Home · Our Story
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-seven 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-seven people in it.
Greetings from Goshen Hole
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.
Those two sentences up there — sold gasoline first, then the country grocery — aren't folklore. Somebody photographed both of them.
Look past the signage and it's the same shape both times: a low building on a highway, a roof pushed out over the front so people could stand out of the weather, and a door that everybody in the county used. The pumps went, the meat counter went, and the building kept doing the one thing it has always done — give people on US-85 a reason to stop.
Archive photographs of Hawk Springs, shared by the family. If you recognise a face, a truck or a year in either of these, Dennis genuinely wants to hear about it — that sort of thing ends up on the wall.
Over the bar
The Emporium has never just been about food and drinks. It’s about the people.
Dennis knows just about everybody — and if he doesn’t know you when you walk in, there’s a good chance he will by the time you leave. He’s always ready with a story, a little advice, or encouragement for wherever life happens to be taking you. He makes friends quickly, too. If the mood is right, don’t be surprised if he buys you a drink.
Dillon is often the smiling face behind the scenes and in the dining room, making sure every celebration feels special. Whether she’s remembering your birthday, snapping a photo of your family, helping plan an event or simply making sure you’re having a good time, she believes it’s the little moments that turn a meal into a memory. And when she’s not doing any of that, there’s a pretty good chance she’s cleaning something.
But Dennis and Dillon know The Emporium wouldn’t be what it is without its staff. Julie runs the kitchen and has been here for years — long enough that this place would feel different without her. Others have been here a long time too, growing alongside the restaurant and becoming the familiar faces customers look forward to seeing. From the kitchen to the bar to the dining room, they bring their own personalities, hard work and hospitality to every day.
Come for the food. Stay for the stories. Leave feeling like family.
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-seven 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. What there is, is a highway, and a room worth pulling off it for.
That makes the standard higher, not lower. If the food is bad in a town of forty-seven, 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