If you want to enjoy the unmistakable ambience of a real New York diner, head to Wyoming. The Moondance Diner, whose iconic, crescent-shaped sign has long beckoned hungry pedestrians on the western edge of SoHo, is heading to the small town of La Barge, Wyo.

A couple, Vincent and Cheryl Pierce, recently bought the diner and are working out the details — including permits to close off Sixth Avenue and Grand Street — to move the building west, as in the Wild West, not “West Side Story.” According to the Star-Tribune of Casper, Wyo., which broke the news yesterday, Ms. Pierce’s husband and father plan to drive a semi-tractor-trailer to New York City in order to relocate the Moondance to a rural town surrounded by oil and gas fields about five miles north of the Oregon Trail from near the West Side Highway.

“Wow — and they’re going to truck that thing the whole way?” a resident of SoHo, Ann Ascot, said. The 68-year-old was such a frequent patron of the diner that a picture of her and a friend was placed on the wall. She said she already misses the atmosphere and the food. The diner served its last meals on July 1.

Two hours south of Jackson Hole and three hours northeast of Salt Lake City, La Barge is on Wyoming’s Green River, a tributary of the Colorado where there is ample trout fishing and deer hunting. The area also has enough mountain climbing, hunting, fishing, boating, snowmobiling, and skiing to make the most avid sports enthusiast at Chelsea Piers envious.

The town is named for a trapper, Joseph Marie La Barge. It was originally called Tulsa, but changed its name in 1935 partly due to confusion with the Oklahoma metropolis. La Barge has a sign on State Highway 189 stating its population as 493. The mayor, Dennis Hacklin, said the population is closer to 600, partly because of those working in the oil and gas industry. There are more residents in some Manhattan high rises.

The Moondance Diner could soon be serving up burgers, hand cut fries, milkshakes, and homemade buttermilk onion rings to a crowd will appreciate the diner’s barrel-roof ceiling, mirror and chrome interior, stools, and wrap-around windows every bit as much as its SoHo clientele, perhaps more so, as the town is currently without a restaurant.

“The diner is going to have a nice home here,” Elizabeth Brown the facilities manager at the town’s only school, La Barge Elementary School, said.

“It’s not only a nice addition, it’s a needed addition,” Mr. Hacklin, who owns La Barge Realty, said. He said the town has three policemen (one full-time and two part-time), and two holding cells that are not regularly used because prisoners are taken to nearby Kemmerer, Wyo. The volunteer fire department has five trucks. He allowed that the town is not “big city yet.”

The Pierces bought the diner from a Rhode Island-based nonprofit, American Diner Museum, to which it was donated by Extell Development, the company that is developing the diner’s former site on Sixth Avenue into luxury residences.

Two preservationists from Queens and Brooklyn, Michael Perlman and Kyle Supley, helped save the structure, designed by the late architect Alan Buchsbaum, and its signature revolving moon sign, created by signmaker Jim Rogers. In addition to its celebrated design, the Moondance was no stranger to celebrity: “Rent” playwright Jonathan Larson once worked at the Moondance Diner. In the 2002 film “Spider-Man,” Peter Parker’s girlfriend Mary Jane, played by Kirsten Dunst, waits tables there.

“I’m excited,” a teacher at La Barge Elementary, Eileen Stewart, said. “We are in desperate need of a restaurant.” Currently, there are only two gas stations and convenience stores that serve hamburgers, hot dogs, and fried chicken. A restaurant called Timberline, which served American cuisine, was once part of the landscape, and the Moondance may also get a competitor, to be called the Hideaway Café.

Previously, hungry La Barge residents have gone 20 miles north to Big Piney, Wyo., to eat Mexican cuisine at Los Cabos or American cuisine at Annie’s Place, which is in a log building that has been an American Legion Hall, a clothing store, and a schoolhouse where Cub Scouts once met. Annie Phillips, who started Annie’s Place after taking over Gatzke’s Grubhouse, serves a 12-ounce New York steak for $17.95.

Ms. Phillips said New Yorkers who travel to La Barge and Big Piney will find a “friendly atmosphere and good people.”

The executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, called the move a “disconcerting trend.” He said: “It’s an indication that the real estate market in New York, and particularly in Manhattan, is so superheated that anything that doesn’t dedicate itself to the super luxury market does not seem to be able to survive.”

The Moondance is not the first rural rescue of a diner. A real estate developer, Jeremy Gorelick, was one of 15 people who banded together to save the 1940s-era Munson Diner on 49th Street and haul it to Liberty, N.Y., in 2005. “A diner can do well anywhere,” he said, adding that it was terrific that so many people have the vision to save diners, which are pieces of Americana.

The director of the SoHo Alliance, Sean Sweeney said, “I’m thinking — SoHo is getting Starbucks and Wyoming is getting the Moondance Diner. Is this a fair trade?”