The Season Moonlight Basin Opened Its Dinner Table

For as long as most residents can remember, Moonlight Basin ran on a strange kind of hospitality. Walk the trails and nobody stopped you. Ulery's Lake Loop, the 3.9-mile path that circles the lake behind Moonlight Lodge, has always been open to anyone who wants to cross its ski bridges and read the interpretive signs about the wetlands and wildlife along the way. Moonlight Basin is the only private club in the area that lets the public use its trails, a fact the Big Sky Community Organization has pointed to for years as something the wider community should be grateful for.

But sit down for dinner and the door closed. The Reserve Clubhouse and Moonlight Lodge built their dining rooms around membership, not proximity. You could hike straight through the property on a Tuesday afternoon and still have nowhere inside the gates to eat that night unless your name was on a member roster. That contradiction, open land and closed tables, defined the neighborhood's daily rhythm for a long time.

This fall, for the first time, that's no longer true.

What Actually Opened on November 18

One&Only Moonlight Basin completed its opening on November 18, 2025, after years of construction, and with it came the neighborhood's first restaurants that anyone living nearby can simply walk into. Three kitchens went public that day: Wildwood, The Landing, and a restaurant from celebrity chef Akira Back, along with the cocktail bar Dear Josephine. A second bar, Moonshack, stayed reserved for resort guests, so the shift wasn't total. But three new public dining rooms inside a community built almost entirely around membership is not a small change.

Each venue has its own identity, and the specifics matter more than the category:

• Wildwood, the Main Lodge's signature room, leans into ranch-to-table cooking with locally sourced bison, elk, river trout, and handmade pastas.
• The Landing, set next to the gondola at Sky Lodge, is the most public-facing of the three, serving elevated mountain fare like an eggplant spread starter and a chicken schnitzel main to a mix of hotel guests and Big Sky skiers passing through.
• Akira Back, one of the chef's roughly two dozen locations worldwide, centers on a sushi bar and hot-stone wagyu, with a yellowtail starter that reviewers have singled out as difficult to believe you're eating in landlocked Montana.
• Dear Josephine, named for a 19th-century Montana bootlegger, is the copper-toned lounge that's open to the public for cocktails and light bites, distinct from the members-only Moonshack tucked deeper in the woods.

None of this required a golf membership or a lodge key. That's the part worth sitting with. For a community where the Reserve's Jack Nicklaus course and the original lodge dining rooms were built around exclusivity, having three kitchens and a bar open on a walk-up basis is a genuine first, not a marketing gloss on an old amenity.

The Neighborhood's Chef Just Got the Call

The shift isn't only about who can get a table. It's also about who's cooking at it, and where else that cooking is now being recognized.

The inaugural Big Sky Food & Wine Festival runs September 24 through 26, 2026, bringing more than 40 Michelin and James Beard-recognized chefs to Lone Mountain's backdrop. Host Chef Ming Tsai, who runs BāBā at the Yellowstone Club, leads the lineup. Akira Back, the same chef whose Moonlight Basin restaurant opened to the public last November, is on the roster alongside him. So is Francesco Martinelli of the Tom Weiskopf Clubhouse in Big Sky, part of the Opening Night BBQ on September 24.

"I am so excited to serve as Host Chef of the first annual Big Sky Food & Wine Festival," Ming Tsai said of the event.

For a resident, the practical read is simple. The restaurant you can now walk into on a Tuesday night is, two and a half weeks from now, cooking at a regional festival that pulled in chefs from Los Angeles, Miami, and Denver. That's not a coincidence of timing. It's the same kitchen, the same season, doing double duty as both your neighborhood spot and a marquee name on Big Sky's culinary calendar.

The Other Half of the Day

None of this changes what was already true about the trail. Ulery's Lake Loop still starts at the trailhead on the west side of the Moonlight Lodge parking lot, still crosses an 800-foot skier bridge early in the route, and still winds past a beach, a warming yurt, and views of Beehive Basin and the Spanish Peaks before looping back. It's rated intermediate, with about 275 feet of elevation gain over natural surface, and it's still the piece of Moonlight Basin that never needed a membership card to enjoy.

What's different is what happens after the loop. Big Sky's ski season doesn't typically start until late November, which leaves a real shoulder-season window right now, through October, when the trail is clear, the crowds are thin, and the walk back to the parking lot ends somewhere new. A resident finishing that hike this month has an actual choice for the first time: the Tavern near the trailhead, or a short drive over to Wildwood, The Landing, or Akira Back for dinner. A year ago, two of those three doors weren't open to them at all.

That's the actual shift this fall. The land was always shared. The table wasn't. Now, for a few months before winter closes the gap again between hiking season and ski season, both halves of a Moonlight Basin day are open to the people who already live there, not just the ones staying at the resort.

Whether that stays true through next winter, when the Yellowstone Club-adjacent dining crowd and the ski crowd overlap for the first time at One&Only, is worth watching. But right now, in September, the neighborhood's dinner table looks different than it has at any point in its history.

If you're weighing what a home in Moonlight Basin actually means day to day, not just on paper, Charlotte Durham & Co. can walk you through what's changed on the ground this season and what it's likely to mean for the next one. Start Your Montana Luxury Journey.