Glacial Gastronomy · Jackson Hole, Wyoming
The Rusty Parrot Lodge burned on a winter night and went dark for years. Now it's back on its old corner of Jackson — and at its restaurant, Wild Sage, a chef named Hugo Goodwin is cooking the place back to life. A dispatch from the table.
The fire · Wild Sage reborn · Chef Hugo Goodwin · the skiing · a journalists' table
A homecoming in Jackson
For the better part of three decades, the Rusty Parrot Lodge sat at the north edge of the town of Jackson, Wyoming — a low, warm, family-run inn a short walk from the square, with a bright wooden parrot over the door and a small restaurant that quietly outcooked rooms ten times its size. It was the kind of place locals sent their visiting parents and out-of-town couples booked for an anniversary. Not the flashiest address in the valley. One of the most loved.
Then, in November 2019, it burned. A fire tore through the lodge and took most of it — and just like that, one of Jackson's last independent inns went dark. The corner stayed boarded and quiet through season after season, long enough that people began to talk about it in the past tense.
It has come back. The lodge has been rebuilt on the same ground, the parrot is back over the door, and the restaurant — now called Wild Sage — is lit and serving again. Which raises the only question that really matters about a comeback like this one: not whether the walls returned, but whether the cooking did. So we went to dinner.
The lodge with the parrot
Jackson Hole has no shortage of grand hospitality — it is a valley of marquee resorts and brand-name lodges, where international groups have steadily planted their flags. The Rusty Parrot was always the counter-argument: the independent, in a town of big names.
It came by that character honestly. Ron Harrison — a construction entrepreneur turned boutique-hotel patriarch — scouted the corner in 1990 and led the original build, and what went up was small, owner-run, and personal: thirty-two rooms rather than a few hundred, with a spa, a fire to sit by, and a restaurant that punched far above its room count.
That restaurant was the heart of it. Intimate, candlelit, ambitious in a way that never tipped into stuffy, it built a reputation across the years as one of the better tables in a town that takes its tables seriously. People came for the lodge; they remembered the dinner.
So when the fire came, the loss wasn't just a building. It was a particular kind of place — the independent in a field of conglomerates — and in a town where land is precious and patience is expensive, there was no guarantee it would ever come back as itself.
After the fire
This is the part worth pausing on. In a resort town, a cleared lot is sometimes worth more than the beloved business that stood on it. The simplest path after a fire like this is the quiet one: take the settlement, sell the corner, let something larger and glossier rise in its place. It happens all the time, and almost nobody blames the owners when it does.
Ron Harrison chose the harder thing. The way Si Si Penaloza heard it, reporting from Jackson this season, the moment the fire took the lodge he didn't mourn — he plotted. Rather than cash out, the family rebuilt: same footprint, same spirit, room by room and beam by beam, with the patience a from-scratch reconstruction demands. The point was never to put up a new hotel. It was to bring back this one — now under the stewardship of Ron's son, Brandon, who Si Si spent time with on a recent stay.
Not as a replica, though. As a rebirth. The bones came back sturdier and the comforts came back quietly serious: more steel, more soul, geothermal heat under everything, underground parking for the Range Rover, and a tucked-away deck for watching elk over morning espresso. Si Si's shorthand for the new Rusty Parrot — Hemingway meets Loro Piana — gets it exactly: rugged sporting lodge on the outside, hushed luxury within.
The restaurant came back with it, reimagined as Wild Sage. A new kitchen, a new room, a new chef at the pass — but the same intent that made the old dining room matter: cook seriously, welcome warmly, and let the food, not the price tag, do the talking. A rebuilt lodge can be judged by its lobby. A rebuilt restaurant can only be judged one way.
A case study in Western grit — how mountain men rebuild after a burn leaves nothing but backbone.Si Si Penaloza · reporting from Jackson Hole
Chef Hugo Goodwin at the Wild Sage pass. Quiet, exacting, produce-led — the kind of cooking that earns a white tablecloth without ever lecturing you about it. Photograph · courtesy The Rusty Parrot Lodge
At the pass
Executive chef Hugo Goodwin leads the kitchen at the reborn Wild Sage, and on the evidence of the plates, the lodge chose well. His cooking is precise without being precious: clean lines, real technique, a respect for what's in season, and a confidence that lets a single beautiful ingredient sit at the center of a dish and carry it.
He arrived as the lodge's quiet coup. The Harrisons poached Goodwin from the Yellowstone Club — the famously private Montana enclave where, as Si Si tells it, he spent years searing tomahawk steaks for the likes of Tom Brady. He looks the part of a modern mountain chef, but the cooking is all substance, unbothered by its own pedigree.
You can read the whole approach in a plate of fish: cured, glazed, set just so, surrounded by things that flatter it rather than crowd it. It is fine dining in the contemporary mountain mode — serious food in an unserious posture, the sort you can arrive to in good boots and leave from grinning.
That instinct matters here more than anywhere. A relaunch invites a chef to overreach, to prove a point with tweezers and foam. Goodwin does the braver thing: he cooks like the restaurant has always existed, and lets the room relax into it.
On the plate
The best dishes at Wild Sage share a quality that's harder to pull off than it looks: they're immediately legible. You don't need the menu's permission to enjoy them. A piece of fish lacquered to a deep shine, a base of cauliflower whipped to cream, the salt-pop of roe and a brittle, blistered cracker for texture — every element is doing a job you can taste, and nothing is on the plate to be clever.
It's a confident way to cook for a relaunch. There's no scramble to dazzle, no kitchen-sink tasting menu trying to justify the rebuild. Just a handful of very good things, composed with a steady hand, plated like the room has been doing this for thirty years — which, in a sense, it has.
From a long dinner to an easy morning
A lodge restaurant lives two lives, and Wild Sage commits to both. At night it's candlelight and considered plates; in the morning it's the warm, unhurried breakfast that a ski town actually runs on — the kind of table you linger at in base layers before the lifts, coffee going cold while someone decides whether the cinnamon roll counts as sharing. The ambition and the comfort aren't in tension here. They're the same hospitality, served at different hours.
The bronco on the glass. Riding up at Jackson Hole Mountain Resort — the Wyoming bucking horse on the gondola window, Teton Village shrinking into the valley below. Photograph by Doug Olear
The reason you came
A great meal is the anchor of a Jackson stay, but nobody comes to this valley only to eat. A short drive up the road from the Rusty Parrot sits Jackson Hole Mountain Resort — one of the most serious mountains in North America, with a vertical drop near 4,140 feet, the famous big red aerial tram, and the kind of steep, no-apology terrain (Corbet's Couloir chief among it) that skiers plan whole winters around.
It's the rare resort that rewards experts and still sends everyone home grinning, and it's the engine the whole valley runs on. Ski hard all day in Teton Village, then come down off the hill windburned and hungry — which is exactly when a candlelit table at Wild Sage starts to sound like the best idea you've had all trip.
A table of visitors
This season the lodge did the thing a confident relaunch does: it opened the doors and invited people to judge. A group of American travel journalists — Alpine Analytics's own Si Si Penaloza among them — came to Jackson to spend time inside the rebuilt Rusty Parrot, eat Hugo Goodwin's cooking, and see whether the new Wild Sage lived up to the name on the old one.
It is a particular kind of dinner, the press table — equal parts hospitality and exam. The chef cooks, the room fills, and the verdict gets written on faces before it's ever written down. On this night the faces were easy. Goodwin came out and sat down with the table, and the conversation ran long the way it only does when the food has already made the argument.
Dinner is only half of a Jackson stay. Between meals the Rusty Parrot points guests out into the valley — here, Si Si in a sun-warmed geodesic dome among the snow, one of the many off-site excursions the lodge folds into a visit. The food is the anchor; the mountains are the reason you came.
Photograph · courtesy Si Si Penaloza
Last course
There's a temptation, with a story like this, to make the fire the whole point — to let the loss do the emotional work and call the rebuild brave and leave it there. But a restaurant doesn't get graded on its backstory. It gets graded on the plate in front of you, and then the next one.
What's quietly moving about Wild Sage is how little it asks you to remember any of this while you eat. The cooking stands on its own. The room is warm. The cinnamon rolls are absurd in the best way. You could sit down knowing nothing about the years the corner spent dark and simply have a very good dinner — which is, in the end, the highest thing a comeback can hope to be.
Jackson has its independent back. The valley of big names is one beloved small lodge richer than it was a few winters ago, and the proof isn't in the new beams or the fresh paint. It's in a glazed fillet, a long table of satisfied writers, and a chef who pulled up a chair. It's in the scent of warm snickerdoodles that still meets you at the door — and in the hand-forged parrot above it, the one that somehow came through the flames and went straight back up where it belonged. The fire took the building. It didn't get the thing that mattered. ✦