The way Xanterra narrativizes on its website and menus for its higher-end park concessions is not unique to the M66 Grill, but slight variations on their key themes can be found. The Grant Village Dining Room, overlooking the scenic West Thumb geyser basin and Yellowstone Lake, plays equally hard to get with its reservation policy. But on its menu, the green leaf icon is not just for items made with sustain-able or organic ingredients but also for those made within 500 miles—one of the only clear statements about foodshed seen in the dozens of Xanterra concessions menus that I reviewed. There is, however, less info provided about the sourcing of menu items, but there is a brief italicized statement, “We proudly support local ranchers.”
At the elegant, stately, white tablecloth Lake Hotel Dining Room, which over-looks the waters of Lake Yellowstone, the website tells us that “the menu is creative and upscale, with unique dishes of fresh fish, wild game and more. Our commitment to sustainable cuisine (local and/or organic) is no more prevalent than at this casually elegant restaurant.” On this dinner menu, many of the green leaf items indicate a city, although it’s not always clear what hails from there. The “Wyoming Legacy Steak” is clearly from Cody, as stated, but what part of the “Caramelized Onion and Gruyere Cheese Ravioli” hails from Denver?
With a casual upscale (for the parks) vibe akin to the M66 Grill, the Mammoth Hotel Dining Room (MHDR) is a no-reservations venue known for its Art Deco style with views of the old Fort Yellowstone parade grounds and grazing bison and elk. Xanterra’s website and the restaurant’s menu lean hard into the notions of sustainability that entice their target market of travelers who fancy themselves conscious, responsible, and traveling lightly. The site bills the MHDR as “The First 4-Star Certified Green Restaurant in the National Parks,” touting its 2011 certification by the Green Restaurant Association, a nonprofit that evaluates restaurants on environmental sustainability criteria including energy, food, water, waste, disposables, chemicals, pollution reduction, furnishings, and building materials.
To achieve its 4-Star certification, the Dining Room demonstrated sustainable operations through a major restroom remodel, installation of energy-saving LED lamps and water-saving fixtures, sourcing of local and organic cuisine, re-cycling and composting restaurant waste, and using environmentally-preferable cleaning products.
(Xanterra 2022b)
The MHDR dinner menu contains a handful of green leaves and concludes with a list of Xanterra’s 26 local food-sourcing partners, as well as their Softest Footprint philosophy statement (Xanterra 2021). Although a restroom remodel alone might not be enough to attract a clientele of cosmopolitan diners, Xanterra’s storytelling on its restaurant websites and menus works to affirm travelers’ imagined selves. But perhaps no Yellowstone concession speaks to cosmopolitan travelers with a taste for enrichment as much as the Old West Dinner Cookout.
“An Evening You Won’t Soon Forget”: Old West Dinner Cookout
The range of concessions that Xanterra offers at Yellowstone National Park is typical of park concessions nationwide, particularly in larger, remote, yet heavily traveled parks. What is truly atypical in the parks is the dining experience as an attraction in its own right, as exemplified by the Roosevelt Old West Dinner Cook-out. The boulder-strewn plains of Pleasant Valley, near Lost Creek, in the north central part of the park, are the site of one of the most unusual food experiences in a US national park: a pricey, alfresco, picnic-table or stump-based all-you-can-eat dinner consisting of a massive steak, coleslaw, potato salad, baked beans, corn, muffins, watermelon, fruit crisp, drinks, and cowboy coffee, only accessible via horseback or horse-drawn wagon. To partake of the dinner, visitors plunk down $64–$99 per adult, depending on their choice of horse or wagon, and meet up at the Roosevelt Corral, where they are greeted by jeans-, plaid-, and cowboy hat-clad wranglers who lead them on horseback or drive them in a covered wagon. Either way, they end up at Yancey’s Hole, a clearing in the Pleasant Valley, where they can listen to cowboy singers and storytellers, pet the horses, and scan the horizon for bison. They might notice that the cooks are busy preparing the dinner over propane-fueled grills in permanent, open-sided, industrial kitchens, rather than over a genuine provisional campfire, but they probably won’t be too bothered by this. Once the dinner bell rings, it is every man for himself, and everyone gets in line for dinner. Travelers pass through a buffet line where “cowboys” pile food on their metal plates before they retire to an upturned stump or picnic table to chow down. Anyone still hungry can pass back through the food line, but most travelers gather around the fire to listen to more cowboy stories and to join in a sing-along before they’re loaded back on their horses or wagons for the ride back to the corral.
Xanterra’s old west cookout relies on different representational strategies than its basic or higher-end food concessions. They make few claims about the quality of the food, beyond describing it as “real cowboy grub” with “real western beef steaks” and “signature Roosevelt Baked Beans” (Xanterra 2022c). (Apparently, in this simulacrum of an old west dinner, that the food is real should not be taken for granted!) There is no information provided—either on the website or during the experience itself—about the sourcing of the food or its sustainability. With no photographs on the web page illustrating the food or the eating experience, the emphasis is on the mode of transport to get to the meal (horse or wagon), the beautiful outdoor setting, the massive servings, the ability to observe and interact with “cow folk” while eating, and the winkingly transformative nature of the evening that will take visitors from city slicker to cowpoke. Xanterra relies on playful prose full of dropped g’s to emulate western cowboy talk:
You’ll find those cooks dishin’ up some real cowboy grub at our popular Old West Dinner Cookout. The coffee’s brewin’ over the open campfire, and our wranglers love talkin’ your ears off over a strong cup o’ Joe!’ … You’ll find your boots tappin’ to old western songs sung by our singin’ cowboy. You may have come here as a city slicker, but you’ll go back as a regular cowpoke!
(Xanterra 2022c)
The transformative promise of the old west cookout is contingent on the acceptance of its simulated authenticity. Xanterra beckons visitors to become enriched through a one-of-a- kind (thus genuine) food experience in which the food itself— whether it is local, organic, sustainable, or any of the other things touted in the representation of the regular concessions—is almost an afterthought, taking back seat to the intimate, spectacular, immersive, and ultimately unforgettable nature of the event.