Here’s a thing I didn’t understand until I’d lived here a while: in Wyoming, pie is infrastructure. It’s not a dessert you order if you’ve still got room. It’s the reason you stop in a town you weren’t planning to stop in, the thing the gas-station attendant tells you about before you’ve even asked, the unofficial currency of a state where the next decent meal might be ninety miles away.
I grew up in St. Louis, where food was mostly an afterthought for me until the military got hold of me and dragged me through San Antonio, Omaha, Denver, and D.C. My wife Kimi — also a veteran, and a far better cook than I’ll ever be — is the one who taught me to actually pay attention to what’s on the plate. When we moved to Wyoming in 2022, on purpose, for the mountains, I figured I’d be writing about elk and green chile and the occasional surprisingly good taco truck. I did not expect to fall this hard for pie.
But you can’t drive this state without running into it. So I’m doing the only reasonable thing: making it a project. Welcome to The Wyoming Pie Trail, a recurring series where I track down the slices worth the gas money, one region at a time. This is Part One — a statewide opening lap to plant the flag. Future installments will go deeper into individual towns and corners I haven’t reached yet (and I’m counting on you for some of those — more on that at the end).
A few ground rules for the Trail. I care about places where someone actually rolls the crust by hand. I care about fruit pie especially, because a great fruit pie is the hardest thing on this list to fake — the crust tells on you, the filling tells on you, the whole thing is a confession. And I care about geography. Wyoming is enormous and gloriously empty, and a pie roundup that only covers Jackson is not a Wyoming pie roundup. It’s a Jackson pie roundup with delusions.
Let’s drive.
Cowboy Cafe — Dubois (and Sheridan)
If there’s a single answer to “where’s the best pie in Wyoming,” more people will point you to the Cowboy Cafe in Dubois than anywhere else, and they will say it with the certainty of someone giving directions to a church.
This is the one I’d build a road trip around. Tucked on Ramshorn Street in little Dubois — out on the highway between Lander and the Tetons, in the kind of town you blink and miss — the Cowboy Cafe turns out something like twenty varieties of pie, all made in-house. The recipes trace back to owner Severine Murdoch, who’s originally from Paris and revamped the place after she and her husband bought it in the early ’90s, and the day-to-day baking has been handled for years by Sherri, who works late nights to keep the case full. During peak season the Dubois location reportedly goes through around thirty pies a day. Thirty. In a town you could walk across in ten minutes.
The lineup is where it gets ridiculous, in the best way: bourbon chocolate pecan, peach caramel crunch, apple blackberry, blueberry rhubarb, raspberry rhubarb, plus inventions like rhubarb ginger crunch and a chocolate pie with a salty pretzel crust. Stick with the fruit pies and ask for it warmed with ice cream — that’s the move every regular and every honest Tripadvisor review keeps repeating. One reviewer’s line stuck with me: the food was good, but the pie was exceptional. That’s exactly the right ranking.
The beautiful part for the rest of us: you don’t have to make it all the way to Dubois. The Murdochs run a second Cowboy Cafe in Sheridan, up on North Main on the other side of the state, and they ship pies there daily. So whether you’re coming over Togwotee Pass or cutting across the north on I-90, the Trail has you covered. Two stops, one legend.
The Bunnery — Jackson
Jackson has more money per square foot than anywhere else in Wyoming and a restaurant scene to match, which makes it genuinely impressive that the spot people line up for is a cheerful little bakery a quick walk from Town Square.
The Bunnery has been doing breakfast-and-pie in Jackson for decades, and the pies are the quiet headliner. They’re fruit-forward — strawberry rhubarb is the local darling, but you’ll find peach, apple, blueberry, huckleberry, and cherry depending on the season — and they’re made with that meltingly flaky crust that’s the whole ballgame for a fruit pie. In a town where you can drop a hundred bucks on dinner without trying, there’s something grounding about a slice of honest rhubarb pie made the same way it’s been made for years.
If you’re already burning a tank of gas to see the Tetons, the Bunnery is the pie stop that doesn’t require a detour. And if you want to make a real day of it, pair it with a jar of the most Wyoming preserve there is — I wrote a whole love letter to chokecherry jelly that’ll tell you why that purple jar belongs in your cart.
Wind City Sweets & Treats — Casper
Casper is home base for me, so I’d be lying if I pretended I was neutral here. But I’d also be lying if I told you Casper out-pies Dubois. What Casper has is a genuinely excellent from-scratch bakery scene, and the standard-bearer is Wind City Sweets & Treats, which has been voted the city’s best bakery a few years running.
This is a real scratch shop — pastries, croissants, cakes, tarts, the works — and while their reputation rides on a wider spread than just pie, their maple pecan pie bar is the thing I find myself thinking about at odd hours. It’s the pecan-pie experience concentrated into a few honest bites: that dark, buttery, almost savory filling, the maple doing something the corn syrup version never quite manages. If you’re a “I want pie energy but I’m walking around downtown” person, this is your slice.
I’ll keep digging on Casper proper — there are a couple of cafes here I want to put through their paces before I’ll vouch for them on the Trail — and a real Casper deep-dive is high on my list for a future installment. If you’ve got a Casper pie I’m sleeping on, the comments are right there. For what it’s worth, if you want my current read on the Casper breakfast-and-comfort-food landscape, I laid a lot of it out in my Wooden Derrick Cafe review.
The Bread Basket Bakery — Cheyenne
Drive to the southeast corner of the state and the pie gets old-fashioned in the way I mean as the highest compliment. The Bread Basket Bakery in Cheyenne is the kind of place that grinds its own wheat in-store, mixes it with honey, and treats baking like a craft your grandmother would recognize. People describe walking in and being hit with a wave of nostalgia, and they’re not wrong — it’s got the bones of a small-town bakery from a few decades back, the kind that’s mostly disappeared.
The pie list is exactly what you want from a shop like this: cherry, apple, blueberry, peach, and cream pies, all made in-house, sold whole or by the slice. Nothing trying to reinvent the wheel. Just a flaky crust, real fruit, and a price that won’t make you flinch. If you’re rolling through Cheyenne — and a lot of Wyoming road trips start or end there, since it’s right off I-25 and I-80 — this belongs on your list.
And since you’re already in town: Cheyenne does breakfast better than it gets credit for. I made the full case in my best breakfast in Cheyenne roundup, which pairs nicely with a mid-afternoon pie stop.
Sagewood Cafe — Buffalo
Buffalo sits at the foot of the Bighorns where I-90 and I-25 cross paths, which makes it one of those natural pit-stop towns where a good slice of pie can genuinely change the trajectory of your day. Sagewood Cafe is the spot I’d steer you to — a comfort-food cafe known for hearty breakfasts, scratch cooking, and a case of freshly baked pies, with a little gift store attached so you can pretend the stop was about something other than dessert.
I’ll be honest that Buffalo deserves a closer look than I’ve given it so far, and a full Bighorn-country installment of the Trail is coming. (Yes, I know about Pie Zanos and its Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives episode — but despite the name that’s a wood-fired Italian joint, not a pie shop, so it sat this one out.) For now, Sagewood is the honest answer to “where do I get a slice in Buffalo,” and it’s a good one.
Heritage Bakery & Bistro — Cody
Cody gets treated like a Yellowstone waiting room by a lot of travelers — gas up, grab a burger, push on toward the park. That’s a mistake, and Heritage Bakery & Bistro on Wyoming Avenue is the proof.
This is a proper scratch bakery with a bistro menu wrapped around it — fresh-baked bread, sandwiches, soups, and a pie case that punches way above its size. The rhubarb pie gets singled out again and again, but the one that kept coming up in review after review was the dark cherry — one regular called it the best they’d ever had, full stop. There’s also a 3-berry pie that gets “fabulous” thrown around a lot, plus seasonal caramel apple and pumpkin when the weather turns. Across the board, people talk about the crusts the same way: homemade, flaky, the kind that tells you someone rolled it out by hand that morning.
If Cody is huckleberry country to you — and it is, the wild ones grow all over the mountains around town — that’s still a real thing worth chasing. But for a stop on the Pie Trail, Heritage Bakery is the one I’d point you to: a hidden-gem bistro with a cozy atmosphere and a pie case that’s earning its reputation one slice at a time.
Help Me Build the Trail
That’s Part One — six stops across the Tetons, the Bighorns, the high plains, Cody, and home in Casper. But here’s the thing about a state this big and this empty: the best pie in Wyoming is almost certainly in a town I haven’t named yet, in a cafe with eleven tables and a hand-lettered sign, made by someone who’s been doing it for thirty years and would be baffled that anyone’s writing about it.
So I need you. What pie shop did I miss? Lander, Saratoga, Lusk, Worland, Pinedale, your aunt’s diner in a town that isn’t even on the map — I want all of it. Drop your pick in the comments or tag @wyofood on Instagram and Facebook with a photo of the slice. The best submissions go straight into the next installment of the Wyoming Pie Trail, with full credit.
A pie this good deserves a proper pie dish to bring the tradition home, too — if you’re inspired to roll your own crust, here’s a solid ceramic pie dish and a set of pastry tools to get you started. (As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.)
Now go get a slice. Warmed, with ice cream. You know the move.
— Sean