Dining Guide

"Papa Hemi’s Hideaway is the place where all the Valley meets and mingles over good food and drink. The food is the best you’ll have in Idaho. It is Idaho. Fresh, seasonal ingredients from local farms, ranches and streams expertly prepared by national award-winning chef proprietor Lynn Sheehan. Everything on the seasonally changing menu is made by hand, from scratch, to preserve the full flavor of Idaho’s bountiful lands.

“When you step into our log cabin roadhouse, you step into Idaho history,” says Sheehan. The fireplace dining rooms were once the main lodge of the 1940s MacDonald Cabin Colony—home to beloved American author, renowned outdoorsman, and Ketchum native “Papa” Ernest Hemingway from 1947-1949. Here in this cabin, Papa penned The Garden of Eden on an old Royal typewriter. Away from his desk, he would seek his muse in the nearby wildwoods, returning from hunts to dress and cure birds and game in the old barn.

Papa loved this secluded valley not only for the hunting and wild Idaho mountains and streams. He loved most the earthy townspeople, the real folk who talked plain, worked hard, respected their neighbors, and treasured their little piece of Idaho heaven. Traveling the world from Spain to Cuba and many points between, Papa always came home to roost in Sun Valley, where he was sure Idahoans would keep his feet planted firmly on the ground.

“Papa’s values are our values at Papa Hemi’s Hideaway,” explains Sheehan. “We don’t subscribe to frivolity, pomp or ostentation. We welcome folks to come as they are, treat all like family, and relish an atmosphere where everyone from the dog catcher to the socialite can chat about events of the day . . . or the big one that got away. You’ll dine on hand-hewn wooden tables with a homey hodgepodge of tableware. Like Papa’s writing, our dishes are born of simple natural ingredients, cleanly and expertly prepared, rich with the taste of the land. And Papa wouldn’t like it if we were too pricey or citified, so our chefs offer the familiar alongside the exotic at prices all can afford.”

You haven’t arrived in Ketchum if you haven’t dined at Papa Hemi’s Hideaway—“Ketchum the way it used to be . . .”