Foodies Get 5-Star Cuisine In Middle Of Nowhere Wyoming’s Brooks Lake Lodge

Editor's note: Business and Tourism reporter Renee Jean, who spends most of her time traveling across Wyoming, spent a few days last month at the historic Brooks Lake Lodge. This is one of her many reports.

Guests at Brooks Lake Lodge could be forgiven for thinking that such a remote location deep in the wilds of Fremont County, Wyoming, is likely to lack dimension whenever the dinner bell rings.

But those guests could not be more wrong.

Daily activities challenge guests to try new things during their stay at the exclusive resort, and Brooks Lake Lodge Executive Chef Whitney Hall does the same thing from her kitchen, alongside a pastry chef and a sous chef.

The three together are like the Great and Powerful Oz. What they accomplish in such a remote locale is nothing less than pure magic.

“The reason a lot of people come here is to experience the things that they see,” Hall told Cowboy State Daily. “So, the buffalo, the venison, the elk — and I also try to put some (other small) wild game in, like the pheasant or the duck or guinea fowl, that they might not get anywhere else.”

Every meal Hall creates has to have a “wow” factor to it.

“I want it to be something memorable, where they’ll say, ‘Oh my gosh, I would have never ordered this when I was at home, but I tried it out in Wyoming, and ended up, you know, crushing it,’” Hall said. “That’s kind of the basis of where I come from, as far as how I build the menus.

“And I know that wild game is becoming more popular around the United States, but I think it means a little bit more when it comes from here, when it’s from the area where it originates.”

Local Is Best

Hall sources as many of her ingredients as possible from the Western region.

“There are some smaller farms around the Dubois area, but they’re just not going to create enough product for me,” Hall said. “But I do try to get it as close as possible, so most of my fresh produce comes from a greenhouse in Utah.”

She sources wild game from farms in Utah and Colorado, while burger meat comes from a ranch in Idaho.

“I do look at and research the places and try as best as possible to do everything sustainably,” Hall said. “So, I choose places that I feel are upholding the value and morals of the animals, as well as, obviously, providing the best quality.”

Many ingredients arrive at Brooks Lake Lodge twice a week, but all the game meat and cheeses arrive once a week, and are generally shipped by air.

“Liquor is once a week and beer is every other week,” Hall said. “And so, it’s a little bit to keep up with for sure as far as what day is which, what needs to get ordered when, and how much you need.”

That makes it a little bit of a guessing game sometimes, Hall admitted, and sometimes “also just a little bit of hope and prayer” too, because there is no such thing as a quick trip to the grocery store at Brooks Lake Lodge.

“You’re paying twice as much as you would if you have to go get something in an emergency,” Hall said. “And it’s definitely challenging, because it’s 30 minutes in a snowcoach going down, two hours to a store and then two hours back, and then 30 minutes back up.”

That’s more than half a day, without including any shopping time, Hall pointed out.

“So, there’s lots of planning,” Hall said.

Longevity Helps

Hall doesn’t have to do a lot of guessing though, not after 20 years of experience immersed in and shaping the daily dining scene at Brooks Lake Lodge.

“I started here at Brooks Lake Lodge as their pastry chef and breakfast cook in 2002,” Hall told Cowboy State Daily. “And then I fell in love with it. The scenery, the weather. I’m from Texas originally, and so coming out here for a summer, you are very much free from the heat and the humidity and everything that you get when you live in Texas, basically.”

Hall never intended to stay at Brooks Lake Lodge. Fresh from culinary school in Texas, she was planning a summer or maybe two, and then moving on to the next stage of her career.

“When I graduated, we had to put our resume on the Internet at three different sites, and so that’s how Brooks Lake found me,” Hall said. “And it was between this place and a place in Colorado. I felt like Brooks Lake was going to get me where I needed to get in my career, versus the place in Colorado, so that was mainly the deciding factor.”

At Brooks Lake Lodge, Hall eventually learned all kinds of new tricks in the kitchen, the most important of all being how to cook delicious game meat.

“It took me a while to learn how to cook wild game really well,” Hall admitted. “I messed stuff up before I got it right. Because it’s such a lean meat, it doesn’t have a lot of fat, so you have to provide the flavor and know what it pairs with, like what brings out that type of game meat.”

But now that she is expert at preparing all sorts of game, she has a favorite dish.

“The duck is my favorite to make,” she said. “I think people are scared of duck because they’ve had some weird experiences with it. But I like it when people trust me enough to try it, and then are very much surprised at how much they wish they wouldn’t have steered away from it in the past.”

Hall makes sure that her staff is as practiced with all of these dishes as she is herself. And that is part of the magic behind the scenes. Teamwork makes the dream work.

“It should be a complete circle,” Hall said. “You should never know who was actually back there cooking in the kitchen.”

It’s A Small World After All

Hall did take a short sabbatical after serving at Brooks Lake Lodge for about seven years, and among the places she worked was Hell’s Backbone Grill & Farm in Utah, where she was a sous chef at the farm-to-table restaurant.

There, unbeknownst to either of them at the time, Hall prepared a meal for her future boss, Brooks Lake Lodge General Manager Matthew Tousignant.

When Tousignant came on board at Brooks Lake Lodge, he decided to interview everyone already at the Lodge to get to know them better.

But when he was asking Hall about her ideas, she decided to flip the tables on him, and instead asked him for his idea of a perfect meal.

So, he told her about that most phenomenal meal at Hell’s Backbone.

“It was so creative, and you know, chef-driven and as much farm-to-table as possible,” Tousignant told her. “And when we pulled into the driveway, there were chickens running around and goats, and the chef was out in the garden picking things.”

That meal, Touisgnant told her, was nearly perfect, from start to finish, ambiance included.

“And then she goes, ‘Do you remember what your favorite dish was?’” Tousignant recalled.

“And I go yeah, ‘It was these pumpkin enchiladas that we got as an appetizer,’” Tousignant remembers telling her. “They were so delightful, and all the fresh crema, and all the crazy ingredients.”

Hall smiled this secret little smile, but said only, “Excellent, can you tell me when you were there?”

Well, Tousignant thought, that’s a pretty weird question to ask. But he went ahead and told her, fall 2015.

“And she goes, ‘Well, I was sous chef at Hell’s Backbone while you were there, and that’s part of my menu.’”

That left Tousignant speechless for just a moment before conceding, “It’s a small world.”

And Then There’s The Texas Two-Step

One of the twists that distinguishes Hall’s dishes from all others is her Texas culinary background.

Flavors are big in Texas, and that’s something Hall wants showcased on every plate.

But sometimes, just like the iconic Texas two-step, big flavor can also be super-fast and easy — like her iconic, fried chocolate chip cookie dough, which has become a Brooks Lake Lodge staple in winter.

It’s a gooey concoction, served with a scoop of vanilla ice cream, chocolate sauce, whipped cream and powdered sugar.

If you think it sounds like something that you could buy at a state fair, well, you’re thinking just like Hall. The dish’s inspiration was all the fried foods that she enjoyed at the fair while growing up in Texas.

“I toyed with taking the fried cookie dough off the menu at one point,” Hall has told various reporters over the years. “But I got so much backlash from the regular guests that I had to keep it.”

Fried chocolate chip cookie dough is thus more or less permanently on the menu. And Hall is OK with having one of her dishes become such a popular classic that it returns every year by popular demand.

If she ever does a cookbook, the fried chocolate chip cookie dough will no doubt be one of the many dishes that has to go in it.

“People continually ask me about (a cookbook),” she said. “And it is an idea that’s been talked about a lot.”

Time is the big issue, though, Hall said. She’s busy dreaming up new dishes all the time, and to do a cookbook would mean painstakingly testing each idea out in a home kitchen, as well as figuring out exact measurements.

“That’s a time-consuming process,” Hall said. “And then there are the things that are just in my head that I just do and never measure. It becomes hard to break that down for people.”

But every now and then, guests are in for a treat, because when the weather is rainy in the summer and the guests cannot really go outside, Hall will pull the curtain back on her Wizard of Oz show at Brooks Lake Lodge, offering an impromptu cooking class and teaching some of her own tricks with game meats.

“My goal at Brooks Lake Lodge is for everyone to experience something they’ve never experienced before when they come here,” Hall said. “And I always hope that the dining is part of that. I hope that it goes hand-in-hand with the beauty of the place and everything that they got to experience in the day, and that it then comes full circle at night, when they get to sit down and enjoy their meal.

“That it’s all worth it in the end, is what is my hope, my prayer, and my wish.”

Renee Jean can be reached at: Renee@CowboyStateDaily.com