Review: Yellowstone Lake Hotel (Lake, WY)

Posted by johngl

As many of you know, I was recently on a tour of Montana and Wyoming.  Since we were celebrating our 19th year of wedded bliss, the most glorious spousal unit actually accompanied me.

As one might gather from the title of this post, one of our stops was Yellowstone National Park. Located in roughly the center of the caldera of an active super volcano in western Wyoming, the Yellowstone Lake Hotel has survived pretty well given its 120 year history and location. In it’s heyday, this place must have been pretty spectacular.

But, contrary to the title of this post, I’m not actually going to review the hotel.  This is a food blog after all.  And, being in the land of meat — bison, antelope, and elk, just to name a few — I would have been remiss had I not eaten these wonderfully tasty beasts.

So this is Bison Osso Buco.  For those unfamiliar with the Italian language, osso means “bone”  and buco means “hole.”  Leave it to the Italians to keep it simple.

Specifically, this is a cut of shank.  Imagine taking a cross section of your leg just above the knee (or your arm at the bicep). Also imagine how tough this meat must be since those muscles get an awful lot of use.  Consequently, these cuts require long cooking times and moist heat: braising. It’s one of the most glorious spousal unit’s favorite ways to cook.

Obviously, since we were vacationing, she didn’t cook. However, she did do me the kindness of actually ordering it. I had Duck Risotto.

Believe it or not, that is the appetizer size. It was excellent and I ate every last morsel. The duck was tender and extremely flavorful and stupidly, I failed to ask if it, too, was wild.

Anyway, by now you’re probably confused as to why I ordered duck and not the bison. Here’s why:

Dude, that’s just a bone!

Of course it is and that is the whole point. In reality, I could give a rat’s ass about the meat attached to it as that belonged to my belovéd spouse. Here, for the first time ever, I had a crack at a 2 inch long hunk of  bison bone.  Well, not the bone per se, but what is actually inside the bone: marrow.

All you vegans out there, run for cover! This is gonna get ugly.

Yeah, I know, everyone is going to comment on how gross that looks (I did consider not posting it, but after the pig-head thing, how could I not?). Gross looking or not, this was the best bone marrow I’ve ever eaten bar none (and I’ve been eating it since I was a kid — as a butcher’s son, I got the good stuff).

Actually, I am more than a bit afraid that I might start a run on bison shanks. Yes, it was that good. It is all that for which we eat meat.

If you can believe what is in print these days, some folks speculate that early humans survived on the bone marrow of large animals killed by predators. So, if nothing else, eating bone marrow will bring out your inner cave man, put hair on your chest, and make you grunt and drag your women around by their hair. It monounsaturated fatty goodness just can’t be beat.

Here is the osso buco, the “bone with a hole.” I worried this thing for about 20 minutes.  Looking up, I noticed the most glorious spousal unit sitting there grinning at me.

“What?” I asked whilst trying to scrape any last vestiges of marrow out of that thing.

“Oh nothing.”

After 19 years of marriage, she knows me.