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

Yosemite's food story is a single great room. The Ahwahnee was the project of Stephen Mather, the first director of the National Park Service, who wanted a hotel grand enough to draw influential visitors into defending the parks. Gilbert Stanley Underwood — the architect of the great Utah park lodges — designed it, and it opened in July 1927 at a cost of about $1.25 million, built of steel, granite and concrete stained and textured to imitate redwood: the rustic timber look is a fireproof fiction, chosen after earlier Yosemite hotels burned. The Park Service made it a National Historic Landmark in 1987. Its name is the Ahwahneechee people's word for the Valley itself, rendered as "land of the gaping mouth."

The Dining Room is the hotel's reason for existing: about 130 feet long, its ceiling 34 feet overhead on sugar pine trusses and granite pillars, with floor-to-ceiling windows framed in stained glass looking to the meadow and the cliffs. It seats some 350 diners and serves breakfast, lunch and dinner year-round, today under Yosemite Hospitality, the park's Aramark concessioner. Dinner reservations are open to non-guests as well as residents, but the prime sittings are claimed well ahead — in peak season, weeks ahead.

December turns the room into theater. The Bracebridge Dinner, staged since the hotel's first year in 1927, re-creates the Christmas feast of Washington Irving's Squire Bracebridge: the hall becomes a 17th-century English manor, costumed singers and players process between the tables, and seven courses are served across an evening of pageantry. Tickets are distributed by lottery and are among the most contested in the national park system. The same room hosts the park's other food pilgrimages — Chefs' Holidays in January and February, when guest chefs cook and teach, and Vintners' Holidays from late October into December, built around California winemakers and five-course gala dinners.

At dinner the Dining Room's stained-glass windows have gone dark against the night cliffs, the wrought-iron chandeliers carry the light, and the sugar pine trusses arc overhead like the ribs of a ship turned upside down above the white tablecloths.

The Bracebridge Dinner's first jester was a photographer. Ansel Adams played the Lord of Misrule in the pageant's first two seasons, 1927 and 1928, before stepping behind the scenes to rewrite and direct the production — the man who defined Yosemite in black and white began his park career in costume, carrying a prop.

• Breakfast — Eat in the Dining Room early, when the windows hold the morning light on Glacier Point and the room belongs to residents.
• Lunch — Take provisions from the Valley's stores to a Merced River picnic ground; the park's midday meal is a meadow, not a menu.
• Dinner — The reserved sitting at the Ahwahnee — and in December, the Bracebridge lottery entered months ahead, or a Vintners' Holidays gala in the same room.

The Ahwahnee's table is a booking problem before it is a meal: Bracebridge tickets move by lottery, signature-event dinners sell as packages, and ordinary peak-season dinner reservations can require four to eight weeks of lead. Outside the Valley, in-park dining thins quickly — the lodges and grills run on the concessioner's seasons, and the high country along Tioga Road offers almost nothing once you leave the Valley floor.

Reserve the dinner when you reserve the room, and treat the Bracebridge lottery as a trip in itself if December is possible. The timing question in this group sets out the seasons those events occupy.