Out here, the land does not make things easy. Wind works the ridgelines. Clay-heavy soil holds tight, then lets go. What survives in the North Dakota Badlands survives because it learned to live in relationship with this ground — giving back as much as it takes. 

That idea is the whole of Salt+Scoria. 

The name comes from two things you can find within sight of the table. Salt is for saltbush, the four-winged native plant that roots in the hardest soil, holds it in place, and feeds what little else can grow there. Scoria is the fire-formed red rock that gives the Badlands their color — and the Library its rammed-earth walls — stone that carries the earth’s memory of heat, pressure, and time.

Together they point to a way of cooking shaped by the land rather than imposed on it: food that is wood-fired and smoke-kissed, drawn from native botanicals and ethically sourced game, and built through real partnerships with Native growers and local ranchers. Nothing on the plate is manufactured or far from its source. It is honest, grounded, and formed by wind, water, flame, and hand. 

To eat here is to take part in that exchange — to sit at a table set between past and present, between people and place, between taking and giving back. 

Salt+Scoria sits inside the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, on the same Badlands ground that changed a young Roosevelt’s life — and that Native peoples have known and cared for across generations. Both stories live in this food: a deep respect for wild country, and a relationship with the land that asks for care in return.