roast beef sandwich at home, but you can't make mine."
That was the theme all weekend, taking things that are not extraordinary and making them so good that you want to keep going back for more. Jamie shared that he had never seen bull riding in person before last year, and what hooked him was not the eight seconds; it was the atmosphere, people driving in from everywhere for three days. All walks of life getting together to watch one big event. The goal, in his words, was "doing food that's approachable to people, but still a little fun and edgy." His Saturday elote comes buried in Flamin' Hot Cheetos. Approachable, fun, edgy, and you will go back for a second, even a third.
Jarrett Wrisley is one of the local chefs on the roster cooking out of Bozeman year round. At Shan he builds around local product, and his rodeo dish may have been the clearest statement of the whole weekend: a bowl of lu rou fan, the Taiwanese braised pork belly that exists to comfort people, rebuilt on North Bridger bison. Bison is too lean to carry it alone, so he braises skin-on pork belly right alongside.
"I really wanted to do something that was delicious and simple and comforting, because I guess that's what rodeo food is, this sort of frontier food," he said. As our conversation continued, I asked him if the goal was to make the dish itself simple, and he replied, "It doesn't have to be simplistic, but what has to be simplistic is the act of putting it on the plate."
Which is the whole trick: there are a dozen moving parts in that bowl, but only one motion to serve it.
Josh Adams, another local chef from Livingston, knows exactly what rodeo food is supposed to be. When I asked him, the answer came fast: "Funnel cakes, fried bread, burgers, hot dogs," he told me. "Heavy, greasy, kind of fills you up and does the trick, especially when you're drinking a lot of beer." Josh runs Campione, the little Italian room he opened with two partners six years ago in a vacant corner bakery in Livingston, after telling himself for years he would never open a restaurant. "In a moment of weakness, I said yes." His road to that corner is the longest one in the tent: born in North Carolina, raised in Taiwan for eighteen years, back to Carolina to study hospitality, then Montana, where he stopped.
His Saturday dish comes straight off the menu at B-Side, his new place, and it is called "Mutton Bustin'." Merguez-spiced Keys Ranch lamb from right there in Park County, braised slowly and shredded in its own juices, a relish of his burnt pickles, a garlicky harissa toum, mint, dill, on the housemade flatbread he uses for his pizzas. Naming a North African lamb flatbread after the event where small children cling to sheep is exactly the register this whole weekend runs in.
"What we tried to do here was really focus on sustainability and supporting our local farmers," he said, "trying to bring something fresh and nice, still in a kind of rustic style, that is approachable." His Friday plate went the other way entirely and won anyway: caramelized Spore Attic mushrooms piled on an open-faced toasted miso bun with smoked onion, farm herbs and Pecorino Romano. A tent full of meat eaters went back for seconds on the vegetarian dish.
Eduardo Garcia is where Emily's no-waste rule actually gets tested. Remember that whole bison, tongue and kidneys and liver, all of it? His Saturday dish, the "Rodeo Clown," is where those cuts land: a loaded Montana potato under slow-braised bison birria, finished with hemp seed crema, built out of everything most people walk past. His Friday plate, "High on the Hog," puts Olive Branch Ranch pork carnitas on a crispy blue corn tostada with lacto-fermented slaw and a garlic scape picante. Fermentation and garlic scapes at a rodeo, and not one person blinked, because it is a taco, you eat it with your hands, and it is gone in four bites.
Emily was not only directing traffic, she was also on the line. Her Friday dish, "The Wrangler," was NBB chorizo sausage, burrata, and a pistachio and garlic scape salsa verde. Saturday's "Blazing HAZER" was a Cajun smoked trout slider with giardiniera and Fresno aioli. Even the skyboxes got it this year. She handed those menus to Joel Gill of Braza and Keenan Anderson of Provecho, who are running all-local spreads of their own, from open-fire steak sliders to a traditional Oaxacan tlayuda.
Sheldon Simeon, back for his second year, may understand rodeo food better than those of us who grew up eating it. He walked in last year expecting "big ol' pots of chili, smoked meats or whatever." What he found was chefs layering technique out of an outdoor kitchen, at an event he calls "comparable to some of the best events that we've been around the country."
His dishes originate from the big gatherings of his own upbringing. Palabok, the celebratory Filipino shrimp noodle dish, rebuilt as fried rice under Alaskan spot prawn gravy. A brisket he braises into a gingery soup instead of smoking it, because "it's one of those dishes that feels like a bowl of hugs."
When I asked him what rodeo food means, he did not mention a single ingredient. "Rodeo food should feel communal," he said. "Everyone's coming together for the show, and that's the same thing the food should feel. We should be celebrating our moment that we get to share with each other."
At some point I asked Jamie to define rodeo food and he handed me the line I have not been able to put down. "If it doesn't drop on their boots, it's probably not rodeo food."
I repeated it to Jarrett. He grinned. "Oh yeah, it'll definitely fall on your boots."
That is why this works. Nobody out here is trying to lay a white tablecloth in the dirt. "There is no abstract art you put in your mouth," as Jarrett said. It is food you eat with your hands, standing up, while a man is trying to stay on a bull fifty feet away. It just happens to be built by some of the best cooks in the country out of a whole bison, local lamb, and vegetables from a farm twenty minutes down the road.
If you want to know where it goes next, I asked passers-by. One of them grew up in the South doing rodeo, barrel racing, eating the same food I did: burgers, cornbread, hot dogs, whatever you could carry. Now she is studying sustainability and hospitality management at MSU with a farm-to-table focus, and after one bite of Jamie's elote she said, "That was an explosion of flavor. Now I'm going to think of that when I go to a rodeo again. To me, now that's rodeo food."
Asked where it should go from here, she answered fast. More local. CSAs out of Bozeman and Livingston. Maybe a collaboration with MSU and Towne's Harvest. Universities and local farms feeding the grandstands. A rodeo kid, reprogrammed by a corn cob buried in Flamin' Hot Cheetos, drawing the blueprint for what comes next.
Growing up, I would have told you rodeo food would never change, and honestly I did not want it to. What Emily and her crew worked out is that it does not have to change. It has to grow up where it stands.
Still communal, still messy, still falling on boots. Simply made out of whole ingredients from local sources by people who cared enough to use all of it.
