In the Paradise Valley, heading towards Yellowstone National Park from Livingston are scents and aromas worth tracking. Taylor and Rebecca Henson have been firing up good food at Follow Yer’ Nose BBQ and Wildflour Bakery since 2012.
Follow Yer’ Nose is an outdoor BBQ Shack that opens from April to the middle of October depending on the weather conditions. The recipes come from Taylor’s upbringing in Macon, Georgia where barbecue is centered on chopped or pulled pork, a tangy tomato-based or mustard based sauce, but in adapting to Montana’s taste and availability of beef, brisket is also offered along with house made sausages, chicken or turkey and ribs.
Wildflour Bakery, located behind the shack, makes pastries and breads from scratch with offerings of coffee and espresso, and a small breakfast menu.
The barbecue business partners nicely with the bakery. When one turns off of the highway onto Overlook Road, one drives by the iconic Old Saloon to a large gravel parking lot that is filled with cars with license plates from all over the country.
Follow Yer’ Nose anchors the front of the complex with an open order counter and covered outdoor seating, with everything offered written on a large chalkboard. Wildflour Bakery opens at 7:30 AM, while Follow Your Nose starts serving at 11 AM.
“So, from the very beginning, Rebecca worked at the bakery, and the lady running the bakery allowed me to come out and serve barbecue, and it was just a patch of grass, gravel, and weeds, and a propane tank, and a half-built fence. I started on Saturdays. I was bartending in town at the time. I worked every Saturday and tried to cook meat and sell it to people, and people were really excited about it. And then the lady who started the bakery offered for us to buy it,” Taylor says.
“Taylor and I met working on a river in Oregon in 2011, and we had just gotten off of a Grand Canyon trip, a 21-day trip down the Colorado, and we were trying to settle for a minute before we moved back to Oregon, and we decided to come meet at my folks' ranch, which is four miles south of here.” Rebecca shares making the decision to stay that winter and not returning to their river guiding jobs.
Barbara Ernest, who was the previous owner of the Wildflour Bakery, hired Rebecca to work at the bakery a couple days a week.
“And that's when Barb offered him the opportunity to just bring a smoker for Saturdays,” Rebecca says.
“Growing up in Georgia, we always had a smoker going at the house every weekend. We had people over all the time, like my friends always coming over. They knew they could get good barbecue at my dad's house. When we came out here, there wasn't any barbecue very close by, and so I wanted to eat it. So in order to eat it, we started cooking it,” Taylor says.
But Taylor soon realized that he was in Big Sky country, where cows abound, and there was an appetite for beef. “Here, when we started, I didn't have brisket. All I had was pulled pork, and ribs, and chickens, and then we did quarter chickens, half chickens. And then we evolved into like, well, this is cattle country, so we started cooking brisket, and it took a little while of fine-tuning over a couple years.”
Tyler Shamit, Rebecca's cousin, who is the general manager, is credited with helping perfect the brisket. Aside from figuring out how to cook the meat, the type of wood for the best results also needed to be selected. “We use apricot wood, which I've used it from the very beginning. It's sweeter, it burns slower, it's not in your face.
It's got a good smell to it, and it goes into the meat as well,” Taylor says of the wood he has driven to Idaho and Washington to procure.
“Taylor, me, my cousin Tyler, his wife Shelby, my parents, and then a hodgepodge of other people that helped us. But that's how we started in 2012. When we bought it from Barbara, it was more of a wholesale bakery, so we used to deliver our bread to Town and Country in Livingston, the Food Farm in Gardiner, the co-op, a few other places in Bozeman, and it was a grind.”
“Taylor and I were working seven days a week. My parents ended up being our bread slicers, and bread delivery people, which I think it like gave my dad a very different perspective on service jobs, 'cause he was a pretty buttoned up office dude, and then he came to work here, he's like, "Oh, this is hard." So that's how we started, and then every year it's just gotten busier, and we have had to shift our identity and kind of figure out what works in that moment.”
Ned Shapiro says, “Well, I've worked here pretty much since the beginning, and it started out of a smoker in the corner, and this was all gravel. And we would sit there in lawn chairs and wait for somebody to come in, you know. And if we had 20 people come in in a day, it was a good day.”
The business has come a long way as there are usually lines at Follow Yer’ Nose.
Follow Yer’ Nose
Tyler Shamet keeps the operation organized, making sure there is enough product for their Shack in Emigrant, the Smoke Wagon in Gardiner, and for their many catering jobs.
“I figure out how much brisket needs to be ordered, how much pork butt ne- needs to be ordered, ribs, turkey, everything. And then I update a meat prep list for our Chris, who does 95% of our meat prep. He does get some assistance from some of our in-house crew, but, but Chris is great. He has really three full shifts that is just, he's nothing but brisket, pork butts, turkey, chicken, ribs. So he's putting in anywhere between 16 to 24 hours a week of just meat prep. John, bless him, gets in, like, at 4:30 in the morning, and he runs the AM smoker.”
“So any given night, Joe's throwing on between 12 to 16 briskets, and usually another 12 pork butts. And, you know, they're 14, 15-pound pork butts.
And then John will come in the morning, and he'll, he'll temp those, pull them off the smoker, and it goes on and on.”
Nothing goes to waste at Follow Yer Nose. All trimmings go to Chris Clark, who turns them into different kinds of sausages. “Basically, we use all the trim from all the briskets, and then mix it 50/50 with pork, and make our own house sausages.
And we do several flavors from the roasted jalapeno smoked Gouda to cherry habanero, chorizo. We do a house-made twinkie, which is a jalapeno chopped brisket, cooked brisket, so it, it has little chunks of brisket in it.”
Taylor’s want is to source locally and currently he has developed relationships with Marble Farms in Billings and Montana Waygu Cattle Company in the Gallatin Valley. Unfortunately, if supplies are low, he will lean on commodity sources.
At Follow Your Nose, the smoked meats form the backbone of the meals, but it's the other dishes that complete the eating experience.
“The sides, a lot of them came from recipes that my family used, and the coleslaw and the beans that my mom gave me a base of what she has and, and changed it up. The pasta salad, for instance, used to be a potato salad recipe, and we used to do potato salad, and we couldn't keep up and make enough potato salad.”
The side dish that may be dearest to Taylor's stomach was a recipe from his mother, Jane. It's one of those recipes that there's, like, a few ingredients in it that make it what it is, and where people are like, "Can I have this recipe?" And I haven't really given it out. It took a minute to get it from her, I guess, so.”
“The thing about the collards specifically, I feel like, is it's really simple. Yeah. It's like a fat, an acid, collards,” Rebecca says. White wine is the only secret ingredient Taylor is willing to reveal that goes into the recipe.
Sage LeBlanc of Yellowstone Farmstead approached Follow Yer’ Nose and offered to grow the kale for the restaurant. The eight and a half acre agritourism destination in Paradise Valley is dedicated to growing fresh produce, hosting farm to table events, and connecting people directly to their food.
The frosting on the barbecue cake is the sauces and Follow Yer’ Nose offers four different choices with a fiery elixir behind the counter for the hot head. “Everybody loves like a sweet barbecue sauce. It's like the crowd pleaser.
“When people think of barbecue sauce, you see all these, you know, 100 kinds go on the counter and it's like the dark red and you know it's gonna be sweet or smoky or got a little bit of onion to it, whatever it is. So we had to have one of those even though that's not what I grew up with. So, we have one of those, we call it Smokin' Out Back. We smoke it on the smoker. So, it's a sweet, smoky sauce and we actually hit it with the apricot wood for three and a half hours. And that's the most popular one by far.”
“We have a vinegar sauce, which is like a tomato, pepper, vinegar sauce, and we use that in, in a lot of side dishes. It's a main ingredient for a lot of our recipes in house. There's a little bit of Soul Shine is what we call it. It's really good on pork, it's really good on turkey and chicken, and it's really good on macaroni and cheese.”
“And then we also have a spicy sauce, which is a lot like our sweet and smoky sauce, the, the Smokin' Out Back. It's a thicker tomato sauce. And the, the spicy one we call it the Hoot Owl Hot because when the hoot owl goes home in Yellowstone you know it's hot out. We basically take the vinegar and the, the Smokin' Out Back and then add more chilies and, and everything to it to spicing it up a little bit.”
“The third sauce that we have is a mustard based sauce, and that was a lot of fun creating 'cause we created it at the same time we did it, our turkey recipe, and it was probably about eight or nine years ago. We had a lot of friends over and they were from out of town and trying to dial in a rub recipe for the turkey and the mustard sauce to go with the turkey and the poultry and everything.”
Wildflour Bakery
Rebecca runs the bakery With Natasha Platt as the pastry chef. “I'm not a classically trained baker, I just like to bake. I was actually enrolled in culinary school when I met Taylor, and I was gonna move to Portland, and then we decided to kind of pivot.
But ironically, the gal that runs our kitchen now went to the same culinary school that I was going to go to, and she's amazing, and she's just kind of elevated what we put in our bakery case,” Rebecca shares.
“We make a lovely coffee cake, scones, cinnamon rolls. I mean, anything that you really want in like a, you know, a rustic bakery, we've got it. We have a few varieties of bread. We do pies if you really, like, are in the know and you can call and order one.”
A visitor can spend several hours eating at Wildflour Bakery and Follow Yer’ Nose. A breakfast pastry and a cup of coffee can be enjoyed before Follow Yer’ Nose opens. Then after savoring barbecue, one can go back to the bakery for dessert.
2018 Lonely Planet’s Best Places to Eat in Every Country
Follow Your Nose has been recognized for their efforts. It is evident when one pulls into the parking lot as there are cars with license plates from around the country.
The barbecue business was named in Lonely Planet's Best Places to Eat in Every Country in 2018, alongside the iconic Franklin's Barbecue in Texas as a top barbecue destination.
Rebecca says enthusiastically, “Word travels fast. As much as advertising is great, word of mouth is really the best. We'll get texts from random people that we've met over the years and been like, "Oh my God, I just saw somebody wearing a Follow Your Nose hat in downtown Manhattan."
“Or like we were at a friend's wedding in Moab, and we were hiking, and this gentleman was like, "What's up Taylor?”
Then a visitor from London made a planned trip just to eat at Follow Yer’ Nose from a neighbor’s recommendation.
Rebecca and Taylor have brought together a team that has become family. The community has embraced their presence and come often to eat and hang out even though there might be a wait.
Diner’s loyalty and curiosity showed when recently Follow Yer’ Nose did a popup with James Beard Recognized Chef for Best Chef: Mountain Region this year and Best New Restaurant in 2024. Customers were willing to wait in line for the food combining Asian and Montana flavors and techniques.
Taylor says, “If you think about barbecue, it brings people together. Like, that's something that you have. You're not just gonna cook a, a brisket or a big chunk of meat and eat it all yourself. You have to have people to share it with you. And I know that it is so cliche to say, but it's true that, like, barbecue brings people together.”
