Eating Wyoming: Lander’s Mulino Italian Bistro Is Hard To Find, But Worth It

LANDER — In the heart of downtown, hidden from all casual view, there’s a serious little slice of Italy, waiting to be discovered by the keenly observant. 

Casual passersby are likely to miss the restaurant the first time or two they pass it by on Main Street. While there is a sign advertising the place, it’s tiny and nondescript. The only words visible to travelers along Main Street are simply, “Mulino.”

That’s Italian for mill. But the Mulino Italian Bistro is not a mill at all. It is a restaurant, as posh as anyone might find anywhere in the world. The food is sophisticated and well-plated, and the cocktails are quirky and fun. 

Diners will enjoy things like short rib pappardelle, which marries slow-cooked, tender short rib beefwith wide, hand-made ribbons of pasta. The whole dish is coated in a sauce akin to a caramelized beef stew reduction. 

It’s as good as it sounds, but it’s not just the food that’s great at Mulino. There is an atmosphere here that’s a little like walking into your newly found Italian grandmother’s home for Christmas. 

The tables were filled with happy faces, enjoying a little wine with a delicious meal, when Cowboy State Daily visited.

And it soon became clear to this reporter that leaving this restaurant without having made a few new friends, is improbable, if not impossible. 

While Cowboy State Daily was there, three complete strangers out of the blue invited this reporter to help them share a round of each dessert that the restaurant had for that night. 

“We need a fourth to make it work,” they said, almost apologetically. “Because there’s four desserts. Won’t you help us?”

How can one refuse such an offer? 

New friends were made, and fabulous desserts ensued, with a taste for each member of this newly formed party of friends.

A Beautiful Thing

One thing that really sticks out to those new to Mulino is the three small children who are politely running about the restaurant, helping stir drinks behind the bar in between playing with bikes and taking riverside walks with their babysitter.

These children belong to Mulino’s owners, Joe and Angie Hammer. 

But these children are definitely not the kind who are there to be seen and not heard. The trio are an integral part of the restaurant’s nightly operation, and their parents wouldn’t have it any other way. 

Joe and Angie are masters at keeping their children actively involved in the restaurant.

“They have little knives and little cutting boards and little chef outfits,” Joe told Cowboy State Daily. “And I’ll just give each of them a half pound of butter and say, ‘Hey, cut this butter up.’ And then I’ll use that butter to make their dinner.”

When they’ve finished with butter, there’s broccoli to chop for their dinner, as well as other ingredients.

“We just save everything that they cut, and it goes into their dinner, which I think it’s good that these kids get to see where their food comes from and how it all works,” Joe said. 

Having the children “bopping” in and out of the restaurant throughout the night is what the Hammers say is their version of the American dream.

“Being like small business owners and getting to do what we love to do and have always loved to do and are so passionate about, but then also to have our families involved,” Joe said. “That’s so fun because these kids, first of all, they want to work. They’re like little border collies. Jackson wants to wash the dishes and help our back server bus tables and polish glasses and Chez (Czeslaw) wants to help cook.”

Jackson often helps Joe cut pasta, too. They talk about Lander, life, and pasta. 

“And then, at the end of the night, Jackson is the first one who is like, ‘Daddy, it’s time to get a broom. It’s time to sweep. And it’s the most beautiful thing ever.”

In Search Of Home

When one of his kids comes into the kitchen only to announce, “Oh, you’re making gnocchi,” it’s like confirmation that somehow stars and fortune have aligned to bring Joe and his family to the right place, at just the right time. 

That wasn’t something he could have ever predicted starting out. It’s always been something of a leap of faith and definitely comes from that invisible thing we like to think of as heart.

Angie and Joe met in Philadelphia at a high-end restaurant called Mica. She had been certified as a level two sommelier with the Court of Master Sommeliers, and he had completed a culinary degree at Le Cordon Bleu Institute of Culinary Arts in Pittsburgh. 

Right off the bat, they were the perfect match for the restaurant, with Joe handling the food and Angie handling the drinks. They got along so well, in fact, that they were soon married. 

But thinking about starting a family in Pittsburgh? That made them both a bit uneasy. 

“The lifestyle we want to live was we wanted slow, small-town life. Access to the mountains. Not a lot of people,” Joe said. “And that’s just not Philadelphia.”

So the couple remodeled a van into a tiny traveling home — a “tent on wheels,” to affordably travel the country as they searched for a new place to call home.

They started out thinking that place could be Bend, Oregon. Joe had a friend talking things up there. They gave it a few months to try it out. But it was ultimately a little too “big city.”

They headed next for Jackson, Wyoming. That only lasted a couple of weeks before the couple knew it wasn’t right either.

“We went to Lander for the summer,” Joe said. “And we just never left. We like, got stuck.”

It was a combination of things working the magic. Outdoor recreation, world-class climbing. A real estate market that still seemed affordable. And kids riding their bikes around the city park like they didn’t have a care in the world.

“It was like this small piece of small-town America out there,” Joe said. “And we were like, how do we make this work?”

Stars Aligned

The answer to that turned out to be simpler than either of them could have imagined. 

While the couple had made a pact when they first married to own a restaurant in five years, they had quickly realized as they traveled around the country that it might not be as easy as they’d dreamed. It might take more than five years.

They immediately started looking for jobs in Lander. And happened across a brand-new restaurant opening up in Lander, just behind the Mill House. It was part of a restoration project and in a fledgling, not yet even framed-up state.

So, Joe wandered into this restaurant-to-be, just to see if they might need a chef. He’d worked with well-known, high-end chefs in Pittsburgh, like Chef Chip Roman, who trained at Le Bec-Fin under Georges Perrier. Roman later opened the James Beard-nominated Blackfish, in addition to the Mica Restaurant in Pittsburgh, where Joe and Angie had met.

Unfortunately, the owner of the upcoming restaurant had already lined up her chef. But she could still use some help designing a kitchen for that chef if he was interested in that.

It would do while he looked for full-time employment, he decided. 

That was a lucky decision, because when that chef didn’t show up, it put him first in line for the job. 

After all, who else would know the kitchen any better?

Eventually, the unlikely chef opportunity turned into the even more unlikely chance to make their newlywed dreams come true. One day the owner decided the last thing she really wanted to do was to own a restaurant. 

“We signed the paperwork for Mulino one day before our five-year anniversary,” Angie said, beaming. 

Lander Is Extended Family

Since then, Joe and Angie have implemented many changes to the restaurant to make it their own. Angie handles the cocktails just like she once did at Mica in Pittsburgh. She crafts original recipes like Tall in the Saddle, a smoky, rosemary-laced twist on a Manhattan, while Joe dreams up made-from-scratch pasta dishes using fresh, seasonal produce, as well as cast-iron seared dishes like the ever-popular chicken duo or cast-iron seared beef tenderloin. 

Angie grows a garden of fresh herbs to complement the restaurant’s food and drinks, while Joe has found local greens from places like Uncle Sassy and Greybull Farms. It’s also not uncommon to see him at the farmer’s market, buying up a large quantity of tomatoes for a beautiful and freshly made gazpacho soup.

Making things by hand, from scratch is important to Joe, who grew up in a family that treated food as just food. It was sustenance, not celebration.

“Like I wouldn’t say I was a picky eater, but I wouldn’t have eaten blue cheese back when I was 17, 18 years old because those are things I just wasn’t exposed to,” he said. “My parents didn’t eat those things.”

He only learned to see food differently after taking a random job at a ski resort for a free ski pass. He was planted in the cafeteria, bussing tables at first and then, eventually, making salads.

“I can remember like learning how to make Thousand Island Dressing or something like that, and there was this big epiphany,” he recalled. “I was like, ‘Wait, you can make that!?’”

Emulsifying eggs to make mayonnaise was yet another epiphany, one that made him realize that he really liked not just cooking food, but the science behind it, and how that can be used to elevate a dish to new levels of delicious.

“Ever since that, cooking has just been my life,” he said. “It’s my lifestyle. I cook for my family. I cook for my Lander family every day. It’s just become an extension of me at this point.” 

And that’s how the restaurant in Lander succeeds in creating not just delicious food, but a sense of coming home to a restaurant where, on any given night, young chefs learn to chop their own broccoli and butter in an American dream that’s been made real.

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.