Ski-resort eateries offer much-improved fare

Once upon a time, ski food meant greasy $3 hamburgers and chili, even at major resorts. Well, the hamburgers and chili are still there, but these days they're made of Kobe beef and cost upward of $15.

And it's not only gourmet, $20-a-plate restaurants that are dishing out decent food. Just about every eatery has its own hook with some pretty yummy fare.

I recently was at The Mill Cafe, one of the on-slope restaurants at California's Mammoth Mountain near Yosemite National Park, when a guy in his early 20s, well over 6 feet and hardly 180 pounds, pointed excitedly to a dish in the cafeteria line.
"That," he said, his eyes gleaming, "and that and that and that."

Though he added grilled chicken breasts and salad and potatoes to the mix, the star on his plate was the smoked tri-tip beef.

Yeah, I ordered it, too, and it turned out to be the best meal I've had on a ski hill without paying big bucks at a waiter-served place.

The juicy, tender slices of beef had just enough smoke to give them flavor; they melted in my mouth and came with a killer dipping sauce.

Be still my growling stomach.

But there was more. On busy days and weekends, Mammoth hauls out its burrito cat.

It's a bright orange food truck on snow treads that serves up four flavors of burritos for a quick on-slope snack.

For the more gourmet-minded, there's the snowcat dinner. Picture a bus on snow treads and you've got a passenger snowcat. It takes diners to 9,600 feet, where you find Mammoth's ultragourmet Parallax restaurant, usually reserved for Black Pass owners.

Black Pass? A paltry $10,000 for membership gets you favored parking, permission to cut lift lines, concierge service and lunch at Parallax.

But for the rest of us, a typical $89 snowcat dinner at Parallax will serve up wild arugula salad with goat cheese, maple- and peppercorn-crested duck breast or rack of lamb followed by chocolate soup — yes, soup.

Why is all this good food available?

Perhaps you can credit Deer Valley in Utah.

This is the place that invented ski luxe. There were telephones on lift poles here in the early 1980s so skiers could stay connected, well before skiers could pull cellphones out of their pockets. There were ski packages that included butlers. And, of course, there were gourmet buffets with half a dozen kinds of mushrooms.

People shook their heads when the lodge opened, with its brass bathroom fixtures, original oil paintings and gourmet ski food. But it didn't take long for other resorts to copy the idea.

And now we get to the much-sought-after, three-times-weekly Fireside Dining meals at Deer Valley's Empire Lodge.

This takes ski dining to unheard of levels.

Begin with the architecture: a 35,000-square-foot lodge filled with what has become the prerequisite ski luxe decor of cedar planking, heavy beams, peeled logs and, of course, massive fieldstone fireplaces. These fireplaces are the focus of the dining experience.

First, the cheese. Huge rounds of raclette sit on the hearth, slowly melting and dribbling onto plates. The fragrance is so sharp, you catch your breath while dropping boiled potatoes, pickles, tiny onions, bread and Swiss meats onto your plate.

Take a plate of cheese, some homemade mustard and dig in. But not too much; this is just the appetizer.

Then it's on to the next fireplace, where you find steaming bowls of stews, thick with tender chunks of lamb, chicken or veal that swim alongside mushrooms, leeks and roasted tomatoes
And finally — sheesh, can there be room for more? — dessert. This is at the third fireplace, where pots of bubbling chocolate and caramel sit alongside huge strawberries, slices of apples and bananas and assorted dried fruits.