One appetizer on the new menu that recently debuted features flash-fried soft-shell crab, a pair of corn cakes, ancho cream and a shot glass of watermelon lemonade, and a salad celebrating summer stars heirloom tomatoes, with a supporting cast of arugula, basil, fromage blanc (a soft cheese) and pine nuts. Entrees include barbecued duck with Chinese bun and stir-fried greens; slow-roasted pork belly with onion-apple puree and crispy fried hen's egg; grilled fresh pond-raised Idaho trout with bread salad, thin green beans, onions and cherry tomatoes with a warm tarragon vinaigrette; and naturally raised ribeye steak with olive oil mashed potatoes, Walla Walla onions and tomato. Wild Alaskan king salmon is also on the menu.
For non-meat eaters, vegetarian dishes include all the salads, a platter of artisanal cheeses with Le Petit Outre bread, a vegetarian sampler plate, a farmers market panzanella (bread salad with a selection of vegetables from the market), and a main dish of zucchini and tomato gratin with fried squash blossoms and a frothed yellow squash sauce.
Myers is devoted to cooking seasonally and to using as many local ingredients as possible. To that end, you will not find fresh tomatoes on his menu unless they're at their ripest and most flavorful. The exception is green tomatoes, which he pickles and serves with his burgers in the wine bar downstairs.
“We're 80 percent local or regional and organic,” Paul says.
The Western Montana Growers Cooperative is one of his major sources. Based in Arlee, the cooperative acts as a broker for 25 local and organic farmers, and it supplies Paul with produce, pork and chicken. Paul also shops at the Missoula Farmers Market every Saturday.
Although 515 is a showcase for Paul and his many talents, the restaurant is a partnership with Paul's wife, Carrie, who is the charming and friendly hostess, and Brae Bullard, who runs the business end of the restaurant and tends the wine bar. Both Carrie Myers and Bullard have had many years of restaurant experience, and Brae cooked with Myers in Seattle's Palace restaurant. Bullard received her chef's training at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. She sometimes joins Myers in the kitchen at 515.
Before opening 515, Myers worked for years in a few Missoula restaurants. At the age of 19, he started as a dishwasher at the short-lived but excellent Slabs. There the excitement of cooking took hold of him under the guidance and tutelage of Christian Guideman, one of Slabs' owners. Guideman, only four years older than Paul, had years of restaurant work under his belt with Mark Miller at the Fourth Street Grill in Berkeley, Calif., and the Coyote Café in Santa Fe, N.M.
One night at Slabs, the pizza cook didn't show up and Guideman took Myers aside and taught him how to make pizza. Myers was a natural, and from then on he became known as the old pizza cook. Guideman also taught Myers how to make fresh pasta.
But perhaps even more important than the physical act of preparing food, Myers learned from Guideman how to care about food. This meant being connected to the ingredients in a way that forced him to think about how best to cook and present the food. It is this caring that opens the door to creativity.
From Slabs, Myers went on to help David McEwan and Shirley Juhl transform the venerable Lily Restaurant into The Bridge, with Myers serving once more as a pizza baker. The whole pizza program fell under Myers' guidance, and soon this led to the Bridge opening a highly successful take-out pizza business.
After four years of pizza work, Myers felt he was ready for a change of scene, and he also wanted to expand his restaurant experience. Over the next five years, Myers worked as a chef or sous chef in restaurants in Friday Harbor, Wash., and Seattle. The Palace and Dahlia Lounge in Seattle provided him with the big-city restaurant work he felt he needed if he was ever going to open his own place.
In Seattle, Myers fell in love with pork cookery. Tom Douglas, who owned the Dahlia Lounge where Myers was sous chef, encouraged Myers to experiment with pork.
Now it's true that Myers was born in 1971, the Chinese year of the pig, but that's only part of the reason it's Myers's favorite food animal. On his days off, Myers frequented Salumi, an Italian deli owned by Armandino Batali (Mario's father), and that's where Myers tasted all sorts of pork creations that were new to him and where he became fascinated with the animal's culinary possibilities.
Myers' experiments with prosciutto, soprassata sausage, guanciale (pork cheeks) and other pork preparations, opened the world of charcuterie - which means cooked meat of the pig in French - to him. Charcuterie also brought into focus the whole idea that cooking is a process. It didn't matter if that process took just a few seconds to reduce a sauce over high heat or to take a couple of months to cure a prosciutto.
By the time Myers left Seattle, the pig had become his totem animal, and its figure graces the walls of 515, as does its many incarnations on the menu.
Before he could open his own restaurant, Myers felt he needed specialized training in the new emerging area of molecular gastronomy. For that, he went to New York to work with Wylie Dufresne for 10 weeks in his celebrated restaurant, WD-50.
“That's where I saw real striving for perfection in cooking. It's where I learned the excruciating art of exacting detail,” Myers said. “I remember one day somebody had dropped a sprig of thyme on the floor of the walk-in and the sous chef wanted to know who did it. At WD-50 you couldn't be sloppy at any level of kitchen work. Meticulousness was demanded everywhere, at all times, and that's what I try to achieve at 515 with all our staff.”
This involving process is what Myers treasures most about cooking. He has applied the lessons learned from his charcuterie work in Seattle to the special preparations he makes at 515.
Myers thinks nothing of it taking four days to ready pork bellies for a slow-braised main dish or for his crispy melt-in-your mouth rillons, or the four weeks needed to prepare head cheese - pork meat from the animal's head is soaked in a brine for one month, then cooked in chicken stock with minced vegetables to make the meat tender and to rid it of excess salt, followed by chilling in fresh gelatinized chicken stock with minced carrot, celery, and onions - because that's simply how long it takes.
515, located on Higgins Avenue in the space formerly occupied by The Bridge, has an upstairs and a downstairs, each with its own menu. Both menus change four times a year to jive with the food of the seasons. Downstairs features a wine bar and menu items suggestive of a French brasserie: burgers with house-made fries, croque monsieur sandwiches (grilled local ham and Swiss cheese), chicken and pork patés, steamed mussels, a variety of salads and a selection of desserts (all prepared by Myers). Upstairs focuses on fine dining, including the dishes mentioned at the beginning of this story.
Dining at 515 is an experience because all the components of a first-rate restaurant come into play, starting with the greeting by Myers' wife, Carrie, the attentiveness of the trained and knowledgeable wait staff, and Myers' heartfelt and imaginative way with food.
Greg Patent is a food writer and columnist for the Missoulian and Missoula.com magazine. He also co-hosts a weekly show about food with Jon Jackson on KUFM Sundays at 11:10a.m. His cookbook, “Baking in America,” won the 2003 James Beard Award.
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