With gas prices creeping back up and the national economy in freefall, nobody is quite sure what the North Dakota tourism season will look like this year. Everyone I know in the industry is curious and a little apprehensive. Experts contend that it is likely that people will spend their recreation dollars close to home.

It's especially hard to get a sense of how this tourism season is going to unfold because of the bizarre weather we've been having - snow in western North Dakota in early June! My mother, using the precise language of meteorology, said that in Dickinson "it has been colder than Sam Hill's left ankle." Wow, Mother, you don't have to get all technical.

I know a fair amount about history and virtually nothing about the hospitality industry. But I can make one completely enthusiastic recommendation. Get yourself to Medora sometime soon and eat at the new restaurant at the Rough Riders Hotel.

Here's what you can expect: outstanding food by an award-winning chef in a historic village on the banks of the Little Missouri River in the midst of the most beautiful effusion of grass I have ever seen in North Dakota's breaks country.

The Badlands are the greenest they have ever been in my lifetime. They're almost garish-green. Driving in with my mother and daughter the other day, I saw west of Fryburg some hills and buttes I have never before noticed. Every hillock, ridge and bluff stands out this year in high relief. It's as if there were suddenly a Great Plains of Ireland with velvety box buttes in every direction. It's as if Emerald City and Dodge City had been folded into a single landscape by a god with an offbeat sense of humor.

But it's the marvelous food at the new restaurant I want to talk about today.

The chef is a man named Richard Siegel, 49, now a North Dakotan, but originally from La Mesa, Calif. Formerly a 911 police dispatcher in San Diego, he drove to Wahpeton three years ago, more or less, on a whim to check out the culinary school at the North Dakota State School of Science. It was obviously a fit. Among other things, he is the 2008 and 2009 North Dakota state champion for culinary arts. In 2008, he took fourth prize at the National Skills USA Culinary Competition. In 2009, he placed first in the same competition.

Those are just his credentials. It's the food he prepares that makes Siegel amazing.

I don't know what I was expecting when we walked through the door of the remodeled hotel. I have strong and fond memories of the old restaurant, where I have eaten a dozen times over the years. The old restaurant had a boxy, dusty, Old West vibe. It actually felt like you were eating in a historic frontier hotel, even though we were all vaguely aware that the Rough Riders Hotel was a reconstruction that opened in 1965. It was spare and wooden and open. For me, the sense has always been of eating a better than expected meal in a funky historic space, and when you looked around you could actually feel that Theodore Roosevelt might have dined at your table, or Howard Eaton or A.C. Huidekoper.

That was then.

My first impression of the new restaurant is of gleaming glassware in every direction. Everything is much darker, richer in tone and more luxurious. There are, comparatively, a sea of tables arrayed over a much larger space, and every one is covered with a dark tablecloth and so much glass - including large red wine goblets - that you wonder where the food is supposed to go. The dominant feeling is that you are not in old ,shabby, genteel Medora anymore, but in Telluride or Aspen or Sun Valley.

Frankly, it's gorgeous.

The new dining room is dominated by a fireplace made of bricks salvaged from the old North Dakota State Capitol building, which burned on Dec. 28, 1930. With his characteristic eye for possibilities, the late Harold Schafer purchased a couple of pallets of the red bricks more than 40 years ago. He reckoned that someday somehow they would be useful. Now they are the centerpiece - in a certain way the historical foundation - of the new Rough Riders Hotel.

The old dining room had a seating capacity of 55. The new restaurant, 100. The old restaurant had a cramped, impossible kitchen that actually held up food delivery on busy nights. The new kitchen (actually two, one for catering) is a gleaming state-of-the-art facility that Siegel called "a chef's dream." The old subterranean (non-ADA compliant) bathrooms have been replaced by something you might expect at a luxury airport. There is, in addition, a bar on the southwest corner of the reconstructed building that seats 26. The wine selection is superb - way beyond my tin palate.

Before dinner, I got a sneak preview of a few of the eight hotel rooms that already have been opened. A year from now, when phase two of the hotel expansion is complete, 68 rooms will be available year round or nearly so. Each room has a hand-selected armoire, a unique bedstead, luxury linens and, of course, a historic flatscreen TV. The nearest rooms of this quality are at the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo.

There were eight of us at dinner, including the incomparable Sheila Schafer. Two ate salmon, one beef, one lamb chops, one buffalo steak and two walleye. I asked for a surprise sampler plate and wound up with small portions of duck, walleye, beef and lamb. Incredible red bell pepper soup with crab. By pretending to my friends and family that I have press credentials, I managed to poach bites from every plate. Everything was delicious -the lamb and walleye first-rate. The walleye was the best I have ever eaten.

By the time we had finished our entrees, the desserts, including a white chocolate raspberry cake and a magical key lime pie, were entirely superfluous, but we managed to find just enough room to sample - well, actually, devour - them.

All of this may sound really expensive. It is not.

As we finished our exquisite desserts and began to contemplate suiting up in parkas, long johns, stocking caps and blankets for the Medora "summer" Musical, I felt a wave of nostalgia for the old rattletrap Rough Riders Hotel. I will remember the old hotel with a little touch of bittersweetness as I dine at the new restaurant - again and again and again.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute, a Distinguished Visiting Humanities Scholar at BSC, and the lead scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. You can reach him at Jeffysage@aol.com.)