Rocky Mountain High

After Toledo, we went to Vail, Colorado. We ate at many restaurants, so I'm just going to tell you about a few things that we had at each, because otherwise this post would be taller than Vail mountain!

Our first ski day, we had lunch at Tavern on the Square. Tavern is located in The Arrabelle, which is where we stay. It's at the base of the mountain in Lionshead and so it's very easy to ski right up to it for lunch. Unfortunately, this means that they get very busy. So while the food is good, the experience isn't always great. It takes a long time for the food to come and sometimes it's hard to find a server for help.

I had a ramen bowl with with peas, shoots, farm egg, shiitake mushrooms, scallions, jalapeño, roasted vegetable broth & crispy nori cloud. I've noticed that most ramen bowls come with more noodles than anyone could really eat, so I think that the accompaniments to the noodles are very important. In this dish I really liked the mushrooms. I liked the egg too, but it was just a regular hard boiled egg. I think it's better when the yolks are jammy and creamy and not fully cooked.

This is the crispy nori cloud that came on top of the ramen. I thought it looked like a shower cap! The sesame on top was the best part.

And this was the ramen bowl hiding underneath!

My dad got bison steak chili, which isn't something that you usually see on menus in Boston! Lots of restaurants in Colorado serve different meats that they get out West, like elk and buffalo and bison. He thought that it was one of the better chilis that he had in Vail. Our friend Alec got Mile High Nachos that had tri-color chips with buffalo chicken, shishito peppers, queso, scallions, sour cream, guacamole & salsa. It was an enormous portion served in a paella pan. It could have been a meal for many people. Alec thought that it would have been a better dish for people to share for Apres ski (that means after skiing!) rather than as a lunch item. I loved the shishito peppers. We also liked that the chips themselves were thick, but some of them got soggy from too much queso. My dad didn't like having buffalo chicken tenders on his nachos, and thinks that my brother makes better ones!

You can't tell from the picture, but the pan was at least 18 inches across!

Overall Tavern is convenient with good enough food. You just need to be prepared that they're very busy for lunch during ski season.

Sushi Oka was one of the most fun places that we ate at in Vail because it's hibachi! Each family sits around its own cooking surface and a chef comes out and cooks your food for you. The chefs are usually very entertaining. They use cooking oil to make big fires and throw and catch their knives and throw food into your mouth. But I actually thought that our chef last year was better than our chef this year because our chef last year caught the eggs in his hat and made lots of funny jokes!

I learned that really a hibachi is a traditional Japanese cooking device that is designed to hold charcoal. The cooking surfaces used in these restaurants in the United States are actually teppan and in Japan these kinds of restaurants are called teppanyaki.

We each got a standard dinner with a small salad, rice and a protein. I had a mix of shrimp and chicken, steamed rice and vegetables. I thought that the chicken was the best. The food isn't that special, but the experience makes it a fun place for families to go eat.

He's cooking on an electric hot plate and there is no charcoal, which is why this is really called a teppan.

Another place that we had lunch was The 10th, which is a restaurant located at the middle level on Vail Mountain. The 10th has a nice view and good service, but it's another restaurant where it's more about the experience than the food. My favorite part is that when you get there you can change into slippers. They have all sorts of sizes and designs and colors. I picked pink leopard! Does that surprise anyone?!

I had the Chopped Cookshack Cobb, which came with herb roasted chicken, romaine, radicchio, bacon, heirloom tomato, avocado, carrot, egg, pumpkin seed, blue cheese, and roasted lemon vinaigrette. I had asked for no bacon and the cheese on the side, but instead they brought me no cheese and bacon on the side. I thought that the salad was okay but I wouldn't order it again.

My dad got elk chili. It came with whipped haystack goat cheese crema, black eyed peas, and micro cilantro. My dad thought that there were too many beans and not enough meat and that the portion was too small. He liked the chili that he got at Tavern more.

This is the elk chili. I wish I had taken a picture of my pink leopard slippers though!

The best part of our lunch was when they brought chocolates at the end and warm cookies that came with my sister's kids' meal! I didn't love the food, but the 10th is still a nice place to have a relaxing lunch on the mountain.

Another one of my favorite places to go in Vail is Bol. Bol is both a restaurant and a bowling alley. Some people just go there to eat, but we get a lane to bowl at. Once you walk through the restaurant, there is a stand to get bowling shoes. You tell them your size and then you try them on and can get bigger or smaller ones if they don't fit. My brother is nine and his shoes came with laces, but my sister's and mine had velcro. I wish that I'd had laces because they looked more grown-up.

Now you're probably wondering why I'm talking about bowling on a food blog! But Bol actually has great food and they will bring it to your lane while you're bowling!! We ordered lots of stuff and shared. My favorite savory dish was raclette filled acorn squash and house-made hot pretzels, which was an acorn squash filled with cheese to dip in, pretzel baguettes and bavarian mustard. I really liked dipping pretzels in cheese and I thought that the squash bowl was creative. The pretzels were soft and squishy and delicious.

We also got a Margherita Flatbread, which had roma tomatoes, mozzarella and basil, and a Fungus Amongus Flatbread, which had arugula pesto, ricotta, fontina, forest mushrooms, leeks, and black truffle. The Fungus Amongus Flatbread name is a joke, because mushrooms are fungus and if you order it there are mushrooms among you, but my mom had to explain that to me. Flatbread is really just a fancy sounding name for pizza. Even though it had a silly name, the mushroom flatbread was amazing! I probably would have taken off the arugula pesto, but the rest of it was delicious, and the cheese flatbread was great too.

This isn't a very good picture of the Fungus Amongus Flatbread, but you can still get the idea!

We also had wild boar meatballs with sweet chili ginger sauce, peanuts, anaheim salsa, cotija, and cilantro. Anaheim is a kind of mild hot pepper, and cotija is a kind of Mexican cheese. The meatballs were the best meatballs I've ever had!

But my very favorite thing that I ate at Bol was the dessert! We had the Chocolate Sphere Boling Ball which was a dark chocolate sphere (which is a big circle like a bowling ball). What made it special though was that the server poured hot caramel sauce over the top, which melted the chocolate and then pieces of flourless chocolate cake (which were like brownies), candied walnuts, pastry cream, and raspberries fell out! And what's even better than the dessert is that I figured out how to put a video onto my blog so you can see it for yourself!! The video is kind of dark because Bol is dark. But I still think it's cool!

I think that Bol is a really fun place for families to go. I like it because there's an activity to do, but there's good food too. And now that I know about adding videos, here's a video of me bowling too!

The best lunch that we had in Vail was at Larspur. Last year we didn't think that the service there was very good, but this year it was excellent. Our servers were very nice and brought my little sister bread and crayons right away because she was fussy. There is an open kitchen and it was fun to go watch while we waited.

My dad and I shared the Palisade Tomato Soup with grana padano and tuscan basil oil. We had to look it up, but we learned that grana padano is an Italian cheese similar to parmesan. The soup was very good. It was flavorful and smooth and creamy and I liked the garnishes on top.

My mom and I both had the Tangled Greens Salad with winter vegetables julienne, toasted Bolivian quinoa, and house dijon-champagne vinaigrette. We got it with Green Circle Chicken, which is very special. Green Circle chickens are a French breed of chicken that are raised on an Amish farm in Pennsylvania. They're raised the way chickens used to be raised on small farms, before factory farming started. This makes them taste better and I think it probably makes them happier. They get fed food scraps from some of New York's fanciest restaurants!! You can read more about Green Circle chickens here. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/dining/in-pursuit-of-tastier-chickens-a-strict-diet-of-four-star-scraps.html

I liked my salad a lot. The carrots were cut so that they were very thin, and I think that they might have been fried to make them crispy. The quinoa was toasted and crunchy. The chicken really was more flavorful than most of what you usually get!

But the best thing that we had at Larkspur was the truffle fries. They were very different from other truffle fries that I've had before and they were better! The potatoes were cut into thick slices, not the shape of usual fries. They were covered with lots of cheese and truffle salt and were crispy on the outside and soft on the inside. We asked about how they were cooked and learned that they bake the slices before they fry them. Maybe that's why they're so good!

For dessert, we had the Baker's Dozen chocolate chip cookies. I found out that a baker's dozen is another way of saying 13 of something because a long time ago, if you bought 12 loaves of bread, the baker would give you a 13th for free. At first I thought that 13 cookies was going to be way too many, but they were very small and the nine people at our table ate them all! The cookies were very soft and came out hot and were a great way to end our last lunch in Vail!

For dinner that night, we went to to a really special restaurant, but there's so much to tell you about that I think it needs to be its own post. So get ready to hear more soon!