Lake Yellowstone Hotel Dining Room

This review is for the dining room for dinner, not the hotel or any other meals. My wife and I live in D.C. and decided to try the Lake Lodge dining room after eating at the Old Faithful Inn and at the eatery up in Canyon. The dinner options at Old Faithful were excellent and the food at Canyon was not even 100% edible. So, on our second night in Canyon, we decided to make a reservation and drove down to the Lake Lodge. We were not disappointed, and the food at the Lake Lodge was actually slightly better than at Old Faithful Inn. I would advise people to pretend the buffet doesn't exist and just steer clear of it. Everything we ordered from the a la carte menu was excellent, fresh, well-seasoned, and perfectly cooked. The bottle of wine we ordered was extremely reasonable and was so good we ordered a few more bottles while we were in the park. Our server was exceptional, friendly, professional, and honestly provided us a better overall experience than we generally get in the big city. He was so well-liked that another 4-top specifically requested to sit in his section while we were there. I can't remember his name, but he was from Nevada.

We ate in 3 of Yellowstone's lodge dining rooms during our visit, and we were also pleased that the menus between them all seemed slightly different, but all had the same excellent quality and service. Perhaps some people ate on off-nights, but given the length of our stay and the various times we visited the dining rooms, I didn't notice any deficiencies. I would eat at any of the Yellowstone historic lodge dining rooms with confidence, but the stuff up at Canyon really is pretty terrible, yet it somehow gets better reviews than this restaurant. I'm hoping this review will go a little ways toward remedying that.

Terrific location right in Yellowstone. Beautiful location on Lake Yellowstone. Classic National Park hotel. Very nice common areas. Nice dining room. Bring a USB hub to connect your phone or iPad to wired Ethernet in your room, there's no WiFi.

While the Canyon Village Lodge is a pleasant and (for the park) affordable place to stay, the dining options at the nearby Canyon Eatery are merely tolerable.
As we left Yellowstone for the Tetons, we drove to the Lake Yellowstone Hotel for breakfast (we had lunch here a couple days ago), and it was well worth the drive! By far the best breakfast of our trip! The buffet food was fresh and hot, had wonderful variety, and a stunning view over the lake.
Highly recommended, and we wish we’d stayed here instead. More expensive but worth it.

The dining experience here can be summed up with: amusement park prices, amusement park service, amusement park food.

Our waiter, Donald, took 10-15 minutes to greet us at the table. Didn’t check on how the food was after it had arrived. Took our order, only to come back to reconfirm it 5 minutes later. Unfortunately, even with reconfirming it, the food was incorrect (overcooked steak, added mushrooms when I asked for them to be omitted). Donald never checked to see how things were, and I didn’t want to brave the wait of another 30 minutes to get the plate re-made. My wife liked the ratatouille for what it’s worth. The NY strip I got is not worth the $47 price tag and I would not recommend that to anyone.

Overpriced, undervalued, not great service.

That said, the view is fantastic. Worth a walk down to the lake for sunset after dinner.

You need to make a reservation and can only do so if you're staying at accomodations within the park, possibly limited to the hotel itself or the adjoining cabins (?).
Dining room was not grand or upscale as expected based on description, but the lake view was spectacular.
Quality of food was decent, if a little overpriced. I'm a gluten-free vegan and had the ratatouille with polenta. Had to send it back because it had bread crumbs, despite asking to ensure they were left off, but the final dish was good.
Our server, Jack from Texas (as printed on his name tag) was very attentive, as was the buser; staff was terrific, in general.
Overall, a good option in the park, especially compared to the park cafeterias and their offerings, but I certainly wouldn't classify this restaurant as fine dining.

Mediocre food. We had Old Faithful Obsidian last night and no comparison. Service was very slow we had to look for our waitress. Also a $30 “chicken” item was wrongly added to our bill even we didn’t have it, good that we spotted it. Didn’t bother to take pictures cuz food decor was so poor.

I'm trying to review the lunch we had when passing by, not the hotel. Heard dining room not as good as it used to be, but that was not our experience. Food and service great. Highly recommend.

Allie was awesome.

The dining was superb. Totally a 5 star restaurant. The waiter Mike was awesome at handling a lot of tables and getting all our orders perfect.

Power was flickering but stayed on, and so worth it! Highly recommend the charcuterie board, chimichurri steak, and rabbit ravioli, wow!!

This place is remote. An hour to old faithful.

The staff level must be improved, it took entirely too long to check in and the wait time for breakfast was disgustingly slow. I went down the road after that.

One server a young lady from Germany was the standout for our visit.

It’s a beautiful lake front hotel but not worth the trouble

You have to make reservations 60 days before your stay.

Location is great. Beautiful lake. But for $400 a night, I was surprised there was no wifi and the cell coverage was poor.

The Google form for reviews is for a hotel not for a restaurant, and has the wrong form and questions.

Just like every other Xanterra-managed property in the park, management just can't fit all the pieces together to make a seamlessly good experience.

I arrived at opening for breakfast prior to a backpack. I wanted to enjoy a good hot meal before starting in on freeze-dried food for the next 5 days.

The hot buffet was typical USA breakfast fare. Especially disappointing were the fried potatoes which should have been made with fresh sliced potatoes but were instead deep fried from pre-prepared, pre-seasoned potato cubes provided from the Sysco truck. The link sausages and bacon were good, and the baked egg casserole with spinach was excellent, especially when topped with a little whipped cream cheese from the lox bar.

Speaking of which, there was also a lovely spread of cured salmon with nice accompaniments like chopped red onion, chopped boiled egg, cream cheese and more. But as a telling example of how Xanterra just can't get it right, the bagels were cold and hard as if taken from a freezer bag and dropped onto a platter. Tough and hard. And that was, in fact, the only form of bread on the whole buffet, not counting the stale sweet pastries that also clearly had been delivered from the Sysco truck in a box.

So I opted for the traditional egg and bacon breakfast. I took a bagel but couldn't stomach it, so I asked whether there was a toaster. Answered yes, I requested brown toast. That cost me $3, but two pieces of toast were served hot, buttered, crispy and tasty. The buffet ain't cheap, and it's galling that toast is extra.

Oh, and I almost forgot the coffee. I asked for a cafe latte and was cheerfully served a cappuccino instead. Fine. Except it wasn't. Truly awful. I might have sent it back, but espresso drinks are next to impossible to find in Yellowstone, so I choked it down solely to avoid a later caffeine headache. More than US$40 later I headed out to the trailhead.

We opted to visit the restaurant since there is few options in the park.The food is obviously overpriced.I ordered a 47$ steak whipped potatoes and green beans it was horrible no flavor.My wife ordered some apple cider chicken breast it was mehh.My kids ordered the buttered pasta it tasted like pasta and water.We ended paying 180.00 We should've just cooked at the campground.Stay away its a tourist trap.We did not stayed at the hotel it looked nice.