The Haystack, Double Barrel Cafe
The Double Barrel
Location: 15th Street and 9th Ave. So, in the little house that’s been several businesses over the years.
The Double Barrel is both old and new, being new at this location, but old as a successor to the old Double Barrel that was on the West Side for so many years. One of the proprietors here is a relation of the former owner on the West Side, and all the staff is super nice.
The space is very small, with a small kitchen/grill and small dining area upstairs, with another sitting area/dining area in the basement.
They do have a decent breakfast and lunch and even dinner menu, but to me it seems like the business is first and foremost a coffee house that sells various baked goods including their locally famous many-flavored biscuits. I can best describe those as what a baking-powder biscuit would taste like if you added some flavors and frosting and such. But it still is a biscuit. Not really for me, but other people seem to like them, coming and going to order a few for takeout during my visit.
To me, a biscuit belongs on a breakfast plate, smothered in sausage gravy. So when I visited as past of the never-ending search for The Best Breakfast in Great Falls, I ordered “The Haystack”, described as “home-style biscuits fresh out of the oven topped with crispy golden brown hash browns and smothered in creamy sausage gravy”. Sounds yummy. I went with the two biscuit option, for $7.95. That was a biscuit too far, it turned out. This was a monster plate o chow, as can be seen in the photo. It was also a monster dose of starch for one sitting with the hash browns added in. But for all that it probably would have been yummy except for one thing – I thought the creamy sausgage gravy just did not have much flavor, lacking spice in the sausage and something else in the gravy, like maybe pepper. I ended up having to apply green Tabasco liberally to spice this up.
And that’s kind of the one complaint I have about the Double Barrel, food that’s rather bland to my palate. I also tried a lunch here earlier, a burger with their Big Sky Green Chili that’s an old family recipe ($12.95), and to me there just wasn’t a whole lot of spice to the Green Chili. The burger was good, and a generous portion, but the Chili disappointed me.
You want so much for this place to succeed because the people are so nice, and maybe they are just playing it safe with the spices in a town that seems to demand toned down spices in all things, but for me they would need to spice things up in general to become a real regular stop. Or maybe I need to order something else.
One other thing I will say for this place is that whoever was responsible for their online presence, website and Facebook and the whole thing, they did a really good job.