column: missoula's dish

Don’t Fill Up On Bread

By Danielle Lattuga, 9-13-07

Pull up a chair and join me, as we embark on a feast of undisclosed proportions in the first installment of Missoula’s Dish: an exploration of restaurant life in Missoula, and its microcosmic implications.

It is a cool evening in early fall, and you are feeling the bitter sweetness that comes with crisp fiery colors and shorter days. You’ve been walking in a light rain, reminiscent of your final year in the Adirondacks and the fleeting affair that kept you warm for part of the moist and chilly autumn. Your belly responds to your ruminative wanderings and tells you that you better start adding your winter layer, right now. 

You wrap your fingers around the cold curve of the handle and open the door to warm lights inside a small, quiet bistro. The closing door pushes chilly air against your calves as it eases shut behind you. A low note of jazz announces you.

“Good Evening.” The voice floats towards you and precedes the appearance of a young, neatly dressed woman from behind the polished cherry wood bar.

“Are you open?” you query, as she steps closer to you, adjusting her starched white apron.

“Oh yes, we are just getting started. How are you? Would you like some dinner?”

“Just a bowl of soup, something warm.”

She offers to take your coat, smiling while she shakes the rain from it and hangs it on an iron hook next to a small table.

“Please, sit. We can certainly bring you some soup.”

You rub your hands together and think of the acidic, seasoned humidity that lingered in your mother’s kitchen, after an afternoon of pickling. 

The woman returns with a stout ceramic bowl, glazed in a hue that reminds you of mulling spices. The rich aroma of its contents wafts across your face as she sets it in front of you, along with two thick slices of warm bread.

And so it’s begun. The place and the woman exist as a single element that has mingled with your memory, welcoming you in from the cold to shift your senses and nourish you.  You have chosen to subject your mood and your meal to external factors and your experience in the bistro could alter your evening for better or worse, and for some people (perhaps you), on some particular evening, it could alter the course of life. 

If the woman sat down at your table when she brought you your soup, she might tell you about the power of convivial life and the stories that collide in a restaurant. She might tell you that she is crooked - that the right side of her body bears weight with ease that is disproportionate to the left and dominant side of her body; that there will always be a divot on the crown of her right hip bone, where she’s rested wine bottles while preparing to present and open them. This is what her body has learned in 16 years of an unintentional career, that has carried her through school (all the way to a Master’s degree), through an unpredictably long stint as a ski bum and raft guide, and through the juggling act of making a living and pursuing a passion in Montana.

She might tell you that she is about to move onto a career that is deeply entwined with her education and her dreams, but that she is not sure she will ever stop craving weight on her palm, the chatter and clatter of dinner time, or the savory meal and impossibly satisfying glass of a good, red wine at the end of her shift. She would tell you for sure that she would have to find a substitute for the sometimes brash but ever witty banter she so embraced during her fleeting moments in the kitchen. 

All of these crumbs aside, the morsel that she would tuck into your coat pocket on the way out the door, would be that she believes the restaurant is a microcosm, first of her community, but also of life. In every meal you share, there is a lesson and a gift that applies to the world beyond the table. 

But, if she sat down and told you all of that, your soup would get cold, the chill in your bones would not have subsided, nor would your belly be full, and you’d leave her two shiny copper pennies for her two cents, and walk out of the bistro unchanged, unfulfilled, unimpressed. 

Instead, she will read your needs like it’s second nature, allowing you to enjoy your meal, your solitude and her company. 

Then, she’ll tell you that she hopes to see you again, and next time, save room for dessert.

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