Restaurants in Cody, Wyoming: Where to Eat on Sheridan Avenue and Around Town
Published
- Main street
- Sheridan Ave
- Style
- Western, casual
- Peak
- Stampede week
- Timing
- Early evening
Cody eats early and eats on Sheridan Avenue. Both facts follow from the same thing: the rodeo takes the evening, so dinner happens before it.
Where the restaurants are
Almost everything you would choose to walk to sits on or immediately off the main street, which runs through the center of town. This is the practical argument for staying centrally instead of on the motel strip. A few minutes by car is a real difference when it is the difference between walking to dinner and driving to it.
The Irma Hotel dining room is on the same street, and it is the one place in town where people choose the restaurant for the building it is in.
Eat earlier than you would at home
The rhythm here runs earlier than a city’s. Kitchens are busy early and wind down early, and an evening that starts at nine is an evening spent looking for somewhere still serving. If the plan includes the rodeo, dinner first and the arena after is the sequence that works, and it is the order the town itself keeps.
The corollary is useful: the hour after the rodeo starts is the calmest time to sit down anywhere in Cody.
Booking, and the one week it matters
A town of ten thousand people that takes a very large number of visitors in a short summer runs its restaurants accordingly. Capacity, hours and often the menu are built around a few busy months.
Bookings, where they are taken at all, are worth making for the two weeks around the Fourth of July when the town fills for the Stampede, and are largely unnecessary outside it. In the shoulder months the opposite problem applies: some places are simply not open. Hours here move every year, which is why none are printed on this page.
Away from town
There is very little dining up the valleys. Lodges and guest ranches on the North Fork feed their own guests because the nearest alternative is an hour back down the road.
Eating out that way commits you to the drive back in the dark, on a road with wildlife on the verges. That is a perfectly normal thing to do here, but it is a decision made at lunchtime, not at seven o’clock, and it is why most visitors end up eating in town whatever they had planned.
The dinner-and-show option
One place has built itself entirely around the pattern this page describes. The Cody Cattle Company sits about two hundred yards from the rodeo grounds and runs a chuckwagon dinner with a live western music set, timed so the room empties in time for the eight o’clock rodeo down the road. Both run early in the evening through the summer season, and a single ticket covering dinner, show and the arena is sold as one thing.
Whether that appeals is a matter of taste, and it is unapologetically aimed at visitors. The logistics are genuinely good, though: you eat, you are entertained, and then you walk to the arena instead of driving to it and hunting for somewhere to leave the truck.
What the town does well
Cody’s restaurants are a small-town range, not a destination food scene, and treating them as the former makes for a better evening. Beef is the local strength for obvious reasons, and the places doing it plainly do it well.
Breakfast is the meal the town takes most seriously. That follows from a population that starts early and from visitors leaving for the park before the light, and several places open considerably earlier than a visitor might expect. On a day heading west, that is the single most useful thing on this page.
Common questions
Where do you eat in Cody, Wyoming?
Most of the town's restaurants sit on or just off Sheridan Avenue, the main street. Staying centrally means walking to dinner; staying on the strip generally means driving to it.
Do you need to book a table in Cody?
In the week around the Fourth of July, yes. For the rest of the season it is rarely necessary, though the hour before the rodeo is the busiest of the day.
What time does Cody stop serving dinner?
Earlier than most visitors expect. The safe assumption is that arriving anywhere at nine is arriving too late.
Can you eat up the North Fork valley instead of in town?
Barely. The lodges and guest ranches out that way feed their own guests, because the nearest alternative is an hour back down the road. Eating out there commits you to the drive back in the dark on a road with wildlife on the verges. It is a normal thing to do here, but it is a decision made at lunchtime, not at seven.