When we visit Washington, D.C., we often eat at Ted’s Montana Grill in Crystal City. Ted’s has successfully appropriated the American West as its theme particularly with the use of bison as wall art and as a main ingredient on the menu. We always feel a little of what Ted Turner calls “The Big Sky Spirit” when we come off the city streets of D.C. into the wooded ambiance of Ted’s. Sometimes restaurant themes feel like opportunistic gimmicks full of forced decor that can be silly or outrageous, but Ted’s theme is backed up by reverence and belief in preserving the environment and growing and protecting the bison herd, the once vibrant rovers of The Great Plains almost hunted to extinction. Today, amazingly, the bison is America’s first National Mammal.
Sometimes when we travel, we are on the lookout for familiar places. When you’ve had stretches of days with new sensations, sometimes you need a reminder of home on the road. So, in Montana we decided to look for a Ted’s Montana Grill. Before our stomachs could growl in anticipation of lunch, Siri had the directions mapped and we were on the move through the lovely downtown streets of Bozeman, Montana. We spotted the bison sign emblazoned with Ted’s and quickened our pace down the sidewalk. Inside, we passed through the dining room with the red and white checked napkins, recycled brown butcher paper table covers and the mounted bison, and we sat outside on the patio to keep a close eye on the big sky of Montana. Our waitress came to take our order, and I couldn’t help but study her closely and stare a bit noting her full and complete Montana vibe. She looked a lot like the singer from Cowboy Junkies, Margo Timmins.
I noticed her hair first, natural and full not flat-ironed to submission, a headdress really of wheat colored hair. She is tall and strong in cowboy boots and jeans with silver jewelry dangling and mixing with strands of her hair, catching sunlight as she moves with surety and hospitality and grace. She made me tired and critical of the bronzed, twiggy waitresses with sleek, flat flounder hair we see at home, flamingo girls on stick legs serving drinks on the boardwalk beside the sea.
We asked the waitress if this was the original Ted’s assuming for sure that this was where it all started. She shocked us with a bright “No, this wasn’t the first.” She was certain the first was opened in Columbus, Ohio. We were mildly distraught at the dissonance here, the whiff of restaurant gimmick. Ted’s Columbus Grill as a moniker certainly doesn’t have the same magnetism and expansion possibilities across state lines.
Montana evokes the Great American West of natural living in harmony with land and animal. The iconography of the Great American West stands for more than stuffed animals on a wall, trophies of prowess and skill, eyesight and aim. Ted Turner’s inspiration is Montana and the roaming American Buffalo, hunchbacked and horned, shag carpeted and serious, thundering and massive. I settle the Columbus origin story as a business decision, practicalities of locale and finances, I guess. I think we all imagined Ted Turner was one of those celebrities who disappeared into the seclusion of the plains and opened up a restaurant on Main Street because ambition follows you even as you walk quiet, country roads. We were wrong.
Ted Turner along with co-founder George W. McKerrow designed their restaurant concept with the bison in mind, the wall-mounted bison but also the roaming bison of the grasslands. They seek to restore the balance inherent in preservation by creating a demand for bison at the table which will help grow and protect the herds. Saving the bison from extinction is a revolutionary restaurant theme and invoking Montana in the restaurant name supports Turner’s desire to “bring forth the values of the Great American West, where genuine hospitality is a virtue and authentic food is always on your table.”
Alas, the food on our table was not bison. For, as much as this is bison country, it is also cattle country which we learned about by visiting Grant-Kohrs Ranch National Historic Site in Deer Lodge, Montana where we spent the morning working up our appetite for lunch at Ted’s. Ted Turner may be poised to be a modern environmentally friendly bison baron, but no one can rival the cattle barons of 1885. For some, the earth is a coffer and man is meant to pry loose all that it contains from its deep recesses to its grassy cover. The earth is not sunflower and daffodil, but only bounty and profit. The earth is to be enslaved, shackled and used for its resources. The earth is to be pounded into submission, eaten unto gluttony and scarred so it remembers its masters.
Conrad Kohrs came west to find gold like all the other miners in the 1800s, exploding the mountains like terrorists, blowing bits of earthen limbs and rock skin with abandon and fervent belief in the saving grace of money. Kohrs found more than gold in the landscape; he found capitalism at work in the mines, supply and demand for fortification and sustenance for the miners. He owned butcher shops in mining towns and turned beef into gold. Eventually, he bought a ranch and owned the cattle that supplied his butcher shops, his ambition unbounded, he began shipping cattle to the Chicago Stockyards and his empire grew and the Cattle Rush was on in Montana with its lush grass and open lands for grazing. Cattle raising became the biggest industry on the High Plains by 1885. But the earth is formidable and will eventually have its way.
By 1886, overgrazing, greed personified, and a harsh winter, earth’s call to arms, crushed the cattle industry in Montana. Also, lured by whisperings of wealth and land, homesteaders came west and fenced in their acres bringing an end to the open range and freedom of the High Plains. The neighborhood, the subdivision, the postal stamp yard was coming west and the landscape and the land spirit would be forever altered by our communal and civilized demands to own the land, to fence what is ours, to mark it.
Great read.. I need to try out this restaurant..