Bozeman has seen a lot of Asian restaurants come and go over the years. Anyone remember Smiler’s? Fast Looie’s? New Asia Kitchen? Thai Isan in Belgrade? If you remember Wong’s, you’ve lived here a long time. None of those places are still standing, but today there are several options for Asian food in our community. The most recent addition is Shan, and a spectacular addition it is!
Situated in the space that used to hold Lot G in the Cannery District at 109 East Oak Street, Shan was opened by owners Jarrett Wrisley and Candice Lin in April of 2023. The word around town is that it’s a Thai and Chinese restaurant, but Shan considers its cuisine to be a specific reflection of the owners’ culinary experiences – particularly in Beijing, Sichuan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Bangkok.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Wrisley followed his wanderlust to Beijing after college. He began cooking and writing in Chengdu, China, and then met his future wife, Candice, in Shanghai. They moved to Thailand in 2008 and opened their first restaurant, Soul food Mahanakorn, in Bangkok in 2010. Next came Appia Trattoria in 2012, then Soul Food 555 and Peppina in Bangkok, and Soul Food Thai in Hong Kong, in 2017. The COVID pandemic hit them hard, and despite closing most of their restaurants, Wrisley managed to write and publish his cookbook, Roads to Rome, in 2020. He and Lin hit the U.S. road in the summer of 2021 with their 4-year-old son in search of new adventures and landed in Bozeman.
“When I was creating the concept for this restaurant, I was looking for commonalities in the food that’s available here and cuisines I know how to cook,” explains Wrisley. “My first experience cooking in China was at the terminus of the Himalayan plateau, and I learned that Asian food is deeply regional – and all food is affected by two major things, in my experience: climate and landscape.” Indeed, Shan is the Chinese character for ‘mountain.’ “So when I moved to Montana, I was thinking about how the climate and landscape shape the food that’s available here, and how that intersected with the cuisines that I understood and knew how to cook from Asia.”
What might some dishes of this cuisine include? The menu divides its plates into the categories of snacks, curries and stews, BBQ, noodles, wok, and dessert. The other day, a few curious patrons started out with the deliciously crispy Thai beef jerky and the zesty tiger-skin peppers, followed by the creamy chicken khao soi (curry) and juicy Lanzhou beef noodles. “The cuisine of Sichuan is really reliant on a lot of fermented bean pastes, soy sauces and dried chilis, and there’s a lot of beef and pork,” Wrisley says. To accompany these elements, the orange house wine was recommended; stated Wrisley, “Orange wines work well with curries and spicy stir fries because they have more heft than a white, but less of the tannic wallop of a very dry red, which tends to make food spicier.” Coconut and pandan ‘Tres Leches’ (a light, milky sponge cake) completed the meal – for that day, at least.
It may seem a surprising draw in our Bozeman mountain town, but Wrisley and Lin are on to something. “As a sort of culinary anthropologist, I’ve studied how food cultures come together for a long time. I care about the origins of things; I’m trying to cook with respect and reverence for these cuisines the best way that I can,” explains Wrisley. “The most important thing for me was to create a restaurant with a very particular sense of place that felt like it belonged here in this community, and I hope that we’ve done that. That’s what I wake up and try to do every day. I feel really lucky that I found the right place to do this.”