Old Faithful Inn Dining Room — Restaurant in West Yellowstone

My mum and friends just had this spectacular late night (around 20.34 eruption time) of Old Faithful Geyser show and we were all awed! Yet again, nature at its best indeed! So we were hungry after and we decided to dine at this fancy restaurant; one of our friends was insulin dependent diabetic and was craving for a bison sandwich. In other words, the nearest food joint that we spotted was this restaurant. In we went, the receptionist said "because we did not have reservation we were to wait for 30 MINUTES!" While looking around, there weren't that many people dining at that time and quite a few tables were empty! This was somewhat around 9 pm. We patiently waited anyway considering we were all there for the experience, like "let's wrap up this once in a lifetime get together perfectly unforgettable" kind of thought but lo and behold, 30 mins and more after, we were still waiting. I had a bad feeling about this but, we insisted, thinking perhaps because it's the restaurant's policy to make people wait more than the "allotted waiting time for people who would like to eat without reservation?" I could not wait any longer so I approached one of the staff for attention; if not we would have been totally ignored! So this staff led us in and had us seated. Yet again we waited again for a service staff to approach us and take our orders. The bad feeling levelled up slightly..I told my mum, "hmm, maybe we should go and look for somewhere else to eat?" She said,"let's just wait, maybe they're just busy.." Finally, this young unsmiling lady, looking so miserably annoyed, approached our table and straight away asked for our orders. No offer of drinks first? My mum and our priest friend have not finished making their orders when this same awful, miserable, rude female staff just acutely left our table! We were all gobsmacked but not the same feeling when the Old Faithful geyser erupted but with terribly rude attitude and behaviour she demonstrated!! We all looked at each other, shocked at her ghastly ill manner! Why was that? Where did that come from? Was it because all three of us were brown skinned and only one diabetic man, who insisted to eat there, was the only white person on our table? Nooo! Perfect way to shoo away customers! That was extremely rude and incredibly humiliating that we all agreed to just forget about dining there and left. One of the staff attempted to apologise but the "moral and social norm" (if there's even any), was already damaged and broken that we all left feeling so frustrated and utterly aghast about the way we were treated. Our diabetic friend even almost collapsed due to hunger and I blame this restaurant's service staff for that! Making us wait for almost what felt like forever and eventually treating us so bad for what felt like UTTER DISCRIMINATION! If anything happened to our friend we could actually sue this restaurant and its unbelievably rude staff! God forbid but NEVER AGAIN will I be taking my friends and family over to even think about dining here. Unfortunately, I blame this restaurant and its staff for ruining a what could have been a perfect holiday to see this wondrous part of the world such is YELLOWSTONE. I highly don't recommend this restaurant to any "brown skinned" people...

OMG - this was the worst "dining" experience in my 70+ years on this planet. If you have recently ingested this buffet, I commiserate with you. If you have future reservations, do yourself a favor and cancel them. Instead, take a walk across the rear parking lot and dine a la carte at the Snow Lodge Obsidian Dining Room. They don't take reservations, but it's a small price to pay to avoid the garbage dished out at the Old Faithful Inn "buffet."

Where to begin - so many comments, so little time. This place clearly has a "you're a captive audience; we know you'll probably never be back so we'll take every advantage of you we can" attitude. We were seated for our 5:30 pm reservation. The wait staff were simply disinterested. That faraway look in their eyes told me they would rather be anywhere but here. We had to request 3 different forks from the busboy because the ones he kept bringing us were dirty. Our waitress immediately requested our drink order (naturally drinks are not included in the $40 buffet price) and asked if she could bring our soup. Apparently she assumed that we knew how this buffet meal worked and did not offer any explanation - let's not waste any time with small talk. My wife ordered a Huckleberry Spritz which was so watered down she could not taste any alcohol.

The buffet line was long and slow and items kept running out. The salad was a bunch of mixed greens ala Costco. Mixed greens and croutons - there were NO tomatoes, celery, onions, cucumbers, etc. etc. As others have noted, the dressings were all in unmarked bowls. AND, I found out to my great, gasping surprise, they placed the creamy horseradish in an unmarked bowl, right in there with all the unmarked salad dressings. The salmon, chicken breast, and short ribs were all absolutely tasteless - as if they had been boiled. For dessert (served by our waitress) we selected the apple "crisp." It was a disgusting glop of boiled apples with some soggy flakes of oatmeal thrown on top. In sum, I have had better food at a third-rate or school cafeteria. I cancelled our second night reservations and we had a wonderful meal at the Obsidian Dining Room instead.

This is an embarrassment to the historic Old Faithful Inn, the National Park Service, and the U.S. taxypayer. There are so many similar, bad reviews that Xanterra MUST know what's going on. It wouldn't take much to actually provide some decent food at no added expense, but obviously Xanterra just doesn't give a hoot. This is what a bad monopoly looks like. Congress needs to shake things up here with some strong oversight. But, until they do - avoid this buffet (and accommodations at the Old Faithful Inn) like the plague. This historic inn deserves FAR, FAR...

While the accommodations and experience of walking through this storied hotel and sipping coffee while watching Old Faithful were charming, the restaurant was an ABOMINATION.

We were seated for our 9:15pm reservation with our friends who sat in a table next to us at the same time. We ordered drinks but our server didn’t take our food orders. It wasn’t until 9:45pm that we got our waitresses attention to let her know that we still needed to order food. At this point our friends at the table next to us were halfway through eating dinner.

By 10:15pm the food never showed up. Our waitress and many of the servers start setting up tables for breakfast the next day. With exhaustion, we canceled our food order as they had clearly forgotten it, which they admitted to.

We asked to speak to the manager and explained the situation. I really wished I had asked for her name since she had an unapologetic and condescending disposition. Never once did she apologize for the service we received and asked us how they could make it right.

We did not want to be charged for the food that never came and felt like the drinks should be on the house since we wasted our time. At this point, we didn’t have dinner and there was nowhere else to eat. While they didn’t charge us for the food but asked us to pay for the drinks.

After continuous back-and-forth arguing, the manager told us we should’ve eaten the food which she would’ve given us for free to which I answered that we were never offered this option. I got out my card to pay for the drinks since it was clear this was going nowhere. The manager stomped off.

When I thought this horrific ordeal was over, the manager comes back with a tray of food and starts passive-aggressively throwing each plate of food at us and barks at us about “if we need boxes”. At this point, we go over to our friend’s table next to us (who had a completely different experience than ours), say goodnight and left.

I really wish I had asked for her name. She was the manager on duty the evening of Wednesday, August 9th, 2023. It’s a shame as this is truly a beautiful establishment. It would be well worth the time for the staff to improve its management and treatment of customers.

Bar service at the Bear Pit was great. I would highly recommend you skip dinner at the restaurant and do drinks and...