The Martin Hotel

The Martin Hotel is one of the great American regional restaurants, a working Basque boarding-house dining room that has been serving family-style meals since 1898. You sit at a communal long table; the courses arrive in sequence — soup, salad, beans, bread, the entrée of your choice (lamb shanks, steak, sweetbreads, picon ribs), dessert. Pitchers of red wine come with the meal.

Reservations recommended on weekends but you can usually just walk in. Cash and card both work. The dining room is plain, the food is plain, and the experience is one of the most authentic regional eating traditions still alive in the American West.

eating out restaurant
A story
The Martin opened in 1898 as a Basque boarding house — a place where sheepherders from the Iparralde and Vizcaya regions could stay between contracts, eat at the long communal table, and be paid in Basque language and currency. The dining hall still operates on the same family-style model 125 years later, with the soup-to-dessert fixed dinner that has been served almost unchanged for over a century.

Other places in Eating Out