After spending 25 years in the catering industry with her business Earth Angel Organics, serving everyone from raft guide companies to wedding guests to private chef events, Meg Blakney noticed an increasing number of requests from customers with food restrictions.
Between the high demand for plant-based food and the pandemic, which decimated catering events last year, Meg and her husband Tom decided to retire from catering and open Dan d’Lion, a vegan restaurant in Hungry Horse.
“We decided to be a little off-the-beaten path and we decided to be all vegan, gluten-free and 95% organic,” Blakney said.
Although the location might not be obvious for a plant-based restaurant, Meg says she often sees cars making U-turns on the highway, and the eatery is popular among both tourists and locals.
“We were just shocked,” Blakney said. “We thought we knew the demographic of who would be attracted to this kind of food. We were so far off.”
The Blakneys expected younger customers in their 20s and 30s, but they often serve retired people, athletes and many professionals in both the traditional and nontraditional medical fields.
Even though their catering business wasn’t vegan, the Blakneys wanted to create food that was safe for everyone and make it easier to avoid contamination the an all-vegan restaurant.
With a vision to create “crave-able” vegan dishes, Blakney calls every new recipe a science fair project, and says it takes a lot of experimentation and unique spice blends and ingredients to make mouth-watering vegan recipes.
Throughout college, Blakney worked for Campbell’s Soup doing lab testing for V8 Juice and did internships in the labs of Experimental Foods, where she worked on projects like texture palatability and volume of angel food cakes.
“You just tweak one ingredient at a time,” Blakney said. “Sometimes it’s introducing a new ingredient and sometimes it’s extracting an ingredient, and that’s come in very helpful making cheese here because it’s a whole different world.”
Through Blakney’s experiments, she’s discovered that a combination of hazelnut and coconut base, along with additional ingredients like tapioca, starch and different seasonings, creates the best vegan cheese for her pizzas.
Documenting everything throughout the process, Blakney takes elaborate notes and conducts blind tastings with her employees who rate each recipe.
Blakney has perfected the popular Montana Sapphire Pizza, which is a vegan version of a Greek pizza with roasted garlic, peppers, tomatoes, olives and tofu feta cheese.
Many of the vegetables come from their half-acre garden where they grow produce, including heirloom tomatoes, lettuce, collards, beets and edible flowers, typically planning the menu around what was recently harvested.
Using a unique blend of spices, Blakney says the flavors shock many of her customers. In the Lebanese garden hash, she adds potatoes and vegetables seasoned with cumin, cinnamon, coriander and turmeric.
“We just like to pizzazz everything with lots of flavors,” she said.
Many of her sauces are also made with a wide variety of ingredients and can be used on both savory and sweet dishes, like the Glacier Dew sauce made from local Glacier Distilling Company whiskey and the rhubarb ginger sauce, which she originally used on salmon and pork and is now used on tarts.
“It has a real nice zing to it,” Blakney said.
One of Dan d’Lion’s most popular desserts is the huckleberry shake, which uses a hazelnut butter, coconut milk and date base. Those are the same ingredients for Blakney’s coffee creamer, which she’s working on selling to retailers.
Blakney has been taking classes over the past decade to get her manufacturing license through the state, and she plans to package items like coffee creamers, buns and other recipes to sell to other restaurants and grocery stores.
Dan d’Lion is open Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Hours will be reduced in the winter months.
For more information, visit www.earthangelorganicsmt.com.