MONTANA | THE WEST
I Ate at Montana’s Most Expensive Restaurant and Found Something Rarer Than Luxury
★★★★★
SOCIAL HAUS | $$$$$ | MAP | INSTAGRAM
By Jamie Dutton | April 15, 2026
AUTHOR BIO: With family spread across the Midwest and a job that has her in airports near daily, Jamie Dutton finds herself across the Heartland regularly. She’s partial to BPTs a Bell's.
The smoke came first. A bartender at Social Haus lit a piece of wood on fire, dropped a glass over it, and trapped the whole thing like he was preserving evidence. By then I was already deep into the particular mood of the place, sitting in a dark green leather banquette, staring at the glass-walled fire, and realizing this wasn’t going to be one of those tasting menus where everybody speaks in hushed tones about microgreens. At Green O, the adults-only hideaway tucked into the 37,000-acre Paws Up ranch in western Montana, dinner begins with theater and then keeps finding new ways to get more interesting.
Social Haus isn’t just another resort restaurant with good lighting and a chef who knows how to plate a carrot. It’s the centerpiece meal at one of the most expensive overnight experiences in Montana, maybe the most expensive dinner in the state once you consider the whole package around it. Green O is a 12-accommodation retreat in the woods, all private “hauses,” soaking tubs, glass walls, and a level of privacy where you half expect Bono to walk out of the cabin next door. Social Haus, though, gives all that luxury a pulse. It’s not just a restaurant at a very nice retreat in the woods—it’s an experience into the finest of cooking.
Walking up to the place, all glass walled and surrounded by forest, I couldn’t help but think of the fictional restaurant in The Menu. It’s wedge-shaped, with a tall roof overhang above the outdoor section, and inside the first thing you notice is a large semi-circle banquette around a dramatic glass-enclosed fireplace, the focal point until you notice the open kitchen beyond it. There's a bar too and seating out on that patio, but we were lucky to get a seat in view of the kitchen, where you can watch a very serious crew at work.
The tasting menu from chef Brandon Cunningham begins light-hearted, with a ham-and-cheese bite, which riffs on a ham-and-cheese sandwich and announces early that the kitchen is interested in nostalgia, albeit with much better ingredients than any of us grew up with. Then came a prawn and cucumber course that drifted somewhere between aguachile and ceviche: Alaskan spot prawns, sweet potato, avocado mousse, marinated cucumber, nasturtiums. After that, sturgeon with delicata squash, the fish poached in butter and ham fat, with pickled squash and a red-curry squash purée enriched with ham hock, a dish that perhaps more than any other showed the careful hand of the kitchen, not one of the ingredients overpowering the other.
Then the meal got heavier in the right ways. Pork and coffee played off red-eye gravy, using house-made coppa ham, charred cabbage, smoked beef-fat confit, ham stock, and a miso-espresso butter sauce. Venison and xo followed in a Chinese takeout box, a decidedly playful dish, especially when the house xo is made from country ham trim and beef bacon. A tasting menu lives or dies on whether it can avoid becoming a sermon. This one seems to understand that even luxury needs a sense of humor.
Dessert kept going. There was a course built around raisins and carrot, with pumpkin seeds, carrot chips, whipped white chocolate, cream cheese frosting, and roasted white-chocolate crunch. Then orange and vanilla crumble with blackberry sorbet. Then a final butter-and-Scotch dessert with caramelized chocolate almond sponge cake infused with 18-year-old Scotch, plus little amaretti cookies dusted in sea salt.
What I like about Social Haus is that it isn’t satisfied with being expensive, which is usually the least interesting thing a restaurant can be. It wants to surprise you, amuse you, and occasionally throw venison into a takeout box just to prove it still has a personality. Out in the Montana woods, where luxury can so easily turn into isolation with nicer blankets, that feels like the more difficult trick. The real extravagance here isn’t the money I spent. It’s the effort to make a night feel unrepeatable.
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