J.W. Heist Steakhouse

The Restaurant

J.W. Heist Steakhouse opened on January 3, 2023 at 27 East Main Street in downtown Bozeman, occupying the historic Stockman's Bar building — a cornerstone of Main Street since 1944 — directly next door to its sister restaurant Plonk Wine. The room is the work of partners Michael Ochsner and Brett Evje, who purchased Plonk in 2009 and spent the next thirteen years building Bozeman's most established hospitality group before opening Heist on the back of demand for a serious downtown steakhouse format. The dining room runs across two floors: a ground-floor bar and dining room with the original 1944 Stockman's woodwork restored, a back-room cellar built around an exposed-brick wood-burning hearth, and an upstairs lounge with leather banquettes and views over Main Street.

The kitchen, run by executive chef John Thayer (also the senior chef at Plonk), cooks a focused steakhouse menu with a Montana-specific signal that differentiates Heist from the national-chain competition fifteen miles south at Big Sky. Beef comes from regional ranches and is dry-aged in-house for forty-five days minimum: a thirty-eight-ounce porterhouse for two cut from Big Hole Valley Wagyu cross, a sixteen-ounce ribeye over the cherrywood hearth, a Montana-raised bison filet that is the room's quiet signature, and a tomahawk for two carved tableside on a wood plank. Sides run regional — Hutterite-grown root vegetables, foraged-mushroom risotto when the morels are running in May, twice-baked Yukon Gold potato with crisp shallot, and a creamed-corn polenta that has remained on the menu since opening. Cold appetizers feature a Montana trout crudo with citrus and a Wagyu tartare with smoked egg yolk and brioche.

The wine programme, selected by master sommelier–trained beverage director Nicole Hauser, runs to about six hundred references with serious depth in Napa Cabernet (a hundred-bottle vertical of Caymus, Quintessa, and Shafer Hillside Select) and Italian reds (Barolo, Brunello di Montalcino at the trophy tier). The cocktail list, built by Plonk's longtime bar lead Karina Tate, runs to about thirty stirred and shaken classics with house-made bitters and a barrel-aging programme that turns out a quarterly Manhattan at four hundred bottles per cycle. Service is paced and conversational — the senior captains have been in Plonk for ten years before transferring to Heist — and the room has built its reputation in three years on closing the kind of dinner that Bozeman's tech and ranch-finance economy now demands.