Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
dozen different restaurants are scattered
around the 3,000-acre (1,215-hectare)
property, including Colorado's only AAA
five-diamond restaurant, the rooftop
Pen-
rose Room,
a glossy formal dining room
with panoramic mountain views and a
refined Continental menu. The
Charles
Court
restaurant, with its English country-
house decor and picture-window views of
Cheyenne Lake, heads into more contem-
porary territory with a creative American
menu skewed toward Rocky Mountain
ingredients—things like a carpaccio of
Colorado beef with smoked sweet-potato
hash and a quail egg, or a duet of brook
trout and Wagyu beef short ribs, served
with crimson lentils and a sauce Roma-
nesco. The most adventurous cuisine of all
is across the street at the stand-alone
Summit
restaurant (19 Lake Circle;
&
719/
577-5896
), with its sleek earth-toned
Adam Tihany-designed decor and an
ever-changing menu of eclectic brasserie
fare—anything from monkfish “osso buco”
to frisée salad with smoked bacon, from
raw oysters to roasted beets, depending
on what's seasonally available. Both the
Penrose Room and Summit have small
private dining rooms for tastings and cook-
ing demos; the Charles Court has a chef's
table in the kitchen.
Don't feel like dressing up for dinner?
Then settle into the pine-paneled
Tavern,
first opened in 1939 (check out the authen-
tic Toulouse-Lautrec lithographs on the
walls). On an open stone grill, they fire up
excellent steaks, burgers, and fish (try the
Colorado brown trout). Or indulge your
Anglophilia at the
Golden Bee,
an actual
English pub that was packed up and
shipped over to Colorado; it features
steak-and-mushroom pie, fish and chips,
trifle, real ale, and even pub singalongs.
Even at the casual golf course and pool-
side restaurants, the food is executed with
flair. You don't have to be a titan of indus-
try to eat well at the Broadmoor—though
you may end up feeling like one.
Lake Circle, at Lake Ave., Colorado
Springs (
&
800/634-7711
or 719/634-
7711; www.broadmoor.com).
(
Colorado Springs (10 miles/16km).
Gourmet Inns & Resorts
72
Tendrils/Cave B Inn at SageCliffe
The Gorge Rises
Quincy, Washington
The “cliffe” part of the name is no mere
poetic detail—not with that setting on
sheer basalt cliffs 900 feet (270m) above
the Columbia River. It's a stunning place to
find an intimate little luxury inn, and the
Cave B Inn at SageCliffe (named after the
surrounding Cave B Estate Winery) never
lets you forget that breathtaking location,
with huge walls of glass in the lobby and
dining room and floor-to-ceiling windows
in the 30 guest rooms.
And then there's the “sage” part of
the name, which references the 30-odd
varieties of sage growing wild on this
scrubby, semi-arid edge of the Columbia
Plateau. Hosts of restaurants talk about
using local ingredients, but Tendrils, the
inn's acclaimed restaurant, depends on
them, going so far as to forage for wild
sage. Chef Shauna Scriver culls daily pro-
duce from an on-site organic chef's kitchen
and orchard—including heirloom foods
such as amaranth, quinoa, orach (moun-
tain spinach), farro wheat, and Ozette
potatoes. The entire SageCliffe property is
committed to being green (look down and
you'll notice that the floor of the restau-
rant is made of recycled railroad ties), so
