Of Irish and Italian descent, Jim Tracey is energetic and has a mind that is always racing to think up new ways to prepare food. He grew up on one of New Jersey’s barrier islands in Sea Isle City, right on the Atlantic Ocean.
“I have a huge family,” he says proudly. “I’ve got lots of aunts, uncles, cousins, and I’m the middle kid of five, with two sisters on either side bookending me.”
He came west, first to Colorado, then to Missoula, to study finance. His dad’s a certified public accountant, and Jim’s plan was to graduate from the University of Montana and work in New York City. But then he decided he wanted a restaurant instead.
Jim actually grew up in the restaurant business and comes from a line of great cooks. A family restaurant in Sea Isle, founded by Jim’s great-grandfather more than 100 years ago and now owned by his great-aunt, is still in operation. The restaurant serves Italian-American food: red sauce, clam sauce, veal and fish, for example.
“We always had huge meals at home,” Jim says. “My grandma, she’s only 4 feet 9 inches tall, and she still cooks Italian for everybody. My mom’s not Italian, but she cooks Italian. She learned from my grandma. Every time I go back home, we just have these huge feasts.”
In Sea Isle City, Jim worked in the family restaurant and grew to love cooking. So in 1995, when he decided to abandon his academic goals, it came as no real surprise to his family.
He knew he needed more restaurant experience before opening his own place, so he worked at a number of temporary jobs for a few months before cooking at the Old Post with Christine Littig (now owner of Bernice’s Bakery and the subject of my chef’s profile for December). The two got along famously. When Christine opened Red Bird in 1996, she asked Jim to work with her.
“He was my right hand,” Christine says of Jim. “I brought a feminine approach to food, and Jim a masculine one. It was a perfect match.”
For five years, the two worked happily in the Red Bird kitchen. In February 2002, Christine, feeling she needed a break, sold the restaurant to Jim.
In the almost six years since Jim and Laura have owned Red Bird, its inviting, warm atmosphere has remained the same. It is a perfect place for an intimate, romantic meal. The seating is comfortable and the tables are spaced far enough apart to provide privacy.
The business has expanded to include a spacious wine bar, Laura’s domain, which offers a separate menu from that of the restaurant. It is an ambitious menu whose dishes are prepared in a dedicated area of the Red Bird kitchen.
More than two dozen items are offered: cheeses and charcuterie, appetizers, salads, artisan sandwiches and petite entrees. The restaurant menu includes nine or so starters and about eight entrees, along with a few nightly specials. There is a separate dessert menu.
Red Bird diners may order off the wine bar menu, but wine bar patrons can order only off their menu. Given the choices available, this is not a problem.
Jim is a chef who constantly stretches his forays into food. After removing the tenderloins and flanks from a 4-H steer he bought recently at the Western Montana Fair, Jim hung the carcass in a cold room for 21 days to age.
He buys his lamb locally from Ray Johnson, who raises the animals in the Bitterroot Valley and for many years has been the head butcher at the Good Food Store. Ray cuts the lamb according to Jim’s specifications. On one visit, I watched Ray haul three boxes of fresh lamb into the kitchen.
“Isn’t the meat just beautifully trimmed? Ray really knows his stuff,” Jim said, remarking on the racks, chops, legs and shanks.
Jim is one of the few area chefs who offer veal, and I am happy to report it is delicious and perfectly “politically correct,” because the calves are never penned up and fed specially formulated foods to keep them anemic. Instead, they roam freely with their moms in Pennsylvania grassland.
Because it isn’t always on the menu, Jim buys veal primals, major large muscles, that he can use quickly, instead of whole animals. The same is true for bison. Tenderloins are what he orders, and they come from North Dakota.
He is quick to point out that he has a team of professionals who work with him as sous chefs and who help generate ideas for the menus.
“Ten of us work in the kitchen. It’s just not possible for me to do everything, especially now that our wine bar has really taken off,” Jim says, “So I’m really fortunate to have guys working with me who are as passionate and as excited by food as I am. When we’re online cooking, each of us knows each other’s job, so someone can always fill in if we have a crisis.”
A hallmark of Red Bird’s menu is that it is always changing.
“I’m always looking for a better way to make a dish, making it more special,” Jim says. I mention the house-made ricotta and paradise garden squash ricotta gnocchi I had eaten at the restaurant a few days before and Jim says with excitement in his voice, “That dish tastes completely different now. We made the gnocchi firmer and changed the seasonings. We’d never used squash in gnocchi before.”
Jim likes to make special meals for meat eaters, vegetarians who eat dairy products, and vegans, who don’t.
“Just give me a couple days’ notice,” he says. “I’ll make anything people want. I love doing not-on-the-menu cooking.”
As I’m about to leave the Red Bird kitchen one afternoon, I spot a large pan with two pig heads staring up at me. Not actually staring because the eyeballs have been plucked out. Sides of pork are lying on the clean counter awaiting processing.
One of Jim’s most recent passions is charcuterie, the ancient art of cooking and preserving pigs. The whole pig. Nothing is wasted. The book, “Pork and Sons,” by Stephane Reynaud, stirred Jim up and got him thinking about ways to use the whole animal.
So Jim sent one of his sous chefs, Matt Cornette, to charcuterie school, and Matt then shared his knowledge with Jim and the staff. A recent Red Bird menu featured house-made sausage, marsala pork-filled ravioli and grilled farm-to-market pork loin, and the wine bar menu offered pork lettuce wraps and a pulled pork sandwich. Jim’s future charcuterie efforts are certain to please.
In the nest
Red Bird is open for dinner from 5 to 9:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. The restaurant is closed Sunday and Monday. Call 549-2906 for reservations. The wine bar is open from 5 to10:30 p.m. Monday through Saturday and is closed Sunday. Entry to both the restaurant and wine bar are through the Florence Building entrance at 111 N. Higgins Ave. in downtown Missoula.About this series
On the first Wednesday of each month, Greg Patent profiles western Montana chefs in the Missoulian Foods section. What motivates a chef to do what he or she does? And how is local food incorporated into their menus? We’ll take you into the kitchen for answers.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 11:10 a.m. His cookbook, “Baking in America,” won the 2003 James Beard Award. His new cookbook, “A Baker’s Odyssey,” will be published in December.
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