Huckleberry House has mastered cohesion and unreasonable hospitality.
On cohesion, Midwestern hospitality, and how a messy restaurant won my heart.
Introduction: Yes, I went to Bismarck.
Last year, a city appeared in the James Beard semifinals list that made me go, “Huh.” This year, with a different restaurant, it appeared again, and I immediately booked the most janky AirBnB to go eat in Bismarck, ND (a TV doesn’t work, a doorknob fell off when I tried to shut a door this morning, the beds are definitely cots, the basement has a murder room, and the fridge starts shaking for no good reason).
I made the choice to drive 6.5 hours to Huckleberry House because just one glance at the menu told me that this restaurant has the identity of The Plains. The menu is heavily German and Nordic featuring lefse, wild rice, and of course, a burger, because you can’t seem to have a menu in the Midwest without one.
Looking at the menu, I felt like it was of its city, for its people, introducing new dishes in ways that were accessible not just for foodies but for your dad (whoever your dad is).
This feels rarer and rarer every day in a world where it seems every restaurant is trying to go viral. When I looked at a menu that was both creative and approachable, distinct and familiar, I felt I had to go.
On my first, second, and third visits, my boyfriend and I were the only ones in the dining room at one point. During the week, Huckleberry House felt like a ghost town. It’s slow season, sure. This is a seasonal spot built on the river, sure. But it’s also terrifying to see the dining room of a special restaurant empty.
With all my years of eating around the United States, I’ve learned that an empty dining room doesn’t mean a restaurant is not good.
It sometimes means a restaurant is misunderstood.
Sometimes it means it “had its moment” and people have moved on to other less special places in the middle of their moment.
Sometimes it means they have no press budget.
Sometimes it means they have no star power.
And sometimes it’s all about location (Huckleberry House is a few miles from the center of town, where objectively bad restaurants serving undercooked arancini topped with acrid barbecue sauce are full while this one sits empty).
You can do everything right and your restaurant still might close. I believe that.
But the empty dining room also affirmed something for me. In many markets, a James Beard semifinalist recognition means a full dining room, at least for a moment. Not so in places the awards have historically ignored. That’s Bismarck, ND, and most other rural or small markets around the country.
JBF has a large city urban bias to the point that one year when Chicago and NYC were shut out of the national awards (outstanding restaurateur, chef, and restaurant) but not their local awards, it was news.
I saw NYC chefs post about “JBF small city bias” in a way that made me stop in my tracks. I responded to a lot of these stories with some context. In reality, those small city nominees rarely win. Not in their local market and not in the national awards. For example, the same year this “shut out” was news due to “small city bias,” Outstanding Chef was won by Michael Rafidi in DC, Outstanding Restaurant by Langbaan in Portland, and Outstanding Restauranteur won by Id Est in Denver. Not small cities by any definition.
What chefs are seeing (and complaining about) is actually a correction for how JBF has ignored those cities (especially in the north) for its entire existence.
Even with this correction, small city restaurants are often put on the semifinalist list and left off the finalists in a way that leaves me grouchy every. single. year.
So I drove out to the plains in Bismarck, North Dafuckingkoda to give one of these acclaimed small city restaurants a try. While it was 70 degrees in Minneapolis, my boyfriend and I braved wind that whips with nothing to stop it, -2 windchill, and snow in pursuit of good food in unexpected places.
Because that’s where the best food is. Not New York, not Chicago, not LA. Somewhere out there in the “middle of somewhere” is our best restaurant. I’m on the prowl to find it.
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My first time walking into Huckleberry House was straight off seven hours on the road. My ex-boyfriend and I walked in to a brightly lit dining room with warm wood, white shiplap, and these giant red doors that were the only pop of color in the whole place, aside from the fire. Those doors open to the river in the summer, when the restaurant turns into mostly patio. It looks like the kind of place Joanna Gaines would have made in her early years. It’s the kind of restaurant marked by seasonal dining, with fewer seats inside (84) than outside (100). It’s open and airy, with a fire burning at the far end.
The first dish that hit our table on our first visit was curried pumpkin knoephla, except there was no pumpkin, and while we were assured there was curry, you can’t taste it. Pillowy soft dumplings, a texture somewhere between béchemel and damn good gelatinous bone broth, and salt taken right to the edge were our first introduction to the food of Huckleberry House.
“Is there pumpkin in here,” I asked our server Zane.
He looked at the dish and said, “It doesn’t look like it.” So he went to ask.
He came back to say, “We’ve learned something together,” which is honestly how I feel about the hospitality at Huckleberry House. As much as you put into it, you will get out of it. It’s built together in a way that feels rare, special.
The answer came back to us (and Zane), “Pumpkin is no longer in season, so there is no pumpkin.” As much as this velvety rich soup was an indicator of the quality of food to come (excellent), this moment was an indicator of something about the restaurant, too (a little bit messy).
The lack of pumpkin (and curry flavor, regardless of curry addition—we both have sharp palates) did not matter. The soup was topped with homemade crispy onions and reminded both me and my boyfriend of a hug—the kind of stick to your ribs food you need on the plains when the wind is whipping with no trees to stop it.
But still, it shows a sense of messiness, of rawness, that pumpkin wasn’t in the soup one day (on purpose or on accident, who knows) and that was not communicated to front of house staff. The next day, we got the soup again. To our surprise, it had pumpkin, which means the answer Zane was given was inaccurate information. Whether pumpkin is in or out of season, it was in the soup.
I found myself looking out into the restaurant trying to understand it. I always do this. The main question I ask is, “Who are you?” So who are they, from my first visit? Not sharp and crisp like a white table cloth joint but more like your friend who cooks from the hip.
That same night, we tried to order a peach salad, except, there was no peach. Instead, there were apples, as if the restaurant doesn’t have a budget to update its menus as the season changes.
When the salad arrived, it was so beautiful that I took a bite before realizing it also came to us completely undressed.
I ended up flagging down Damon (front of house manager). I told him our salad was undressed and asked for dressing. He walked backwards holding up one and two fingers in an alternating fashion, asking if I wanted one or two cups of dressing. “One,” I said, and he took off to the kitchen with what I can only describe as haste.
When he came back, he told us that immediately upon walking into the kitchen, the person who made it hung his head and said, “Did I forget it?” He stopped everything that he was doing and issued a profuse apology told through Damon to us. We kept telling him to tell that cook it was okay, it didn’t matter. And it didn’t.
Part of the charm of Huckleberry House is that it is deeply human.
They’re not pushing perfectly plated dishes at you. They’re giving you food by and of this place, by and of themselves, and when I’m eating damn good food like that, I can forgive any error (I mean this—when I get grumpy at the errors in a kitchen it’s because the food is overhyped, overpriced, or not that good).
Here’s the thing, though, before I got the dressing? I was eating the salad without dressing. The granola on top was a lovely take on a crouton, leaning into the identity of people who actually order salads (almond moms) and not cheffing it “up and away” from its target demographic. The greens in it were crisp even in a winter that has been harsh on greens. The apple tasted like November apple and not overwintered apple. Yes, the hop and honey vinaigrette was fun, and yes the salad tasted better with it, but even without it, it was a good salad.
The salad felt like it had a clear identity. This isn’t a salad you can find anywhere else—it lives here.
So too with the käsespätzle, which should in all reality, sit on every single menu they have. It only sits on the lunch menu, but singularly, this is Huckelberry’s “it” dish. Extra cheesy, with dumplings that hit the mark of perfect, caramelized onions rich enough that you can smell them as the dish sits in front of you, and bacon that adds the right notes of salt and sweetness, this is the dish I’ll dream of for years to come. I mean, just look at that cheese pull.
It’s a quintessential midwestern dish, one that I might serve to someone asking what midwestern food is.
Midwestern food is the kind of food that might kill you if you eat too much of it, but it’s damn delicious. Midwestern food is also food from other places, transformed for the hardest of hard winters.
Its Diane’s Place’s (Minneapolis) Hmong Sausage with extra hot sauce or Mint Mark’s (Madison) sauerkraut chocolate cake or The Boiler Room’s (Omaha) extra creamy soups or Huckleberry House's käsespätzle.
It’s the perfect dish for when it’s 70 in your hometown and 10 degrees in Bismarck, ND, like the last breath of winter. We ate it alongside a ham sandwich and the haus salad (which they serve for $5, unheard of in 2025) with rye crouton and buttermilk dressing rich with herbs.
If you gave this to me as a baby tasting menu (haus salad, soup, small sandwich, käsespätzle), it would feel cohesive to me. I thought maybe we just ordered well for our first two visits. After we went five times, I realized we could have ordered anything and it would have felt the same way.
Dessert also has a clear identity. We ate a cardamom bread pudding with aquavit caramel that felt bold for Bismarck, ND. The aquavit was there but not overpowering. Think of it like a baba au rum (bread pudding au aquavit). Sticky, full of the bite of alcohol, and rich with cardamom, this dish feels cohesive with the menu. Like yes, after I eat beef with dill seed and chokecherry, I do want something sweet with cardamom.
It rarely feels like chefs sit down in their restaurants anymore to ask if someone could order any appetizer, main, and dessert and feel like they know who the restaurant is at the end of their meal. But it’s clear that Executive Chef Cody Monson has done that.
The dessert that caught my eye the most was lefse cake. Lefse, sunflower seed nougat reminiscent of the nut tart that Chef Maria Beck ran at Herbst, and whipped cream made this a crunchy, not too sweet dessert that continued the feeling that this restaurant is of here. Lefse is not something people on the coasts eat. It’s something you really only find in the US in the Upper Midwest. Someone once described it to me as a bland tortilla, which is honestly a fair assessment. Mostly, people associate it with lutefisk (something else you really only find here) and not dessert.
My ex-boyfriend and I talked to Damon about this dessert. He told us that people are afraid of it. “Lefse,” they’ll say, like how can a dessert have lefse? “I have to talk them into it,” he said. “But it’s so good, right?” It is. It’s so good. It’s also humble. Sunflower seeds are cheap. Whipped cream isn’t a showstopper. Lefse in dessert honestly seems like kind of a bummer at first.
But the magic of Huckleberry House is they’ll take those humble things and care enough to make them special.
Lefse cake and aquavit caramel are not easy to order desserts like a budino and basque cheesecake (these are boring desserts that are palatable to most people). These are desserts the staff have to convince people to try. They’re challenging. They’re also both perfectly executed, incredibly creative, and belong on this menu.
Huckleberry House has nailed cohesion on their lunch, dinner, and dessert menus. Each dish feels like the restaurant in such a way that if you showed me 5 dishes from Nordic and/or German spots, I know I could point theirs out.
I walked away after eating this with a sense of that Chef Monson trusts the people of Bismarck enough to challenge them. He isn’t giving them dishes that don’t taste like home or things that are so out of bounds people won’t come back. He’s just giving them a little nudge, like he’s saying, “Look, if you liked my burger, you will probably like the lefse cake,” and that’s how we get people to expand their horizons: one surprise at a time.
Brunch doesn’t have that same identity. It didn’t live up to the lunch or dinner menu—and I think most of that is because it lacks the cohesion found in those other menus.
A basic buttermilk vanilla custard waffle doesn’t fit next to smørbrød and curried pumpkin knoephla, but a cardamom waffle might.
Tots with ketchup feel out of place, but serving them with the dill-hemp heart sauce would bring it together.
I am dreaming of käsespätzle with an egg on it for a heart attack in a bowl hangover cure.
The wild rice waffle (it’s puffed wild rice mixed in and sprinkled on top, not a batter made of it) feels phoned in, but I see what they’re doing: they’re trying to use an ingredient known to here. For me, I’d love to see them roll the chicken and waffle into more of a sister to the fleischkuekle, with dill pollen butter and a darker color on the waffle by way of wild rice ground into the batter.
And their short rib hash with huckleberry agrodolce leans too much into the huckleberry. It makes the entire dish sweet. But within that feeling of too much huckleberry sauce, they’re trying to be cohesive and in conversations with the other dishes on the menu that have huckleberry in them. They just need to find a way to do this that doesn’t blow your palate out at 10am.
Lunch and dinner feel so distinct. Brunch feels like it could be anywhere. One of the things I love most about this restaurant is the distinctness and I want to see them nail that on brunch, too.
But brunch does have something special.
When we walked into Huckleberry House for brunch, Damon was waiting at the host stand and said, “I’m going to be transparent with you. Our truck was supposed to be here at 8:00am and we have four things on the menu.”
We laughed. We laughed because at Huckleberry House, it felt like we were in a sitcom where the whole point was Murphy’s law for restaurants. “We’re happy to wait,” we said. We weren’t alone. 8 other people waited for the truck to come. Damon kept looking out the door, going up on his tiptoes to do so, as if he might be able to see the truck in the distance. The truck wasn’t coming, but more people sure were.
We got a scone while we waited, along with NA drinks. One of the main questions I ask in restaurants is, “Who made that?” I try to figure out whose dish something is. It’s often not the Executive Chef or Chef de Cuisine who makes all the recipes. Sometimes sous chefs do. Sometimes pastry chefs do. And sometimes (in a well run kitchen) someone else gets a shot.
Damon said, “Oh, that’s Cam’s.” Cam is 18 years old and has been at the restaurant since the tender age of 15. Would I call this a scone? No. It’s somewhere between a biscuit and a scone. Light and buttery, not dense at all, it’s really good. It melts in your mouth. The glaze on this one was full of lemon in a way I would define as unapologetic and the blueberries are speckled throughout the dough, not sinking to the bottom.
Whenever I hear of young chefs/cooks making magic, it always makes me tear up a bit. I did here, too, asking Damon to tell Cam how good the scone was. It’s worth coming in for, if you’re local to Bismarck. But it also taught me something about Executive Chef Cody Monson: he’s giving his team a chance to grow in his kitchen.
Is this scone cohesive to the menu? No. But it’s special.
I’d love to see Chef Monson coach Cam on how to make scones that fit with brunch. Pull out flavors from the smoothie or granola and turn them into a scone or make a scone modeled after one of the drinks (hibiscus scone when?) so that when they sell that drink (or pastry), they can upsell the other.
45 minutes into service, staff disappeared from the restaurant, all of them hauling things from the truck into their outdoor freezers and kitchen. 10 minutes later, they were ready, taking deep breaths in the back ready to push through tickets for an entire dining room essentially sat all at once. “That was fast,” my boyfriend said. It normally takes time to go through your order. But it seems like when push comes to shove, Huckleberry House figures out a way.
They did that with something I can only describe as grace.
My ex-boyfriend and I also worked through the entire NA menu over the course of our trip (they’re all good, you can get any of them), save for one cocktail that wasn’t available because they didn’t have raspberries.
On our last day in town, Damon came up to the host stand to excitedly tell us that he was late to work that morning to get raspberries for us so we could try the last NA drink on the menu: the NA cooler. Unlike lots of drinks that make a raspberry syrup, these are muddled, meaning you just taste raspberry, not sugar. The drink was fresh and bright. I’m glad that we got to try it.
But more than the drink, it was the moment of unreasonable hospitality that touched me.
I really don’t think that Huckleberry House knew I was writing this. I think they saw the giant knife on my arm, my boyfriend and I speaking to them in restaurant language, and assumed we were a hospitality couple passing through for inspiration. Lots of those people take notes.
I think that Damon stopped to get raspberries not to make the restaurant look good in a piece of writing, but because he really does give a damn about his job. He really wanted us to try it. He wanted to show us that hospitality of The Plains. The entire team did.
For those unfamiliar, Unreasonable Hospitality is a book (and now training series and summit) by Will Guidara and a hospitality style adopted by Eleven Madison Park (EMP) to make magic happen in restaurants.
Think of it like this. Let’s say you left your champagne in the fridge and you’re sad about it at dinner. Someone at EMP would go and get that bottle of champagne for you and leave a really nice vintage of one in your fridge for you to come home to, maybe with a note. Let’s say you really want ramune at dinner and someone overhears. Someone will go get it. Let’s say you say, “I want potato chips right now,” while eating caviar. Some appear, maybe from the backpack of a line cook, but they’ll find their way there.
Normally seen as reserved for fine dining, if you know the philosophy of unreasonable hospitality, you see it everywhere. Once, a restaurant gave all my friends Diet Coke to go when they were jealous of mine (they were drinking, I was not). A dive bar in the mountains bought a six pack of NA beer and put my name on it, because I’m the only person who orders it. A year later, they still had it, knowing that once a year, I go back. Going and getting raspberries so someone can try all your drinks is another example.
All of these are examples of unreasonable hospitality. But the raspberries? It’s my favorite one.
When we told our server Cherry that we were going home, she responded with, “Ahhh, shucks. It’s always nice to see other cool people in North Dakota.”
This is the kind of place that values their regular guests, even in just a flash, a place that wants you to come back to visit. If you live in Bismarck and you’re looking for a place where you can go and become a regular, this is my pick. They’ll welcome you back every time with open arms.
I do my best to find these places in every city—not the hippest or trendiest restaurant, but the ones that will take care of you with a type of hospitality that feels rare.
You won’t find those places on Eater. I dig through Yelp reviews to find them, looking for the rare gem of something like, “They were out of my favorite drink so the bartender made a dupe of it,” or, “[NAME OF SERVER] takes such good care of us every time we go,” or, “My date stood me up and the bartender gave me a toy duck to be my date and comped my drinks.” That’s what I look for. And this is that kind of place.
When we were leaving, there was a line 10 deep out the door waiting to get sat while it snowed outside.
I wrote a note for Cam and left it. Cam should keep going. Cam should dive into pastry and perfect it. At 18, they have all the time in the world to become Bismarck’s best pastry chef. They should go for it.
Damon had disappeared into the back. There wasn’t a way for me to tell him thank you or tell him that he’s incredible at his job. For the first time all week, someone was waiting for our table. So we left quietly.
“You can go find him,” my ex-boyfriend said.
I told him what I say all the time to people, “I try not to be in the way.”
I curl into corners at restaurants. I used to have a tiny notebook trying to be small (I’d have 50 pages of tiny notes for one restaurant and that’s unreasonable, so I had to get a full size one). I don’t bring ring lights or spinning tables. I take one photo and it’s often very bad. And then I act like a guest in a restaurant with very little phone use and only a couple pointed questions over multiple visits. Going to find someone isn’t really my way. I do my best to be out of the way in a rush, especially a rush like this one.
So we left, standing in the snow, while our hometown was 70 degrees.
I said, “I never want to go back to Bismarck, ND,” while we ran to the car.
My ex-boyfriend is adamant that we have to come back here in the summer when the patio is open and everything is green. “Just for one more dinner here,” he said.
That’s what happens when you find teams like this one: they leave you wanting to come back, weather and ghost town and undressed salad be damned.
(But like, when we go back, we’re going to go in the summer and you should, too.)
Sneak peak.
So where am I going next? Chicagoooooo, baby, and if you subscribe, you’ll get access to my behind the scenes thread for Chicago where I taste tons of pastries in my search of my five favorites, go back to a restaurant I hate, drink my favorite NA cocktails anywhere, and work on publishing about multiple Indian restaurants I love. The best Indian food in the US is in Chicago—and I’ll die on that hill.
I always think the Dakotas are RIGHT THERE and I wish I had a few more destinations in mind other than the Black Hills and Wall Drug (lol). This SO makes me need to go to Bismark to have that meal by the river like whoa.