“We’re still using the same recipes that basically came with the store,” says Pork Chop John’s owner Ed Orizotti. Orizotti’s late dad John bought the original location in 1969—becoming just the second family (and third John, following Burklund’s son-in-law John Semmens) to own Pork Chop John’s after Semmens retired. When nudged, Orizotti reminds me that the batter recipe and breading technique remain, as ever, top secret.
And why fix what ain’t broke, when the double-battering method lends satisfying crunch and juiciness to the pork? Since Orizotti the younger assumed the helm in 1985, Pork Chop John’s has only evolved to appease customers’ penchant for the extra. A “loaded deluxe” gets you mayo, lettuce, and tomato. You can also add cheese, a fried egg, bacon, or ham; or do as the local high school and college students do and request a “pork burger,” a.k.a. a quarter-pound cheeseburger atop the fried pork chop.
Absurd toppings aside, a traditional pork chop sandwich makes for reliable road food, the kind you can wolf down over a lap napkin in your car without fear of drippage. Indeed, Orizotti tells me some customers admit that they haven’t been inside the restaurant in years, because they only ever order from the walk-up window. That Butte is situated almost halfway between Yellowstone and Glacier National Park makes it an ideal stopover city, even just for lunch. (This very road trip brought me to Butte this summer.)
“We get a lot of people coming back and forth between the parks, stopping in and saying, ‘I want to try the best sandwich in the state!’” Orizotti says.
“This is the place,” wrote KC O from Albuquerque in a Yelp review of Pork Chop John’s in August. “Been there forever and has the charm and character to match.” They add that the pork chop sandwich is “culinary nostalgia nirvana.”
Pork Chop John’s OG storefront on 8 W. Mercury churns out up to 300 sandwiches a day depending on the season (the most popular being summer). Since their tenure began, the Orizottis have spilled operations into all three stories of the original building, added a wholesale arm, and opened a second location downtown—all adding up to roughly three quarters of a million pork chops sold each year.
By the time the second outpost of Pork Chop John’s arrived in the early ’70s, the Freeway Tavern had established itself as another favorite among tourists and locals, including the late, Butte-born stuntman Evel Knievel, who was best friends with Freeway Tavern co-founder Harry “Muzzy” Faroni. The man—who passed away in 2015—opened the bar with his brother-in-law George “Stan” Stanisich in 1962, the same year his daughter Kathi Faroni was born. She grew up there, picking up peanut shells and loose change off the bar floor to put in her piggy bank. Soon after opening, Muzzy created the Wop Chop, a single-battered variation on the pork chop sandwich whose name cheekily nods to the family’s Italian American heritage. Faroni learned the process at her parents’ sides, which was and is still all done by hand.