There’s a spot on I-25 north of Casper where the drive stops being a commute and starts being a trip. Somewhere past Kaycee the Bighorns come up on your left like somebody raised a wall, and you roll into Buffalo — county seat of Johnson County, sitting on Clear Creek right where the High Plains give out and the mountains take over. It’s the town where I-25 runs into I-90, which means half the people passing through are headed for Yellowstone or the Black Hills and never look up from the gas pump. Their loss.
Because a block off the highway noise, on North Main, there’s a brick hotel that has been feeding people since Rutherford B. Hayes was president, and inside it there’s a steakhouse named after one of the most famous Western novels ever written.
I’ll level with you before we go any further: I haven’t eaten at The Virginian yet. Kimi and I have talked about the Buffalo run a dozen times and something has always come up. So this isn’t a “Sean got the window seat and worked his way through the elk” review. It’s a “here’s what you actually need to know before you go” rundown, put together from the restaurant’s own materials, a magazine profile of the kitchen, a stack of traveler reviews, and about 145 years of documented history. When we finally make the drive, I’ll come back and tell you how the steak held up. For now, consider this your scouting report.
The Occidental: a hotel that was the town before there was a town
The short version of the history is genuinely wild, and better still, it’s documented rather than invented.
A carpenter from Wisconsin named Charles Buell camped along Clear Creek in 1879, three miles from the newly relocated Fort McKinney. By the fall of 1880 he’d put up a 24-by-28-foot log building holding a lobby, a dining room, a kitchen and six bedrooms. That was the Occidental. In a town that barely existed yet, “The Ox” ended up doing double duty as a stagecoach station, post office, saloon, town hall, polling place, makeshift hospital and county courthouse. Buffalo family lore says the town’s name was drawn out of a hat at an 1880 gathering, submitted by somebody from Buffalo, New York.
The hotel got rebuilt in brick and by 1910 covered an entire city block. Then the Depression took the shine off, ownership changed hands, and the place sat closed from 1984 to 1990 and was dilapidated enough by the ’80s that it could easily have been torn down like most frontier hotels were. It wasn’t. Dawn Dawson bought the building in 1997 and started a roughly ten-year restoration, and pushed to get it onto the National Register of Historic Places. David and Jackie Stewart came in as managing partners in 2008 and bought the property outright in 2015.
If you liked reading about the Irma Hotel in Cody, this is the same kind of place — a working hotel where the history isn’t a plaque on the wall, it’s the wall.
The famous-guest list is the part everyone repeats, and I want to be careful with it, so here’s how I’d put it: the hotel’s own history — echoed by the Wyoming State Historical Society and by regional press — names Buffalo Bill Cody, Calamity Jane (who drove freight wagons on the Bozeman Trail), Teddy Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, General Phil Sheridan, cattle detective Tom Horn, sheriffs Frank Canton and “Red” Angus, Ernest Hemingway, and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who reportedly rode over from the Hole-in-the-Wall country southwest of here. Some of that is hotel tradition passed down; some of it has paper behind it. Big Sky Journal reported that the hotel’s old guest registers include Cassidy signing under the alias George L. Cassidy in 1890 alongside two known associates, which is about as good as frontier documentation gets. Treat the roster as strong local history rather than notarized fact and you’ll be about right.
The Owen Wister connection is the reason the restaurant has its name. Wister came to Wyoming in the 1880s, spent real time in the Occidental’s lobby and saloon watching cowboys, cattlemen and assorted desperadoes, and drew on them for characters in The Virginian (1902). The hotel says some people believe he wrote parts of the book in a room upstairs — note the hedge; that’s tradition, not established fact. What’s better attested is that many historians place the novel’s climactic walk-down, the first of its kind in Western literature, in front of the Occidental, and that the year after the book came out the hotel adopted the motto “Where the Virginian Got His Man!” If you want the primary flavor of it, Wister’s novel is still in print and cheap.
What’s actually on the plate
This is cattle country, so the menu leans where you’d expect: steaks, hand-cut in house. Published descriptions and the kitchen’s own profile in Big Sky Journal put flat iron, filet mignon, Angus ribeye, bison and elk tenderloin on the board, with a Kansas City–style bison strip and a bison ribeye showing up repeatedly in reviews and menu listings. As of that 2023 profile, the kitchen was run by chef Jennifer Johnson — a trained historian who worked nearly every job in the building before taking over the range — and her stated favorite is the Angus ribeye.
It’s not strictly a beef-and-game shop, though. The published menu also runs to salmon, scallops, chicken marsala, salads, and a steak gorgonzola pasta, plus weekly specials. As somebody who cooks a lot of elk and antelope at home, I’m most curious about the elk tenderloin — and I’ll flag now that multiple reviewers report it selling out early on busy nights, so if that’s your target, go at the front of service.
On price: expect fine dining by Wyoming standards. Listings tag it “$$$” and “upscale,” and reviewers over the past few years have described steaks in the neighborhood of the low-to-mid $40s, with several noting that a lot of the cuts run at market price and aren’t printed on the menu at all. That’s a legitimate gripe that comes up more than once in reviews, so go in expecting to ask your server what things cost. I’d budget like a nice anniversary dinner, not a Tuesday.
The room
There are two dining rooms — the Rose Room and the Pronghorn, named for the artwork in them. The tin ceilings and wood floors are original. The space has been a mercantile and a dairy barn in previous lives. There are a handful of private window seats, three of them sized for couples, and one of those windows was the building’s original entrance. The hotel is blunt that window seats aren’t guaranteed unless you book in the first half hour of service.
The whole first floor of the Occidental functions as a living museum — original embossed ceilings, the 1908 back bar in the saloon brought in by wagon, antiques original to the building, and 23 bullet holes in the saloon that the staff will happily point out. Dinner here is a two-hour proposition by most accounts, courses paced with room to talk. Reviews skew positive — aggregate scores sit in the low-to-mid 4s across platforms — with the atmosphere and service getting the loudest praise. The recurring criticisms are worth knowing honestly: unpriced menu items, popular cuts running out, and occasional misses on steak temperature. That’s a real restaurant in a hundred-forty-year-old building, not a machine.
Before you go
- Where: The Virginian Restaurant, inside the Historic Occidental Hotel, 10 North Main Street, Buffalo, WY 82834
- Phone / reservations: (307) 684-0451 — the hotel’s main line, which is what the Occidental lists for restaurant reservations
- Hours: This is the one thing I can’t pin down, and I’d rather say so than guess. The Occidental’s own Virginian page currently lists Thursday–Saturday, 5:30–8:00 p.m.; other published listings show longer seasonal hours, roughly 5:00–9:00 p.m. with more days in the high season and fewer in winter. Call before you drive.
- Reservations: Strongly encouraged, required for parties over six, appreciated for parties of four or more. Book holidays at least two weeks out. Seating is limited.
- To-go: Offered, but call ahead for a pickup time; the restaurant requires card payment in advance on to-go orders.
Report back
Buffalo is about a two-hour, 115-mile shot up I-25 from our driveway in Casper, which makes it an easy overnight and a slightly ambitious dinner run. My plan is to go up on a weekend, get a room in the hotel so nobody has to make that drive after a bottle of wine, take the museum tour with my son in the morning, and eat at The Virginian the night before. When that happens, you’ll get the real review — temperatures, prices, whether the elk lives up to it.
Until then, if you’ve eaten there, I want to hear about it. What did you order, what did it run you, and did you get one of those window seats? Tag @wyofood on Instagram or Facebook, or leave a comment. I’d especially love a current photo of the menu, because apparently that’s the one thing nobody can find online.
— Sean