the location
Long tables, big windows, and the whole Badlands out the door.
Salt+Scoria sits inside the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, and the room was built from the same instincts as the food. Light pours through tall windows onto warm timber and cool concrete. Long communal tables invite you to sit near the people you came with — and maybe a few you didn’t. Overhead, a wood-slat ceiling folds across the space like windblown grass.
Look out, and the Badlands look back: rolling grass, layered ridges, and the red scoria that gives this country its color and this restaurant half its name.
beyond the table
Salt+Scoria opens onto the rest of the Library — and the Library opens onto the prairie. A walk in any direction can turn a meal into an afternoon.
The breezeway
An open-air passage runs through the heart of the building, framing the grassland at either end. Step out of the dining room and the Badlands air is right there.
The green roof
The Library’s sweeping roof is walkable — 121,000 square feet of it, planted with the same native grasses and wildflowers that ring the campus. Carry a coffee to the top for a 360-degree look at Theodore Roosevelt National Park, the Little Missouri valley, and, on a clear day, the country around Roosevelt’s old Elkhorn Ranch.
Room to spread out
Just outside the breezeway, a plaza and open lawn offer picnic tables and movable seating — an easy place to land with a take-away meal and a view of the grassland and the boardwalk beyond.
The native medicinal garden
Close to the building grows a garden of the wild plants that Northern Plains peoples have long used as both food and medicine — the same kinds of plants Chef Candace forages and cooks with. It’s part of the Library’s Native Plant Project, which is returning more than 400,000 native plants from over sixty regional species to these grounds. Walk through, and the plants on your plate start to make a different kind of sense: not just ingredients, but relatives, each with a use, a season, and a story.