Just eight months after opening for business, Chef Jarrett Wrisley \u201902 got the call that his new Bozeman, Mont., restaurant, Shan, had been nominated for the James Beard Foundation\u2019s 2024 best new restaurant in the U.S.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIt was a shock,\u201d says Wrisley, and Shan (rhymes with \u201cpan\u201d) was a finalist at the ceremony in Chicago. Now, after nearly two years as Shan\u2019s proprietor, Wrisley has settled comfortably in the Rocky Mountains, half a world away from his culinary roots in the Far East.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Majoring in Asian studies and Chinese at Colgate, Wrisley\u2019s on-the-ground introduction to China was a semester at Beijing University. That was followed by an internship with the New York Stock Exchange, and he was mulling a Wall Street career, but his heart was not in it. A week following his last day interning, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, devastated international finance. \u201cThat made the decision for me,\u201d says Wrisley, and he went back to China. \u201cI traveled, learned Chinese with greater fluency, and worked as a freelance food writer.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For several successful years, he penned travel and culinary pieces for magazines and newspapers in Asia and the U.S., including the Atlantic<\/em>, Time<\/em>, Food & Wine<\/em>, Travel + Leisure<\/em>, and National Geographic<\/em>. \u201cI got paid to travel and eat,\u201d he says. \u201cA lot of my stories were centered around culture, socioeconomic conditions, and politics. Food intersected all of these.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n When he moved to Thailand in 2008, he arrived in the middle of a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat, and he was assigned to cover the crisis for the Atlantic. \u201cMy way of explaining what was happening in Thailand in political terms was to go to the rallies and write about the things people were eating there because what they were eating reflected where they were from, and where they were from was a reflection of their political identity,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n However, a financial crisis forced another pivot as magazines went digital, and the Great Recession caused payments to shrink, and checks were late, he says. \u201cAt that time, I didn\u2019t see a future in journalism for me.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n With the considerable culinary knowledge he digested while researching Thailand\u2019s regional cuisines, Wrisley took a leap and opened his first restaurant, Soul Food, in Bangkok, which received the Michelin Guide\u2019s<\/em> Big Gourmand award. A second location was established in Hong Kong, and he wrote two Chinese food cookbooks.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The plaudits and honors kept coming when he opened two Italian trattorias, both called Appia (named one of the world\u2019s best 50 restaurants by Monocle magazine), in Bangkok with friend and frequent collaborator Paolo Vitaletti. Appia was born of extensive travels in Italy, which also resulted in an award-winning cookbook, The Roads to Rome<\/em>. In 2017, Wrisley opened a Thai restaurant with Black Restaurant Group in Hong Kong, and he launched a fast casual noodle and sandwich shop and a pizzeria in Bangkok.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The frenetic pace and yearslong toil shaped the work he loved, but like so many, his life changed once again with the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. \u201cThe scene in Bangkok was dire. It went from the most visited tourist city in the world to having zero arrivals,\u201d he says. In 2020 and 2021, he closed all but the Appia restaurants and the pizzeria, which catered to the Bangkok upper class unable to leave the country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was time to start anew. Leaving his home and businesses in 2021 was humbling, he says. \u201cI said goodbye to my life in Asia. I just let it all go.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He bought an old Subaru, a tent, and some sleeping bags and drove around the U.S. for four months with his wife, Candice, and their son, August, looking for a place to live, he says. \u201cI hadn\u2019t lived here in 22 years.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The trio traveled to Montana because they\u2019d never been there before, but they knew immediately Bozeman was their new home. \u201cI swore I\u2019d never open a restaurant again,\u201d he says, \u201cbut I didn\u2019t want to work for anyone else.\u201d The couple found a small restaurant space \u2014 its name, Shan, is the Chinese character for \u201cmountain.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI cook traditional mountain food from China and Thailand with products from Montana, even from this valley,\u201d says Wrisley, who, for example, makes dan dan noodles with Meishan pork, \u201cwhich is a Chinese breed, but it\u2019s raised by a pig farmer 10 miles up the road.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He\u2019s reaching back to what he knows, he adds. \u201cMy goal when I opened Shan was to build a bridge between this little mountain town and my previous life in Asia, and I think I\u2019ve accomplished that. I think that\u2019s one of the coolest things I could possibly do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Wrisley admits he\u2019s always been food obsessed: \u201cI started cooking when I was 6 or 7 years old, and by 9 or 10, I was cooking dinner for my family. I could always remember every dish I\u2019d ever eaten at a restaurant from the age of 5.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Jarrett Wrisley’s restaurant brings Asian fusion to Montana.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1263,"featured_media":16259,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[2533,2535,2539,1165,2543,2536,2534,2531,2537,2541,2542,2538,746,2532,751,2540,117],"coauthors":[1825],"class_list":["post-16056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-endeavor","tag-appia","tag-bozeman","tag-chinese-food","tag-colgate-university","tag-cookbook-author","tag-culinary-career","tag-food-writing","tag-james-beard-award","tag-jarrett-wrisley","tag-michelin-guide","tag-montana","tag-regional-cuisine","tag-restaurant","tag-shan","tag-soul-food","tag-thai-food","tag-travel"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/palXSH-4aY","amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2025\/01\/mag-endeavor-hero-montana.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1263"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16056"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16056\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16923,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16056\/revisions\/16923"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16056"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.colgate.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=16056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}