Everything You Can Eat and Drink on Dolly Parton’s Tour Bus
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Stay overnight on the country music legend’s tour bus and feast on her favorite foods.
Courtesy of The Dollywood Company
“Does Dolly like the banana pudding?”
I’m on the phone with Nathaniel, one of the concierges from Dollywood’s DreamMore Resort in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and he’s walking me through the menu options for a personalized dinner that I'll be eating on her tour bus.
The classic menu features dishes like bacon-wrapped shrimp and mesquite-smoked brisket, and I notice three different dessert options. While they all sound appealing, I really just want to know what Dolly likes. I’m assured she does, in fact, love the banana pudding. And what’s good enough for Dolly is good enough for me.
The five-course dinner is included in a stay on Suite 1986, otherwise known as Dolly Parton’s tour bus. The superstar and philanthropist spent over a decade crossing North America on the custom Prevost tour bus, en route to concerts and awards shows. The bus is outfitted with a bedazzled bedroom (complete with a hand-painted vanity, microwave, and wig closet) and a kitchen with a full-sized fridge that required the removal of the bus’s front window to install.
Courtesy of The Dollywood Company
The tour bus was retired and permanently docked in the same spot it was parked whenever Parton would visit DreamMore. Now superfans can book the Dolly Tour Bus Experience. Starting at $10,000, it includes two nights on the bus for two guests, a suite inside the resort for up to four additional people, a welcome amenity, plenty of fun swag (plush bathrobes, signature Dolly perfume), and a highly-customized private dinner cooked by the resort’s chef, Tiffany Hicks. (Proceeds are donated to Parton’s Dollywood Foundation.)
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Courtesy of The Dollywood Company
Days before arriving for your stay, a concierge calls to hammer out the dinner menu so it’s exactly what you want. While the standard menu is full of Dolly’s favorites like biscuits, smoked ribs slathered in Cola barbecue sauce, and that banana pudding, Hicks says guests can choose their own adventure.
“We'll tailor it to you — your preferences, the flavors you like,” says the chef. “If you want something else, by all means, we're here to help you enjoy. That's what Dolly gets — whatever she wants.” It’s just part of an experience that, for a few magical, thrilling days, channels the country music legend’s life.
The first thing I notice when we step onto the bus — besides the walls splashed in hand-painted murals of travelers and crystal balls, and the glossy faux-wood kitchen table where I imagine Parton drinking her morning coffee — is a cheese board. It’s overflowing with cheddar and blue cheese and fruit. Apparently, it’s the same spread the singer gets whenever she arrives at DreamMore. (According to the staff, she loves cheese, which is just one of the many things that makes the icon so relatable.) The full-sized fridge is filled with bottles of water, coke, and root beer, too.
Courtesy of The Dollywood Company
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While you’re staying on the bus, you can visit Dollywood and seek out some of the theme park’s most popular treats, including the funnel cake and iced cinnamon bread. But the made-to-order dinner, each course named for one of Parton’s songs or albums and paired with wine, is only available for Suite 1986 guests.
When it’s time for our dinner, we make our way to the Song & Hearth restaurant inside the hotel, and are led to a cozy banquet in a secluded section of the dining room. On each place setting is a rock imprinted with words like “blessed” and “grateful” along with wooden spoons tied with a recipe for Dolly’s famous Stone Soup as a souvenir.
Courtesy of The Dollywood Company
Chef Tiffany greets us and explains the first course: a cup of duck confit and dumpling soup, with a rich, turmeric-laced broth. It’s a riff on the Southern staple chicken and dumplings. “Turmeric is good for the soul,” Hicks says. “At least that’s what my great-grandma told me.”
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Next up is a plate of cheddar biscuits sitting alongside a ramekin of roasted garlic and rosemary-whipped butter. (Biscuits are another Dolly favorite.) There’s fresh burrata with tomatoes that the chef cooks with brown sugar and finishes with a drizzle of balsamic reduced with honey.
Course three is bacon-wrapped shrimp and andouille sausage over yellow grits that the chef makes with smoked Gouda. And the fourth and final savory course is a feast unto itself. The procession of mains include pan-seared catfish, crispy fried chicken, brisket, slow-smoked for 11 hours, pulled pork that’s been smoked for 12 hours, and — the star of the show — five-hour smoked ribs coated in Coca-Cola barbecue sauce. They’re Dolly’s favorite, and now they’re my favorite, too.
Courtesy of The Dollywood Company
Alongside the buffet of entrées (meant, somehow, for just two adult humans), we’re presented with a secondary procession of sides: made-from-scratch mashed potatoes and collard greens with ham, bacon, and brown sugar “to sweeten your future,” according to the chef. Finally, there’s the mac and cheese, blended with smoked Gouda, Monterey Jack, cheddar, and Cotija, “because it’s salty,” says Hicks.
The last course is a Southern sweet tooth’s dream. Banana pudding, vanilla bean pastry cream, and crushed Nilla wafers are layered into rustic mason jars that the chef first scents with a smoking vanilla bean. It’s not the only dessert, though — Hick makes mini (OK, not that mini) cast iron pans full of peach cobbler, using her grandmother’s recipe with a secret, aromatic ingredient. They come out hot and doused in salted caramel and vanilla bean ice cream. Finally, there’s a strawberry mille-feuille made by the resort’s pastry chef Cindy Fairbanks. Disks of house-made puff pastry are structured with macerated vanilla bean pastry cream and sprinkled with torn basil for a perfectly-balanced earthy and sweet bite.
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Just when we thought we were finished, one last plate arrives: a heap of salted pecan pralines laced with bourbon that Hicks made just a few hours before. By the time the feast was winding down, I couldn’t taste more than a bite of the banana pudding. But the chef graciously put the mason jar in a to-go bag. The next morning, I tried my luck bringing it through airport security, and — a Dolly Miracle — they let me carry it home on the plane.
