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 Boulder Restaurant Profile | ALICE'S RESTAURANT AT GOLD LAKE
WPomegranate-juice Martini with Chopin vodka. Onion soup with caramelized onions, roasted-chicken jus, and Gruyère cheese crostini. Fennel-and-agave-glazed salmon with frisée and radish slaw, basil whipped potatoes, and lemon-thyme vinaigrette. Duck confit salad with chive polenta cake, crispy duck leg, watercress and balsamic. A seven-course tasting menu with paired wines. Mmmm. Does that sound like spa food to you?
At Alice’s Restaurant, above Ward, you can get pretty much anything you want. It can be super healthy, like classic salads and alcohol-free elixirs concocted for high-altitude refreshment. Or it can be a bittersweet chocolate pâté, so silkily dense, with teasing grains of cayenne pepper and fleur de sel, that conversation simply has to stop. Open to the public for lunch and dinner, the restaurant serves close to 70 diners on some summer evenings and up to 40 at lunch. Many locals still don’t know about it, though it’s been in business since 1993 and has been helmed by well-regarded chefs. It has snagged such impressive stamps of approval as Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence, Sunset’s “Best Small Inns of the West,” Westword’s “Most Romantic Restaurant,” Glamour’s “Ten Best Vacations,” National Geographic Traveler’s “joyously intimate getaway” and Mountain Living’s “Best Place to Get Stuck in a Snowstorm.” Driven When Chef Ted Mathesius arrived last January, 6 feet of snow lay on the ground at Gold Lake, and Alice’s felt like a good place to be. Mathesius had come from Seattle, where he started cooking at 17 as an apprentice at the Westin Hotel and spent 18 more years working up the ladder. As a “two-headed chef,” he handled the duties of both pastry chef and executive sous-chef, largely in hotel kitchens. He says Seattle has comfortable, somewhat “mall-y” restaurants, strong on fish and steaks but lacking the independent restaurants and chic dining scenes of either Portland or Boulder. Ready to take charge at a chef-driven establishment, he warmed to the tasks of bringing the kitchen up to his standards and increasing the restaurant’s staff of well-trained help.
“I can’t stand so much as a mop closet being disorganized. I want things just perfect,” Mathesius says. After a few “tempestuous” years—one employee recalls being fired and rehired three times in one day—the restaurant now has a chef who finds “the perfect balance” in fine-tuning the kitchen; buying from local, organic and sustainable sources as much as possible; and supervising three meals a day in the restaurant while catering for the couples, families, wedding parties, and business groups who use the resort. “The 30-minute drive between work and my home in Nederland is definitely my quiet time,” he says. Mathesius’s artistry with pastry is evident in his meltingly crisp housemade pizza dough, olive-oil flavored croutons, and cookies, crackers, breads and breakfast granola. The dishes on the menu, which changes daily, suggest attention to subtle combinations of textures and flavors, as in the serrano-spiked gazpacho verde based on tomatillos, or the accompaniments to a pan-roasted organic half-chicken: a blood-orange-and-currant couscous, and small cipolline onions braised for two or three hours in olive oil. The onion-infused olive oil later flavors vinaigrettes. The chocolate pâté is served with cocoa sorbet, fresh raspberries, and a firm, crunchy brandy snap tinged with cardamom. At dinner, the standard three-course, $39 prix fixe menu offers a selection from a list of five starters (two soups and three salads), five entrées (including one seafood and one vegetarian dish) and four desserts, one of which is a cheese-and-fruit plate with almonds. The lunch menu is simpler. Dining, Thinking, Loving, Sleeping The wine list at Alice’s Restaurant invokes a line by Virginia Woolf: “One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” To make sure guests do, Gary Cummins, a Nederland resident who worked at Liquor Mart for years, serves as wine consultant, categorizing the bottlings as Old World reds, Old World whites, New World reds, and so forth. The inn sells about 10 wines by the glass for about $5 to $10, and sometimes puts together a few flights on blustery afternoons. In addition to a dozen bottled beers from home and abroad, the full-service bar makes a number of elegantly frisky cocktails, like a sidecar with Belle de Brillet pear cognac, Cointreau and fresh lemon juice. The olives in the Lodge Martini are stuffed with local blue cheese.
Built a century ago as Colorado’s first camp for girls, the 100-acre Gold Lake property now comprises the original lodge with the dining room; 19 log cabins; the stables; the spa, which has a menu as long as the restaurant’s; a facility for corporate teambuilding; cross-country skiing, snowshoeing and hiking trails; places for outdoor weddings and other festivities; hot soaking pools; and Gold Lake itself, about a mile around. Long before miners took over the area in the 1860s, Gold Lake was a sacred meeting and hunting place for various American Indian tribes, and Chief Niwot (Left Hand) led the Southern Arapahos up Lefthand Canyon every summer. Staff members show visitors a large outcropping called Niwot’s Rock, which, according to tradition, the chief used for vision quests. The climate is markedly different. On a baking-hot day when it was almost 90 degrees in Boulder, the air was moist and cool at Gold Lake, at one point chilling down to 55 in a shower of hail. General Manager Felicia Correy loves what she sees from her office overlooking the lake: bears, foxes, ospreys, eagles, marmots, ravens, “a moose and her calf, and millions of hummingbirds. Every day when I come to work from Longmont, I feel as if I’m going to church.” In that “healing, sacred, beautiful place,” a guest dines well in a deeply delicious way. | Gold Lake Mountain Resort and Spa is at 3371 Gold Lake Road, Ward—about a 45-minute drive from Boulder. Lunch is served from 11am-2pm, and dinner (adults only, please) from 6-9pm. Reservations are required except for overnight guests. Call 303-459-3544 or visit www.goldlake.com for reservations and directions; Mapquest’s suggested routes can be unnecessarily long. Day, evening and overnight getaway packages are available. | Mary Jarrett, Boulder Magazine’s editor, loves cooking and dining.
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Boulder Restaurants
