How The Trough Became Target Range's Living Room, Missoula

A neurosurgeon built the tables by hand. The neighborhood filled them before there was even an ad.

The tables at The Trough on Clements Road in Missoula were built by a neurosurgeon. Carter Beck cut and assembled them himself when he and his wife Susan were converting the old dairy building into a restaurant in 2015. He could have hired it out. He is a practicing neurosurgeon at St. Patrick Hospital, not short on income or demands on his time. But he wanted the tables to feel like something you would find in a farmhouse, not something ordered from a restaurant supply catalog. So he built them.

That detail says more about The Trough than any menu description could. This is a place where the owners did the work by hand because they cared what the room felt like when a neighbor sat down in it.

The Becks did not set out to open a restaurant. They moved to the Target Range neighborhood, west of Reserve Street, and noticed something obvious: there was nowhere to eat. The nearest full-service restaurant was a drive. The neighborhood had roughly 4,000 people, a gas station, and a market that had been cycling through owners since the 1960s. What it did not have was a place to sit down with a plate of food and a glass of wine without getting in the car.

Carter and Susan bought the property in April 2014. The building at the corner of Clements Road and North Avenue had been King's Dairy in the 1960s, selling raw milk. Dale and Betty Jo Johnson ran it as Dale's Dairy from 1973 until they retired in 2009, and it briefly operated as the Target Range Market under a different owner before the Becks arrived. The 15-foot fiberglass cow on the corner, installed during the Dale's Dairy era, has survived every transition. It is the landmark people give directions by, the corner you turn at when someone says "the big cow."

Susan redesigned the interior to keep the dairy farmhouse feel. Big windows. Barn-style light fixtures. A fireplace for the months when the patio is buried in snow. The market side, renamed The Olde Dairy, reopened first with an expanded selection: 400-plus wine labels, Montana microbrews from KettleHouse, Bayern, Big Sky, and others, plus fresh produce, organic groceries, and local products like Le Petit bread and Kalispell Kreamery milk. The gas pumps stayed. The cow stayed. The bones of the neighborhood market stayed.

The Trough restaurant opened in June 2015. The Becks planned a soft opening, no advertising, just to test the kitchen. They were slammed to the door.

Susan Beck told the Missoulian that night that people kept saying the same thing: where have you been, we have needed this. General manager Emily Englund, who helped launch the restaurant alongside head chef Susan Phillips, described the response as immediate and overwhelming. The neighborhood had been waiting for someone to fill the gap. The Becks just happened to be the ones who moved in, saw it, and did the work.

The menu at The Trough covers burgers, sandwiches, soups, salads, pasta, hand-cut ribeye, and seafood. Breakfast is added on weekends, and the cast iron skillets are a local favorite. A walk-up and bike-up window serves Big Dipper ice cream year-round. The dining room seats 60 and handles private events, birthday parties, and catering. The covered patio added in recent years means outdoor seating is no longer limited to two good months.

Mark Jones, the current manager, credits the staff with keeping the place running as a neighborhood fixture rather than a restaurant people drive across town for. Regulars on Nextdoor describe The Trough as the center of the Target Range neighborhood. It hosts knitting groups, game nights, bridal showers, and the kind of Tuesday evening dinners where people walk over rather than drive. On football Saturdays the bar fills with locals watching the Griz, a burger in one hand and a Montana microbrew in the other.

The Olde Dairy market next door carries a wine selection that runs 400 labels deep and a local product list that keeps growing: KornUtopia popcorn, Lifeline cheese and beef, Montana Coffee Traders, Hunter Bay Coffee, Lake Missoula Tea Co., Mountain View jams, Montana Jerky Co. In summer, The Olde Dairy sells inflated river tubes for the Clark Fork float. In winter, they rent RV and boat storage. The site claims to be Missoula's oldest continually operating neighborhood market and filling station, a line that traces back to King's Dairy in the 1960s.

The one consistent criticism across review platforms is service. The Trough carries 4.4 stars from nearly 700 Google reviews, and the food gets steady praise: the steak fries topped with ribeye bites and roasted garlic, the fish tacos, the ribeye dinners, the weekend skillets. But a handful of reviews mention slow turnaround or inattentive servers, sometimes attributed to a young front-of-house staff. The kitchen is reliable. The dining room less uniformly so.

What holds the place together is not the food or the market or the gas pumps. It is the fact that the Becks built something the neighborhood was already shaped for but did not yet have. Target Range had the density, the families, the distance from downtown, and the decades-old habit of stopping at the corner store. The Trough added a place to sit down.

The 15-foot cow still stands on the corner of Clements and North. Five names have gone on the building behind it. The tables Carter Beck built by hand are the ones people sit at now.