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Since the early 1900s, one way or anotherThe walls are the whole point
Gas station. Country grocery. Cafe. Now a restaurant that people drive across state lines to eat in — in a town with forty-five people in it.
Home · Our Story
Since the early 1900s, one way or anotherGas station. Country grocery. Cafe. Now a restaurant that people drive across state lines to eat in — in a town with forty-five people in it.
225 US Highway 85
The timbers holding this roof up went in sometime in the early 1900s, and they are lodgepole pine — the same tree that built half of Wyoming. You can see them from your table. Nobody boxed them in, because why would you.
It sold gasoline first. Then it was the country grocery, back when Hawk Springs needed one. Then a cafe. Buildings in towns this size don't get torn down, they get re‑used, and this one has been re‑used more thoughtfully than most.
Around 2014 it became The Emporium, and it has been feeding Goshen County and everyone driving through it ever since.
Papa's buttermilk pie
Dennis Simmons runs it. His daughter Dillon runs it with him. Before Hawk Springs, Dennis cut hair in Jackson at a shop called the Clip Joint — and pieces of that shop are hanging in this dining room, because he wasn't about to throw them out either.
The buttermilk pie on the dessert list is Papa's — coconut, buttermilk, pecans, a little rum. That's not a marketing name. It's whose recipe it is.
Some of the paintings and carvings on these walls were made by Dennis's father. So when somebody says the decor is personal, they mean it literally: this is a family's things, in a family's building, in a family's town.
People finish eating and then walk a slow lap of the room. That's normal here. Take your time.
Made by Eugene Bechtel, the bull rider. The kind of object that ends up on a wall in Wyoming and nowhere else.
Not bought, not sourced, not chosen by a designer. Inherited.
The barber shop Dennis ran in Jackson, retired to a dining room on Highway 85.
From when Hawk Springs was a bigger idea than it is now. Locals point at them and tell you who's who.
Stephen Baldwin ate here and left his name on it. Rulon Gardner has been through too — this highway brings all sorts.
In 2020, a national restaurant makeover show filmed here. It aired the following January. Being picked is flattering, and the attention was real, and plenty of people first heard the name Hawk Springs because of it.
But the crew looked at these walls and saw clutter. So down came the paintings. Down came the carvings. Down came the photographs, the scabbard, the pieces of the Clip Joint, most of what makes this room this room. It was replaced with something cleaner and, to a family that had put every one of those objects up on purpose, emptier.
The cameras left. And slowly, quietly, one at a time, everything went back up.
Not out of spite. Out of the simple fact that it was right the first time. A restaurant in a town of forty-five doesn't survive by being tastefully anonymous — it survives by being the only room for sixty miles that anyone actually wants to sit in for an extra half hour.
So the clutter is back, on purpose, and it's staying.
Come see it →“The atmosphere is wonderful, with a rustic western feel that makes you want to linger.”
LizGoogle review
Goshen County, Wyoming
Hawk Springs sits on US-85 in Goshen County with a reservoir to its name and not much else. There's no downtown to speak of. There is one restaurant.
That makes the standard higher, not lower. If the food is bad in a town of forty-five, everybody in three counties knows by the weekend. If it's good, they drive.
Ours come from Torrington and Lingle and Yoder and Cheyenne, from Scottsbluff and the Nebraska panhandle, and from every car heading north on 85 that decided to find out what a restaurant is doing out here.
Hours, map and directions →Lunch any day. Prime rib on Friday and Saturday, by reservation.
(307) 532‑3442