ROCK SPRINGS — Bison, heirloom beans, cannoli and West African chicken shared a menu Thursday night as the Sweetwater County Museum turned a Rock Springs restaurant into a living history lesson.
The Fireside to Table Side dinner, held June 18 at Eve’s restaurant was organized in collaboration with the Rock Springs Chamber of Commerce, Sweetwater County Historical Museum and Rock Springs Historical Museum served as a dual celebration: the chamber’s 90th anniversary and the United States’ 250th anniversary.
Laura Dale, public engagement coordinator at the Sweetwater County Historical Museum, spearheaded the event’s concept. She said the museums were tasked with celebrating America 250 but recognized that framing posed a challenge in the West.
“There was not even a United States out here 250 years ago,” Dale said. “But there were tens of thousands of years of cultural history and roots that run very deep.”
That perspective shaped the evening’s buffet-style menu, which Eve’s owner Eve Piza and her staff developed in collaboration with Dale and the museums. The menu traced the many people who have called Sweetwater County home, with dishes inspired by indigenous cultures, African and African American culinary traditions, and the immigrant communities, including those from the Guangdong region of China, who built the area’s railroads, mines and towns.
Piza said she and Dale leaned heavily on the cookbooks of Sean Sherman, an Oglala Lakota chef from South Dakota, when developing the indigenous food offerings.
“She got a book called Turtle Island, and then I just got a bunch of cookbooks,” Piza said.
The team was also able to source heirloom beans grown by a tribal community in North Dakota, a varietal historically grown in the region.
“I just love the story behind them,” Piza said.
Other dishes included trout prepared from a Sherman recipe and a West African chicken dish with roots in the Gabon region, an area from which many people were taken during the slave trade. The bean dish also featured locally foraged greens, Piza said.
A trio of pop-up exhibits curated jointly by the Rock Springs and Sweetwater County museums accompanied the meal. One featured a collection of historic kitchen items, including one toaster talen from what Dale described as an unusually large collection of toasters, meant to give everyday objects their due recognition.
“They’re sort of mundane items, but we wanted to just give them a new light,” Dale said. “They usually stay in our storage all the time.”
Among the exhibit’s highlights was a circa-1930 Slovenian tapestry featuring hand embroidery that reads, “Lucky is the man who has a good cook.” Dale said she believes the woman who brought it from Slovenia made it herself.
A second exhibit featured historic photographs of Sweetwater County restaurants, and a third focused on the Rock Springs and Sweetwater County communities more broadly. The evening also included a raffle with proceeds benefiting the museums.
Dale encouraged community members who have not visited the area’s museums recently to do so.
“Museums are a treasure,” she said.
Piza said she hopes to continue exploring similar themes at future tastings, potentially diving deeper into indigenous food traditions and Guangdong-area dishes.
