Where should I eat in Yellowstone, and which local food or drink is worth trying?

Yellowstone dining is a concession system, not a restaurant scene: nearly everything is run by Yellowstone National Park Lodges, the Park Service's authorised concessioner, and it runs on the park's short season. The Old Faithful Inn is the room that matters. Designed by Robert Reamer and built through the winter of 1903–04 from local logs and stone, it opened in June 1904 and is considered the largest log structure in the world; the Park Service lists it as a National Historic Landmark, designated in 1987. Its lobby rises some 76 feet around a massive stone fireplace and a hand-crafted clock of copper, wood and wrought iron, and the dining room off it serves breakfast, lunch and dinner beneath the same log architecture.

The Park Service's own listing states the rule that shapes a trip: dinner at the Inn requires reservations, and reservations can be made in advance by hotel guests. With 327 rooms and the whole park's day traffic wanting the same tables, the Inn's dining room is effectively booked through its guest list first. The inn's season is typical of the park — roughly May to mid-October — and the concessioner's planner shows the park's other dining rooms opening and closing on staggered dates, some from late April into late October, most for a shorter summer window.

The flavour to hunt is the huckleberry. The wild berries ripen across the Greater Yellowstone in mid-to-late summer, and the park's general stores and grills translate them into everything — syrup, jam, chocolate — but the canonical form is ice cream. Wilcoxson's, a Montana creamery, supplies the park's deli and ice cream counters, and its huckleberry flavour is the scoop to order; the Bear Paw Deli inside the Inn serves its ice cream a short walk from the geyser, which has made a cone on the Inn's porch during an eruption a small park ritual. Beyond the park line the berries are a public resource rather than a product: on the Custer Gallatin National Forest, which borders Yellowstone on its Montana side, the Forest Service requires no permit for recreational berry picking up to 10 gallons, so a day out through Gardiner or Cooke City in August can be its own supply run. For the park's other formal room, the Lake Yellowstone Hotel — a clapboard Colonial Revival building dating to 1891 that Reamer redesigned in 1903 — runs a white-tablecloth dining room over the water on the loop's eastern side.

In the Inn's lobby the log columns branch like trees into a ceiling six storeys up, the stone fireplace takes a whole wall, and through the dining room's windows the light comes in low and green off the geyser basin while the room fills for the first dinner seating.

The grandest dining room in the park is, in practice, rationed by the room key. Because dinner reservations open in advance to in-house guests, a visitor sleeping in a gateway town is competing for whatever tables the 327-room guest list leaves behind — staying one night at the Inn is the surest booking strategy for eating in it.

• Breakfast — Eat early in the Inn dining room or the Lodge cafeteria, before the tour buses unload at the basin.
• Lunch — Plan it around geography, not appetite: the park is larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined, so lunch is whichever grill or general store sits on your loop segment — with a huckleberry ice cream to finish.
• Dinner — The reserved table: Old Faithful Inn if you are staying west, the Lake Hotel dining room if your loop ends at the lake.

Almost nothing inside the park serves food outside the season, and even in season the staggered opening dates mean a dining room that exists in July may be dark in May. Distances compound it: there is no popping back for dinner across a park where the two loops total roughly 140 miles of road, so each night's restaurant is decided by which lodge or gateway town you booked months earlier.

Reserve the room and the dinner table in the same transaction, as early as the concessioner's booking window allows. The timing question in this group sets out which months those tables exist at all.