A Quest for Food at Yellowstone
Yellowstone is really, really remote. If you haven't brought an RV stocked up with everything you'll need, your food options are pretty limited.
At Yellowstone, all of the concessions are run by Xanterra – restaurants, cafeterias, hotels, stores, you name it. You have to leave the park to escape them, and there are precious few options for leaving the park that won't take several hours of travel time. (I am told in a comment that the general stores are run by DNC, not Xanterra; while I saw no evidence of this, according to the Internet it could be true. This is surprising, because it doesn't show in the quality, or lack thereof, of the stores.)
My quest for food begins, as I'm sure do many others, at the Canyon Village cafeteria, which offers meager portions of mediocre food at inflated prices. For breakfast you can have a couple fork-fulls of scrambled eggs, and two slices of bacon that are so dry and hard you risk breaking a tooth. For lunch, even the pre-made salads are pretty sad-looking. And it's not exactly cheap. This gets old after about one visit.
The park is so big that sometimes your culinary options are dictated by geography: you can either choose from the “local” options, or drive an hour to get something else. So, hungry at Old Faithful, I try the Old Faithful Lodge cafeteria, which looks nicer than the one at Canyon and seems to have more options. Wow, is it bad. I mean, stomach-ache bad. Not hungry again till the next day bad. And still overpriced.
Stuck nearby again, I actually tried it a second time, but to try and be safe, I got a sandwich and some soup. The sandwich was awful, and left me with a stomach ache. How do you mess up a sandwich? (Xanterra manages to make awful sandwiches at the Yavapi Cafeteria at the Grand Canyon, too; perhaps it's a systemic failure.)
The various General Stores include eateries called Soda Fountains, which are attempts to provide soda-fountain-like counter service. The food is slightly better here than at the cafeterias, though not by much. But the service – oh, the humanity! I'm a pretty patient person, but the service is just horrendously slow, and bad on top of it. You sit watching the minutes tick by, wondering if you will survive long enough to eat your meal. And it's still too expensive.
There are Deli establishments at Canyon Village, the Old Faithful Inn, and the Lake Hotel, where you can get sandwiches and the like. This doesn't mean you place an order and have someone make you a nice sandwich. Instead, you choose from the pre-made, wrapped sandwiches on the little shelf, which amount to four bland choices. They are barely acceptable and pretty tasteless.
At some point I get the idea that, given a General Store with a grocery section, I can just “roll my own,” even without a grill – there are many foods that don't require cooking. Well, the average gas station puts these stores to shame, grocery-wise.
At Mammoth Hot Springs I discover the Terrace Grill, kind of a fast-food joint. Now we're getting somewhere. The burger is somewhat better than average for fast food, and the fries are actually quite good. The first problem is that, if you just had a fast food burger yesterday, or anytime this week, really, you don't much want another right now. The second is that it's at Mammoth Hot Springs, which is so crowded that it's difficult to park, has virtually no shade, and is sort of out of the way unless you happen to be in that part of the park anyway.
The Geyser Grill at the Old Faithful Snow Lodge is pretty much the same, only more conveniently located. It's hidden well away from where you're likely to be walking, though, so unless you know it's there, you may never know it's there.
After some days of this, I'm losing my mind, desperate for a decent meal. This is when I begin considering the real restaurants that can be found at several of the villages, with actual table service and everything. Not exactly a quick meal, and they must be quite expensive, mustn't they?
The Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel restaurant gets scratched off the list as soon as I walk in the door: they don't serve my kind there. I totally missed the “no riff-raff” sign at the door. My bad.
The Lake Hotel restaurant doesn't even serve the kind who go to the Mammoth Hot Springs one. I think they have snipers on the roof looking for people like me trying to get too close.
The restaurant at the Old Faithful Inn looks interesting, though I haven't yet tried it. It's a bit expensive, and if the steak is worth the $30, I'd frankly be surprised.
But, here's where the story gets good: the Canyon Lodge restaurant. This is the Promised Land of Yellowstone food. When I was finally so desperate for a good breakfast that I was willing to pay too much for it, upon looking at the menu, I made a startling discovery: it's not expensive. In fact, the breakfast buffet is about the same price as the cafeteria. Price is about all they have in common, though. Scrambled eggs, French toast, sausage, bacon, home fries, fruit, cereal, oatmeal, even grits, in unlimited supply, and it's good. Leave a good tip and it's about two bucks more than the cafeteria.
Why in the world does anyone go to that awful cafeteria? I think it can be summed up by the comment I heard from one group of people who looked in and then kept walking: “looks pretty fancy.” You think you're in for the whole fancy-restaurant experience and the bill to go with it, but if you go to the cafeteria instead (right next door!) the joke is on you. The most bizarre part is that the cafeteria and the restaurant share the same kitchen and yet the cafeteria food is bad and the restaurant is good.
Because it's a seasonal, Xanterra operation out in the middle of nowhere, all of the labor is the usual Xanterra crowd of college students. The hosts and hostesses are inexperienced, and it shows. The waiters and waitresses are mostly inexperienced, and it shows. But they are all trying, and that shows, too. They are friendly and helpful and making an honest effort to do the best job they can, and how many places can you say that about?
The whole staff trains together before they open for the season – read a good first-hand account, if you're interested – and, perhaps most importantly, they all love being here as much as the customers do. I've been back several times already.
There is another option: West Yellowstone. This is the town just outside the west entrance to the park, a town that essentially exists to serve the tourists. It is the Estes Park of Yellowstone, complete with tacky-looking gift shops and horrendously overpriced hotels. But it's also a very isolated little town where people actually live, so it has things like the Market Place Grocery Store, a real, full-fledged grocery store with everything you'd expect them to have (yes, they sell liquor, except on Sunday), plus tourist-centric things like pre-made salads and sandwiches. After exiting the park, make the first right, then the first left, and it's on the left.
The salads are good, the sandwiches are better than any you can get in the park, and of course they have all the actual food you could want. At normal prices, not Xanterra prices.
Finally, the General Store at Colter Bay in Grand Teton National Park is a shopping Mecca compared to the pathetic stores in Yellowstone. It's much too far away for a grocery run, but if you're headed down there anyway, definitely stop in and stock up.
