Text by Shannon Thaler
Images courtesy of Shan
When Jarrett Wrisley opened his eighth restaurant in a nook of Montana’s Rockies region, he envisioned creating a small, mountain tavern in Bozeman. So he named it Shan—the Chinese character for “mountains” or “mountain range.”
Shan marks Wrisley’s first culinary venture in the United States after a decades-long tenure as a restaurant owner across Thailand and China, which included 11-year-old Soul Food Mahanakorn, its sister eatery, Soul Food 555, and an iteration in Hong Kong called Soul Food Thai. Wrisley also made his mark in Bangkok with the Roman trattoria Appia and several locations of a Neapolitan pizza parlor, Peppina.
The pandemic, however, brought Wrisley’s hospitality empire to a screeching halt. It especially battered Thailand, “because it’s a country whose largest industry is hospitality and tourism,” Wrisley says. “Bangkok went from having five to six million tourist arrivals per month to zero, for almost three years. That was a tough pill to swallow.”
So, Wrisley, a Pennsylvania native, moved back stateside to rebuild his life with his wife and fellow restaurateur, Candice Lin, and their then-4-year-old son, August. They settled into a house in Montana that’s nestled right next to the mountains, looking out onto the Bridger Range. It reminded Wrisley of the hinterland mountains in Asia, calling to mind also its regional cuisines.
That landscape inspired the first iteration of Shan, which operated as a supper club out of the couple’s home. “I was cooking food from the north of Thailand, and from the southwest of China, which straddles a mountain range in Sichuan and Yunnan,” Wrisley says of the meals he served during the supper club.
But Wrisley soon realized he couldn’t easily source many of the staple Thai ingredients he’d become used to while cooking abroad. In Thailand, for example, “the food is heavily reliant on a lot of different kinds of herbs, fresh fish, shrimp paste, and fresh coconut milk. I cannot get any of these things here,” Wrisley says. So, when Wrisley and Lin began to transform a location that had once been a cafe into a restaurant in late 2022, he looked to what Montana’s local ranchers and farmers could offer for the menu.
By April 2023, Shan was born. And just over a year after its soft opening, that humble mountain tavern was honored as a finalist for Best New Restaurant at the 2024 James Beard Awards. It wasn’t a distinction Wrisley set out to achieve. “I think the way it came about is just because it’s a good restaurant, and it wasn’t something I jumped into,” he says, referring to the restaurant’s earlier iteration as a supper club.
When Shan first opened in Bozeman’s vibrant Cannery District, it could fit roughly 40 diners in a space inspired by Japanese izakayas, with dimmed amber lighting and a view into Wrisley’s buzzing kitchen that made for a cozy-yet-lively atmosphere. Wrisley would invite “30 people one night, 40 the next,” until word of mouth had every seat in the house full. By the summer of 2024, Shan underwent an additional, two-week renovation that doubled its dining room space to accommodate as many as 85 patrons and created more room for local beers and wines behind the bar.
Unique to Shan is its extensive wine program with as many as 90 bottles on offer at any one time. Wrisley says this sizable beverage program was important at Shan, as he’s been “a huge wine nerd for a very long time.” His affinity for wine pairings had him seeking out mostly organic and all-natural wines from small-family producers. He notes, “There’s no industrial wines, and everything is designed to accommodate the food,” which influenced putting a lot of sparkling, orange, and light-bodied red wines on the list.
When it comes to food, the menu style at Shan “encourages people to order five or six things and share it,” Wrisley explains, recommending that a party of four pick “a stir-fry vegetable, a soup, a piece of protein, maybe a curry, and a noodle” to get a proper sampling. Wrisley’s current favorite menu item is the cumin lamb noodle, a Western Chinese dish. “It’s local Montana lamb that has been braised with a little bit of cassia and star anise, and a lot of cumin and chilies, and I make what is essentially a ragu,” he says. “Then we have knife-cut thick, chewy noodles that we stir fry with the lamb and cilantro, more chili, a little bit of Sichuan peppercorn, and a lot of chili oil. I think it’s just delicious.”
As the restaurant has boomed in popularity, it has come to employ 20 people and rely on 10 partners and purveyors to supply Shan with beef, chicken, fish and other proteins, as well as gourmet mushrooms. Other interesting menu items include a Thai beef jerky with coriander and Sriracha; a salad of smoked tofu, black vinegar and fried peanuts; as well as sticky tamarind ribs. Shan also offers a selection of local meats from the grill, with the menu telling customers to “ask your server” for what’s on offer that night.
Shan is not intended to hew precisely to Thai and Chinese culinary traditions, but rather reflects the couple’s past experiences, as they venture into their present–and future.
