Jackson Hole, Wyo.-The West Bank’s Q Roadhouse is a restaurant you probably know for slow-cooked barbeque and interpretations of some classic Southern seafood dishes. While that’s an accurate generalization about the menu, Q has also become a more eclectic joint. Some dishes, for example, seem a little unusual among quirkier delights like the fried pickles – an appetizer plucked from way below the Mason-Dixon Line. 

At the invite of Gavin Fine, the friendly face in front of the Fine Dining empire (Q, Rendezvous Bistro, Il Bellagio Osteria and Bistro Catering), we were eager to finally give Q the full test spin. Fine himself joined us for dinner while chef Roger Freedman, a business partner, paraded out a feast of mostly familiar dishes from a menu that simultaneously fits and challenges the usual definition of a roadhouse – a meeting place historically found along stretches highway outside city limits.

While Q does clean, upscale takes on foods perfected in flyover America, like a succulent beef brisket or pulled meat sandwiches, the green curry chicken and rice makes it clear that this ain’t your Uncle Eddy’s BBQ joint. 

The savory fried pickles, dipped in spicy remoloude sauce, are addictively good, and doesn’t it make sense that a restaurant that fries balls of corn dough into hushpuppies also serves falafel? Fried dough balls aside, mixing popular culinary elements from the Deep South and the Middle East is part of Freedman and Fine’s approach to dining: eclectic, unpretentious and fun.

We enjoyed tasting the shrimp and grits, a contemporary favorite at many of the South’s better restaurants, which Q twists slightly by substituting creamy white polenta for grits. 

A true New Orleans classic, the spicy blackened catfish, was delicious and served over rice with shrimp. If you’ve never tried either of those two dishes anywhere and won’t be boarding a plane to the southeast anytime soon, I recommend you give them a whirl at Q. 

Back on the more typically ‘roadhouse’ side of the menu (i.e. red meat), the flank steak was chewy and delicious and served with a mushroom sauce, recalling to mind the one of the best dishes I’ve ever eaten in this valley or anywhere: flank steak with local morels at Stone Table late last summer. 

There was some kind of decadent kurobuta pork grilled cheese sandwich (similar to the toasted bistro-style sandwiches at, er, the Bistro), but our stomachs  were feeling the sense of becoming overly sated. 

In the last few months, Q has also become a hotspot for après ski libations and some bar foods like lamb sliders. More recently, the band the Monkey Wrench gang has begun a weekly residency there. On a recent Wednesday, that trio, lead by the indomitable blues guitarist Bob Greenspan, added a unique flavor by jamming in the main dining room, setting a roadhouse mood without snuffing out table talk.

But don’t hold Q too closely to whatever conception you have of a roadhouse; Fine wouldn’t have it that way. The casual shorthand for his restauarants – the Bistro, the Roadhouse and Osteria – are all, as Fine pointed out, generic words that merely denote a certain place or flavor or sensibility. 

That concept makes most cuisine fair game, whatever its provenance. PJH

Q Roadhouse is located at 2550 Teton Village Road, 739-0700.