Here’s the deal. Ski Valley is lovely but has very limited restaurant options, especially on a Sunday night. So after a day of sight seeing and before heading up into the mountains we looked at the menu on their website. Wow. Rare Tuna… Brussels sprouts...with bacon… pizza with apples and goat cheese… wonderful salads and well, just PIZZA. The kids with us were excited about that. And also, this was s special occasion, with a birthday among us. So I called to make sure that they were in fact open and that we could get a table before we started the 30 minute drive to Ski Valley. The woman on the phone was very nice, took my name and said they’d have a table ready for us.
We arrived, table wasn’t ready, name didn’t seem to matter, but we were too busy admiring the BEAUTIFUL pizza oven to care and they seated us promptly at any rate. But then our waiter put a menu in front of us that looked nothing like the menu advertised on their website. No tuna, no sprouts, no salads at all. And… so oddly considering we were looking at a show-stopper of a pizza oven, NO PIZZA.
Defeated but hungry, one kid ordered the “kids chicken” which was an unseasoned 1/2 chicken breast and fries. Blah. And not pizza. Other kid ordered a $25 green chili burger. This was the best thing brought to our table. Delicious. Birthday Guy ordered the petite filet for $57. It arrived cold with a sad sauce which had begun to set. Not a grain of salt or a cracked speck of peppercorn on the filet or in the sauce. I ordered the chicken breast in sweet potato purée. Ugh. It was identical to the Kid’s. Did they take it straight from the Sam’s Club bag of frozen chicken breasts and microwave it? Again, zero seasoning. And it was $32. For a piece of boneless skinless chicken without so much as a pinch of paprika.
So. Waiter was politely told the dishes had no flavor. Salt and pepper was brought. No one stopped by to try to make things right. Thank goodness for a bottle of mediocre Cabernet, good conversation and the divine smell of mountain pines on the walk to our room at Alpine Village.
What a sad and expensive experience. On the upside, there is a Georgia O’Keefe painting in the lobby of the Blake Hotel that almost made it worth it. Almost.More