Wyoming Beefeaters Disdain Changing of Guard : Fremont County steak houses serve T-bones and filets to hearts’ delight and stomachs’ content.

We live in a contradictory age, when city slickers pay a fortune to become weekend buckaroos herding cattle in the Wyoming outback, yet disdain red meat at the dinner table in favor of some pale bottom-trash fish with a sprig of parsley in its mouth.

I’m sorry, Hopalong, but this won’t do. If you seek the authentic western experience you had better be prepared to sink your canines into a serious chunk of bovine. I’m not talking about Cybill Shepherd’s dainty, ironic smile above a dab of filet mignon in a Beef Council ad. No, I’m talking a T-bone bigger than your head, greasy tire tracks down your chin and plenty of bread and potato to pillow the landing in your G.I. tract.

Are you hungry yet?

If so, welcome to Fremont County, Wyo., which boasts one of the highest concentrations of quality steak houses in the United States. It requires a journey off the interstates, away from major airport hubs, but if you’re on one of those sweaty, squinting, see-America-first motoring vacations, you can enrich your life by passing through Fremont County on your way to Yellowstone National Park, just to the northwest. Fremont has its own spectacular mountains, a section of the Oregon Trail, antelope-dotted sagebrush plains, the Wind River Indian Reservation . . . but that’s not what this is about. It’s about slicing the loins of dimwitted ruminants and eating them.

Still with us, Cybill?

Almost every town with street lights in Wyoming has at least one good place to order a rib-eye, but here within a radius of about 50 miles (and no Wyomingite thinks twice about driving that far for a night out), a handful of establishments compete with Olympian zeal to serve the best steak in the state.

If you grew up in a place where eating mangoes and orange roughy is du jour, or your arteries are clogged with the pessimism of the American Heart Assn., or a stringy disc of beef at some low-rise restaurant chain has turned you off, this is the place to give red meat one more chance.

You can start by looking in the meat department of your market for the little stamps that say “Wyoming lean.” That means grass-fed beef from off the plains, au naturel, no steroids or weightlifting, etc. And once you break through the red meat curtain, you can go all the way and start shopping for buffalo roast.

Bessie Svilar started feeding hungry Yugoslav coal miners in her husband’s Hudson bar and pool parlor in the 1920s--all they could eat, and they could eat lots. The mines have long been closed, the town has diminished to less than 200 souls, Mama Svilar passed away in 1981, but the family cooks on and the portions haven’t diminished, at Svilar’s Bar and Dining Room or at the other famous Hudson steakhouse, with the common Yugoslav name of Club El Toro.

Regulars at these steakhouses come in about every week--silver-haired former cowboys with a finger missing here and there and a hello for most of the people in the room--and sit down for a monstrous meal without so much as a coronary. Likely, they spend the rest of the week bench-pressing tractors and yanking up cottonwood trees by the roots.

Though I cultivate, with my urban friends, an image of myself leaping daily into the saddle or sprinting up mountain peaks, such appetite-building adventures are for a rare weekend, and much of my time is spent squatting before a keyboard. If I’m going to consume a slab of Wyoming beef, even a week of heavy typing won’t metabolize it. So I follow a simple cross-training regimen before visiting a Hudson steakhouse. I go into the mountains, hike under a hot sun with an enormous pack, climb several peaks, ford raging rivers, glissade down snowfields, scare off grizzly bears each morning and eat only instant oatmeal and tomato soup. I try this for two weeks and then I call to mind a vision of the two-pound T-bone (yes, Virginia, there IS . . .), sagging over the edges of a groaning plate, brown as bark on the outside and red as sunset within, encircled by a wall of dare-you fat. If the mind is not ready to embrace this vision I go questing back to crags for another week.

Ready at last--starving, really--I have a number of choices. Svilar’s in Hudson has history and quantity on its side, and though your sides may ache, and you may fill several doggie bags with the leftovers, their steaks are tender and flavorful.

El Toro, like Svilar’s, adds Yugoslav appetizers to its fine steaks, including sarma, a meat mix wrapped in cabbage leaves (more meat, just what we need . . . ). Facing each other along Hudson’s only paved street, these two restaurants have a ‘50s look: red wall paper on the walls, crowds of old-timers and new-timers and dance-bands on weekends.

If you want a more thematically “western” atmosphere, and beans on the side, there is the Atlantic City Mercantile, an hour’s drive west from Hudson, up past Limestone Mountain in Atlantic City, near where Jedediah Smith discovered a route through the Rockies for the Oregon Trail. The “city” has only a few dozen year-round residents (the gold mines’ golden days were a century ago), but along with the Mercantile, it hosts a second fine restaurant, Miner’s Delight, run by the intrepid Gina Newman, who offers a five-course diner with a choice of two entrees, one of which is always (you guessed it) beef.

Situated between the dilapidated coziness of Hudson and the craggy redoubt of Atlantic City is the Hitching Rack in Lander. It was here that I ate my first Wyoming steak, and I go back again and again. The steaks are aged and carefully trimmed, and they retain the flavor and tenderness that we have been spoiled to expect in Fremont County. Since I am aging and in need of trim, myself, the variety of cuts and sizes of steak at the Rack--plus some artfully prepared chicken and pasta dishes--assure me I’ll be able to rise from my chair at the end of a meal. And on the side there are varied appetizers and a salad bar that is almost (how do I say it?) Californian.

There is still the risk--there is always risk in a Wyoming steakhouse--that I will waddle into the parking lot feeling like I swallowed a saddle, but that’s my own fault.

The old ranchers you see around the tables at Wyoming steakhouses take the campaign against beef seriously. It’s not just the changing diets of Americans that worry them. That gustatory prissiness is viewed by some as part of a larger campaign to put Wyoming-style ranching out of business.

This lifestyle of rugged individualism has always been underwritten by generous government subsidies for grazing on public lands and dams to irrigate hayfields. Critics who espouse a leaner diet and wilderness without cow pies have coined phrases like “Cattle free in ‘93” or “No moo in ’92.” It’s not hard to imagine, from a corner booth in Svilar’s, that these same “tree huggers” are part of an invidious conspiracy to persuade Americans that steaks and burgers are the path to congestive heart failure.

Most Wyoming ranchers don’t buy it. Their prima facie evidence is here in the dining rooms of Wyoming, where gray-haired gentlemen in their 80s come back every week for a plateful of red-and-juicy. They’ve spent their lives in cardiovascular high gear, working in mines, breaking horses, building fences and throwing chain on oil rigs. Do that kind of work and you can eat a cow, no sweat.

Elsewhere in the country, beef bashing may be counteracted by the hankering many people feel for the imagined life of the Old West. They flow through Wyoming in droves of Winnebagos every summer. Montana author Bill Kittredge puts it: “ . . . it’s a life to which a lot of people, in a complex variety of ways, are returning. Turning back to livestock and the long wheel of days, and some chance at self-knowledge, or at least some knowledge of who killed the cow you are eating.”

I sought that knowledge at the Hitching Rack, and the sorrowful truth is that the cook didn’t go out and lasso a longhorn from amid the buffalo grass on nearby Table Mountain. The steaks came from Iowa. “The fact is,” said owner Daryl McCain, “the corn-fed beef tastes better, our customers like it.” The other restaurants where I checked admitted the same: Wyoming imports beef.

Wyoming’s dry, high plains may not be the best place to raise beef--or, at least, our steers need a few months in an all-you-can-eat Midwestern feed lot before they arrive at the table. Ranching here is no longer a full-time occupation for many: after branding, a lot of cowboys go back to “real” jobs, working for an oil company, teaching school, selling “ranchettes” to urban refugees. I’m not sure the steak would taste quite the same if Svilar’s were not crowded with white foreheads, and creased, sunburned necks; the gentle laughter and jostling, the gossip and weather talk. It’s worth a visit now, while it lasts. In fact, I’d like to invite Cybill Shepherd to sit down across from me and try a little steer wrestling with a two-pound T-bone.

GUIDEBOOK

Where to Find

the Best Beef

Svilar’s Bar and Dining Room: 173 S. Main St., Hudson, Wyo.; (307) 332-4516.

Club El Toro: 132 S. Main St., Hudson, Wyo.; (307) 332-4627.

Atlantic City Mercantile: 100 E. Main St., Atlantic City, Wyo.; (307) 332-5143.

Miner’s Delight, 290 Atlantic City Road, Atlantic City, Wyo.; (307) 332-3513.

The Hitching Rack: Highway 287 South, Lander, Wyo.; (307) 332-4322.