With New Root and Rye Pop-Up, FVCC Students Aspire to Serve Healthy, Flavorful Food

Now through May 2, customers can work their way through a bespoke menu featuring sandwiches, soups, salads and bread that can be bought by the loaf

With their new pop-up restaurant Root and Rye, culinary students at Flathead Valley Community College are serving up sandwiches, soups and salads three days a week as part of a freshly crafted menu which emphasizes local ingredients and freshly baked bread, with the bread also available for purchase by the loaf.

Through May 2, customers can work their way through a menu which features sandwiches like the Gold Mi, a playful Montana-ified fusion take on the Vietnamese báhn mi sandwich, which in this case is served on an ancient grain baguette and topped with Farm to Market pork belly confit, pickled carrots, radish, cilantro, and hoisin and Sakura sauces.

Vegetarians on the other hand may want to drift towards something like The Forager, a flavorful, savory sandwich that lets eaters skip the adventure and effort of harvesting their ingredients in nature, and instead get right into the eating part of the journey. Built around grilled lion’s mane mushrooms from Sun Hands Farm in Kalispell, The Forager includes fiddlehead ferns, mushroom jus, spruce tip mayo, sweet onion, and micro radishes from Ferndale Micro Greens, all held together by two slices of Root and Rye Marble Rye bread.

That marble rye, available by the loaf, was selling fast just a couple days into the Root and Rye grand opening last week. But students behind Root and Rye weren’t exactly surprised to see the marble rye flying off the shelf. They’d already done their homework, of course.

As the latest iteration of the annual capstone project for students enrolled in FVCC’s Culinary Institute of Montana, Root and Rye has taken students through the process of opening up a food-based business from concept to culinary creation. Students in the program begin by envisioning and creating a marketable idea before progressing to developing a business plan and then actually opening up a new eatery in the basement of the college’s arts and technology building. In recent years the pop-up has taken students down culinary pathways focusing on themes like barbecue, Italian food and Scandinavian open-faced sandwiches.

As part of their market research this year, students analyzed a little over a dozen other businesses in the valley which could be considered competitors. The research revealed that marble rye isn’t all that common, and when it can be found, it’s almost always part of a Reuben sandwich.

“Something that’s cool about this, that I feel like not a lot of people know, is the amount of thought that actually goes into the concept,” said Root and Rye kitchen manager and FVCC senior Erin Abbott. “At the very beginning, like back in January, we started with our own personal values, not even related to the kitchen, but just what matter to us as people. And then we found the similarities there. So a lot of it was supporting our community, and affordability, and accessibility, and stuff like that. And so from that basis, we were able to create this concept.”

Andy Blanton, the executive chef for FVCC’s culinary program, and a James Beard Award-nominated chef, described the project as amounting to a test of the students’ values, vision and mission against the reality of serving paying customers. “Our objective is to meet or exceed the expectation of every guest,” Blanton said. “So helping students embody that, and embrace it, and realize it, and experience it so they can feel what that feels like.”

In describing his role, Blanton said that he’s sometimes an observer, sometimes a director of sorts. He wants the students to have a long enough leash to actually feel what it’s like to be invested in the venture, but at the same time to be able to help coerce them towards their goals and make sure that students are mentally and physically prepared.

“I think it expedites their learning capacity and gives them a real sense of what the world they’re entering into will be like once they graduate this program. Everything from the point of sale to the marketing to the human resources element, creating job standards, recipes, techniques, and then getting that to be able to produce for up to 100 guests on a daily basis.”

Blanton said that of the sandwiches on the menu, he’s drawn toward the Gold Mi, The Forager and something called the Mary’s Shepherd, which is made using lamb from Kila-based Hansen Farm that’s marinated before being cooked up and served with a whipped garlic-mint-lime feta, a chimichurri made with arugula from the FVCC Farm, and pickled red onion on an ancient grain baguette.

The ancient grain baguettes, as well as the marble rye, are the byproduct of an artisan breads class that was developed during the pandemic, but are only making their debut this semester. Culinary arts program director Manda Hudak said that a lot of students come into the program with an interest in making pastries, and an interest in the idea of opening up a bakery. Students spend a year working on their pastry techniques as part of the culinary institute curriculum. The artisan breads course is a deep dive into breadmaking, which Hudak said also has the benefit of enhancing pastry skills.

“It’s looking at types of grains used in different applications, and it’s not just the type of grain, but how we grind it and what the bread tastes like, what its texture is and how it eats,” she said.

Although bread is something of a specialty at Root and Rye, the menu also features a number of soups and sides, including a garden potato leek soup made with leek ash and truffle oil, a carrot ginger soup with lemongrass and coconut milk, Palouse beluga lentil soup made with more lion’s mane mushrooms from Sun Hand Farms, a “Smoked Snow Country Garden Potato Salad” which promises a smokey twist on Yukon gold potatoes, and a quinoa salad. Several sandwiches on the menu can also be ordered chopped up into a salad.

For dessert lovers, Root and Rye offers a lemonade float with housemade lemonade and a scoop of spruce tip vanilla bean ice cream made from Kalispell Kreamery cream; a huckleberry bread pudding, which can also be enjoyed with the spruce tip ice cream; and a hand pie filled with green tomato and white chocolate.

As diners head into Root and Rye, they’ll pass by posters on the hallway leading to the kitchen and dining area, which highlight local producers students have partnered with, including Kalispell Kreamery, Farm to Market Pork, Lower Valley Processing Co., the FVCC Campus Farm, Ferndale Microgreens, Snow Country Gardens, Sun Hands Farm and Mountain View Gardens.

Hudak, the instructor, said that in order to make it work, students had to develop relationships with producers, which meant getting them on the phone and figuring out what’s available at what price, or what can be made available for what price. It’s a give-and-take arrangement, she said, which ideally benefits both parties.

As accounting and purchasing manager and FVCC senior Miya Rogers said, “We try to stay as whole and local as possible for our in-house products.”

Abbott, the kitchen manager, added that their slogan is, “Good and good for you.”

“It tastes good,” Rogers said. “Because a lot of healthy food is really hard to approach, especially because it just doesn’t taste good, and it doesn’t look good. So our main goal is to not only make it healthy, but to make it look good and taste good.”

Root and Rye is open Wednesday through Friday from 10:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. through May 2. For more information and to check out a menu, visit https://www.fvcc.edu/event/root-rye/2025-04-17.