Jackson Hole has changed very little in the thirteen years since I last visited. The elk still roam just outside of town, stray moose still stop traffic occasionally and Rendezvous Mountain is still "the big one."
The most noticeable change is the culinary revolution that has been carried into town in the wake of the fur and jewel encrusted jet-setters that now make Jackson their playground.
A day on the slopes used to be followed with nachos and a beer at the Mangy Moose or steak and ribs at any one of a half dozen chop houses. If you were really going out on the town, you would head to the Cadillac Grille.
Today, Jackson boasts three Thai restaurants, three sushi restaurants, a wine bar, a microbrewery and myriad restaurants that would feel right at home in Chicago, New York or Los Angeles. Even the Million Dollar Cowboy Bar now serves its Pabst in BOTTLES.
Day 1We landed too late to get in any skiing, so we unpacked, took a nap (damn elevation) and then headed out to an early dinner.
Koshu - Koshu is a wine bar and 20-seat Asian restaurant attached to the Jackson Hole Wine Company. Most people who come to Koshu for the food stop into JHWC and buy a bottle to BYO.
JHWC does a brisk business in everything from cold cases of my beloved PBR to bottles of first growth Bordeaux. I was shocked at the selection. They have every wine growing region, price point and format represented. Want a $9 magnum of white zin? No problem. A split of Vin Santo? Check. A $100+ bottle of Napa Valley Cab? Pick your vintage.
The restaurant itself is just a handful of tables and a few seats at a bar. The back wall is opaque Plexiglas that hides what would be an open kitchen. The result is that you can see shadows dancing back and forth in the kitchen, but not make out the detail - like shadow puppets.
We started with a few selections from their fairly extensive list of wines by the glass, seaweed salad and "dry fried green beans." The seaweed salad was good enough - the stuff you get in most Japanese restaurants (sesame oil, a little lemon, etc.) but the green beans were superlative. They are coated in hoi sin sauce and sesame seeds before being pan fried. They come out slightly crispy on the outside, but still tender in the center and the hoi sin reduces to a thick glaze.
For entrees, we shared a Vietnamese chicken bowl and Coho salmon in green curry. The chicken bowl was disappointing. It was bland and colorless with the chicken grainy and dry - showing signs of having been kept at high temperatures for a long time (think of those immense vats of soup in your college cafeteria that were continually replenished, but you never actually saw them emptied and cleaned).
The Coho was another story altogether. Vibrant, tell-tale vermilion flesh still raw in the center riding on a wave of pungent green curry and coconut milk. We discarded the sad Vietnamese chicken and devoured the Coho. When we were done, we dumped in a bowl of rice in order to soak up every last drop of the green curry.
Day 2We had a great day of skiing with clear blue skies and temperatures in the mid teens. After a hot tub back at our hotel and late afternoon tea, we showered up and headed into town.
Million Dollar Cowboy Bar - You want Wild West kitsch? You've got it. Saddles are mounted as bar stools, Wagon wheels are turned into chandeliers and yes, just like at the Phil Vassar concert, you can pick up a souvenir thong for that special lady in your life.
After a few PBRs and some good natured shenanigans with a group of wayward Montanans, we settled up and headed over to OYG.
Old Yellowstone Garage - A few people suggested that this was a pretty decent Italian joint (many of the same people who told me to avoid Nani's at all cost) but everyone we met swore by the Sunday night pizza dinner at OYG. For $18 per person, you get a salad of mixed greens and all-you-can-eat of whatever pizzas the chefs feel like making that night.
They manage to keep it civilized, with the chefs making four or five of a given type of pizza and then dispersing the wait staff in different directions. You then have five to ten minutes to wait before the next pizza is pulled out of the brick oven.
Over the course of the evening, we sampled:
- spicy pepperoni
- pesto / sausage / red onion
- red pepper / zucchini / potato
- four cheese
- pesto / potato ("Genovese")
- grilled chicken / mushroom
- grilled chicken / pepperoni / sausage
Our favorites were the pesto / sausage / red onion and the four cheese white pizza, but they were all very good. I highly recommend this if you are in Jackson on a Sunday night.
Day 3The wind kicked up a bit, carrying in clouds and the promise of fresh snow. We had a great morning of skiing and then stopped for lunch at Casper Lodge (at the top of the Sweetwater Triple).
Casper Lodge - Sunday afternoon we choked down some pretty bad "rubber" turkey burgers at Casper, but the weather was so glorious, we didn't really care. Monday, we had the opposite experience - a killer cheese steak eaten near the fire as we sought shelter from the whipping winds and poor visibility.
Casper is great - a warming hut that serves a surprisingly wide variety of good food. Aside from the Mangy Moose, this is probably the best option for slope side food at Jackson. If you go, be sure to go early (before 11:30) as the place can get very crowded.
After a few more runs, we called it a day, with flat light, shadows and drifting snow conspiring to get the better of tired legs.
We partook in our daily ritual of hot tub and afternoon tea before showering off and heading back to Koshu for drinks. We had a few glasses of wine and then walked two blocks to the Blue Lion.
Blue Lion - We had reservations at the Rendezvous Bistro (same owners as Snake River Grill) but really didn't feel like taking a cab or bus to and from dinner, so we cancelled it and scrounged up a table at Blue Lion. Big mistake. Huge.
The Blue Lion feels like a holdout from an earlier, less culinarily advanced era - the culinary equivalent of a wooly mammoth. Everything is just a bit overdone - massive salads come with the entrée and meats are drowned in heavily seasoned sauces. They have completely missed the boat on everything good that has happened in cooking in this country in the last 15 years (fresh ingredients, simple preparations, smaller portions, etc.).
We started with the French Onion Soup and a bowl of the daily special, a White Bean and Sausage stew. The French onion was pretty good and massive - it could have been an entree by itself. The White Bean and Sausage soup was somewhere between a cassoulet and a ribbolita - a thick mélange of beans, sausage and green vegetables. This was also very good, but man did it drop into your stomach harder than a bad matzoh ball.
The salads arrived with a Chipotle/Raspberry dressing. I was very much looking forward to this dressing, before I realized it was basically Russian dressing from a bottle with nary a hint of Chipotle to be found.
For entrees, my wife had the house specialty, Rack of Lamb and I had an Elk Tenderloin. The Rack was massive. There were eight or nine chops, heavily breaded and floating in thick rosemary cream sauce. Inside they were perfectly medium rare, but you couldn’t taste the meat through the hard shell of butter and seasoned breadcrumbs. Any lamb essence that might have slipped through was instantly drowned out by the rich rosemary cream sauce. They could have served my ski boot in the same preparation with no noticeable impact on the overall flavor of the dish.
The Elk Tenderloin was beautifully cooked. It was silky smooth, deep purple in the center (I requested it rare) and the texture was a velvety, melt-in-your-mouth feeling that even the best beef tenderloin struggles to achieve. Unfortunately, it too was drowned in a rich sauce - this time the culprits were green peppercorns and brandy. Minus the sauce, this dish would have sung - garnish with some fresh vegetables and a starch and you have a real award winner here. Drowned under the brandy and supported by a cast of over-cooked green beans in butter and ready-mix mashed potatoes, it simply a terrible thing to do to a great piece of meat.
We cut our losses and skipped dessert.
Day 4We decided to give our legs a day of rest from skiing and try our hand at dog sledding. We drove the hour and a half north to Togwotee Lodge, where we spent the morning behind a team of 12 eager dogs. I can't say enough good things about this experience - especially if you are a dog lover. You are alone in the back country, with the only sounds coming from the dog's breath and the crunch of the snow under the sled's runners. Absolutely breathtaking. Togwotee Lodge - Our half day package included round trip transportation, dog sledding and lunch at the Togwotee Lodge. I suggest you skip the lunch. We had well done bison burgers served with cold fries in a room that felt very much like a high school cafeteria - well, what your high school cafeteria might have felt like had it been full of snowmobile operators ogling your women folk because they hadn't seen another female in days. I recommend saving the $20 a head and scooting back to town to visit Sweetwater or the Bunnery for lunch instead.
We spent the late afternoon lounging in the hot tub and napping and then headed off to an early dinner at Trio.
Trio - As I mentioned earlier, when a "star" restaurant experiences chef defection and said chefs hang out their own shingle just down the street, then a town has reached culinary maturity. When three chefs from the Snake River Grill left to open Trio, Jackson dining came of age.
Trio is a zero aesthetic sort of place. Simple wood floors, corrugated metal walls, high unfinished ceilings and an open kitchen with a few seats at the bar. It felt like they hired the same design firm as the folks over at Koshu. [By the way - I mean Trio and Koshu no disrespect. I actually prefer zero decor - and am highly skeptical of restaurants that spend too much attention on the decoration.]
Our waiter was the first person we met in Jackson who I believe actually knew something about food. Many restaurants neglect the front of the house, especially in a resort town, but the gang at Trio really spent some time educating the servers. He had sampled everything on the menu and was as facile describing their béchamel sauce preparation as he was commenting on the cold front that was moving in (most waiters in Jackson are way more comfortable discussing snow conditions than food).
We started with a mango mojito for my wife and - against my better judgment - a basil mojito for me. These are the sort of drinks that usually signal an unhappy end to the evening for me - not because of their alcohol content, but because they are a great leading indicator of the trendy cuisine that will likely follow.
We sucked these down while snacking on the delicious basil infused olive oil and fresh bread. They infuse their oil at the restaurant, which I know isn't that hard to do, but theirs is really outstanding stuff - like a very good basil pesto, without the gravity of the garlic or cream. [BTW - our candidate for “Resort Town Waiter of the Year" was able to describe in painstaking detail how the chefs infuse the oil with such a strong basil flavor.]
We started with the "BLT soup" and Waffle Fries w/ Blue Cheese Sauce. Our waiter noticed we planned to share both, so he split the soup for us and had it plated as two smaller bowls. It arrived looking exactly like something out of Todd English's deconstructionist daydreams - a pool of deep red tomato soup punctuated with chunks of crispy pancetta and a mound of green lettuce "pesto." Individually, the tomato soup, lettuce and pancetta were very good, but when sampled together, it absolutely tasted like a BLT sandwich - a little "gimmicky," but good.
I would never have seen the waffle fries at the bottom of the menu - and had I seen them, I would almost certainly never have ordered them - but the front desk clerk at our hotel told us they were her favorite dish in Jackson. She is definitely onto something. A pile of crispy, golden-brown waffle fries is covered in a blue cheese béchamel sauce. The sauce is rich, but not overpowering and the blue cheese just sings. Do not miss this dish. I recommend a progressive dinner beginning with Koshu's green beans followed by these fries. . .
For an entree, we split the Elk Bolognaise, a hallmark of the chefs' former employer. This was lighter than I was expecting and actually tasted like elk. It reminded me very much of some of the boar and other wild game ragout we had last fall in Tuscany.
We were going to skip dessert, but our waiter noted that the banana crepes are "out of this World." He is right. They serve three fresh crepes under a wave of grand marnier, bananas, candied walnuts and vanilla ice cream. It is a good thing we are spending our days burning calories on the slopes.
Day 5OK, so maybe dog sledding isn't as relaxing as we had originally thought. We woke up too sore to even think about skiing, so we crawled down to breakfast and then directly to the hot tub. As it turns out, the road to the mountain was closed anyway due to white out conditions. We lazed in front of the fire, reading until we got hungry for lunch.
Sweetwater Grill - After settling into a cozy seat next to the potbelly stove, I realized that I was one of only two men in the entire restaurant. It wasn't uncomfortable, just a little "Stepford" for my tastes - like walking into any restaurant in New Canaan, CT for a late lunch on a weekday. The ladies who lunch come here for the salads, sandwiches and fresh baked goods, though most just push them around on the plate. Those of us who actually intend to consume the food at Sweetwater aren't disappointed either.
We both had salads that, despite being some of the first leafy greens we had seen in WY, were excellent. My Baja chicken salad with ranch dressing was solid, as was my wife's Cobb salad. NB: both salads were massive and could easily have been shared.
After a stroll around town and a stop at The Bunnery for coffee, we headed home to resume reading by the fire.
For dinner, we were jonseing for Thai food in the worst way. Even since moving to New York City in 2000, I have noticed that I start to get the shakes every three to four days if I haven't gotten my fix of coconut milk, lemongrass, kefir lime, chili peppers and curry. After some brief confirmatory diligence with the front desk at our hotel, we decided on a place we had overheard some locals raving about - Teton Thai.
Teton Thai - When the people of faaaabulous Jackson get to be too much for you to stomach, this is the place to go. To get there, you walk a few blocks off the town square, down an alley and through a court yard, ultimately arriving in a 10'x20' room that pushes maximum density to contain a lunch counter, cooler, cash register and kitchen. Cash only. BYO.
Here people cram shoulder to shoulder at the bar, or just stand up to eat. Two Thai women work the stove at a feverish pace while extreme skiing videos play on the TV overhead and the thick, sweet perfume of Thai cooking hangs in the air like a modern day opium den.
We stopped off at JHWC to pick up a bottle of wine on the way (no need to chill it, really - at 12 degrees outside, it is pretty much chilled by the time you make the ten minute walk to the restaurant). When we got there, we grabbed two empty seats and a menu and tried our best to blend in. It was no use. We were not just the only ones in the restaurant that didn't have a season pass, we were the only ones in the restaurant that didn't work at the mountain. It didn't help that we were drinking Caymus Conundrum while everyone else swapped beers.
The food is outstanding. We split a chicken satay to start and then moved on to Pad See Ew and a Massaman Curry that was served in a bowl big enough to backstroke in. The Pad See Ew had a vinegar-tanginess to it that was a little odd, but it was good nonetheless. The Massaman Curry offered chicken and potatoes in a thick, spicy red curry. After fishing out all of the meat and potatoes, I dumped in the rice to repeat the ritual scavenging that I performed with the green curry a few nights earlier at Koshu.
As we were leaving, some of our fellow diners were busy working the phones to find friends to cover for them at work in the morning - it appeared certain that a front was moving in and bringing with it more of the "fresh."
Day 6The kids were right - it started snowing after midnight and when we got to the mountain there were six inches of fresh snow and counting. We skied all morning, taking advantage of the fresh to explore more of the mountain, eventually grabbing a late lunch at the base.
Cafe 6311 - The lines here are very long, no matter when you arrive. They offer made to order sandwiches, coffee, breakfast and smoothies. We split a turkey sandwich and a mango smoothie that were both very good, but not worth the effort it took to get them.
We skied the rest of the day and then grabbed a sunset hot tub before changing for dinner.
Snake River Brewing Company - This is another place that some locals recommended to us, more for the beer than the food. Sure enough, the place was mostly packed with locals. We saw the night bellman from our hotel as well as the musher from our day of dog sledding both hanging out at the bar. I don't want you to get the wrong idea about me, but is there anything better after a long day of skiing than a cold beer? We sampled a few of SRB's offerings:
Snake River Pale Ale - Light, hoppy, refreshing beer with a bit of backbone to it
Last Tram Ale - Malty, amber ale that reminded me very much of - forgive me - Sam Adams
Monkey's Dunkle - Classic German inspired dark lager that is smooooooooooth
Zonker Stout - SRB's award winning stout is more coffee and chocolate than cream, if you know what I mean (think Beamish, not Guinness or if you are on the old sod, "home" not "away")
We bid our friends farewell and headed back to the center of town for a "gut buster" at Billy's.
Billy's Burger - This venerable grease trap has been on the town square in Jackson forever (at least it seems that way). In addition to providing the burgers for the Cadillac Grille next door, they also have a few dozen stools at their counter. You can expect thick, fresh, greasy burgers and waffle fries all served with the wit and witticism of Billy's line cooks. This isn't haute cuisine, but when you need a really good burger, this is the place to go.
Day 7Another six inches of fresh snow overnight brought the three day total to an even two feet of snow. We were on the mountain when the lifts opened and skied through noon before taking a break, opting instead to eat a late lunch in town on our way back to the hotel.
Mountain High Pizza Pie - This is another local favorite. Nothing comes close to New York pizza, but this place makes some very good - and very creative - pies. You can choose thin or thick crust and select from ingredients as pedestrian as pepperoni to as adventuresome as Thai sesame sauce. We had a small thick crust Sunny Pesto pizza - a chewy crust topped with pesto, mozzarella, sun dried tomatoes and chicken.
After lunch we strolled around town before all of the shops closed, eventually stopping into Shades for a cup of coffee.
Shades Cafe - This place is tucked in just down the street from Sweetwater and is a funky combination of two parts coffee house to one part sandwich shop. The coffee was pretty bad, but the food we saw while we waited (and believe me, we waited a long time) looked and smelled very good.
Wild Sage - Nothing in Jackson requires you to get terribly gussied up, but there is something very appealing about not having to put on a parka to walk to dinner, so we decided to try the restaurant on the first floor of our hotel. Besides, after eating fantastic breakfasts all week, and getting to know all of the wait staff by name, it would have felt rude not to try them for dinner at least once.
Wild sage only has about six tables and the open kitchen is at most 8'x8'. The wince cellar shares one wall with a fireplace and the other wall is windows that look out on the town of Jackson. We had a quiet table near the window and after selecting a wine, were offered an amusee of tuna sashimi with sriracha sauce.
We began with the Yakinori Salad Roll and the Venison with Sweet Potato Gnocchi. The salad rolls were passable - crisp fresh vegetables wrapped in rice paper and served with a racy ginger, ponzu and lemongrass dipping sauce. The venison was better, with the peppercorn and juniper berry crust on the meat providing a good counterpoint to the silky sweetness of the gnocchi, but was very heavy as a first course.
For entrees, we had the Montana Beef Tenderloin with Red Potato Hash and the Achiote Rubbed Wapiti Loin. The tenderloin was pretty simple - a beautifully rare piece of meat astride a mound of red skin mashed potato and garnished with a ratatouille of sorts. This wasn't overly creative, but very high quality.
I was drawn to the wapiti (elk) loin because it was described as being prepared with an achiote rub and a hemp seed mole. I had visions of luscious, gamey elk cured in spicy pepper and cooled with rich mole. I could not have been more wrong. The elk was perfectly rare, but there was no trace of the achiote and whatever "mole" was there got lost in a sea of mushroom and tomato which was described as "cuitlacoche and smoked Portobello ragout" but I can't honestly vouch for that claim. [NOTE: cuitlacoche is a fungus that grows on corn in Mexico] There were so many different ingredients, but the flavor had all washed out and on the whole, the dish was a real let down. Remember our favorite German architect’s mantra, "less is more." The dish was an optical disaster as well - shades of grey and red intertwined on the plate like some leftover goulash from behind the iron curtain.
For dessert we had the Chocolate Mousse Martini and the Croissant Bread Pudding. Both were outstanding. The chocolate mousse arrived in a martini glass and topped with an "olive" of milk chocolate wrapped around peanut butter. The bread pudding was a thick, rich, gooey mess of croissant chunks, pear/apple chutney, caramel sauce and vanilla ice cream.
All-in, this was a decent meal, but very uneven. I think the kitchen suffers a bit from an inferiority complex - trying to dress up their dishes to justify the lofty prices on the menu as though diners somehow do food cost calculations in their head during dinner and judge restaurants by that math.
Day 8Well, all good things eventually come to an end. For our last day at Jackson, the sun came out and we enjoyed the blue skies and mild temperatures as we cruised all over the mountain. Finally, just after noon, we got in line for our last tram ride ever (the tram was retired on April 2, 2006).
After some technical difficulties (one of the tram cars hit a tower and sheared off some piece of equipment), they got us up top. After some photos, my wife rode the tram back down and I headed off to race her to the bottom. Once we were all present and accounted for at the bottom, we grabbed some PBR pounders to enjoy in the sunshine, toasted the mountain and then kicked off our skis to head to the Mangy Moose to relax.
The Mangy Moose - This is a Jackson institution. There is a dining room attached to the bar, but the real draw is the noisy bar with great live music, cold beer, a roaring fire and solid bar food. These are what get this place named "the best après ski bar in North America" time after time. They proudly serve, amongst other brews, two of our favorite domestic beers: Moose Drool Stout and Fat Tire Amber Ale. We ordered a few of these to nurse our quivering quads while we awaited our order of their famous nachos.
The nachos measure a full twelve inches across and eight inches high. Inside this tangled mess are tortilla chips, beef chili, jalapeno peppers, melted cheddar and jack cheese, sour cream, salsa and guacamole. These are some of the best nachos around. The two of us picked at them for half an hour and still barely made a dent.
We caught a ride back to town, enjoyed one last après ski hot tub and then took a nap before heading to dinner.
Snake River Grill - This place has the reputation as the best restaurant in Jackson. As such, it attracts all of the beautiful people that the locals love to hate.
The uniform for women is tight black pants or Sevens jeans tucked into newly-purchased cowboy boots crafted from an exotic leather (extra points for endangered species) with an over-sized belt buckle of semi precious stones, a tight-fitting, low cut top that shows off the 300-600 cubic centiliters of what God DIDN'T give you (but your surgeon did) and a fur. Men generally wear the same uniform below the waist, with slicked back hair and an unbuttoned blazer up top. Nowhere else in Jackson are people quite as pushy, loud and obnoxious and the overall feel of the place reminds me very much of why I moved out of Manhattan a few years ago.
I was immediately on edge and as my wife and I took turns rolling our eyes, I was determined to hate this restaurant.
Try as I might, I couldn't do it. The server was a charming, knowledgeable, altogether too perky woman who knew the ins and outs of every dish on the menu and was even fairly well versed in the wine selections. We started with Buffalo Carpaccio and the special, Venison Tamale.
The Carpaccio was one of those elusive "perfect" dishes - ruby-red slices of buffalo topped with cracked black pepper and very thinly shaved pieces of pecorino. The gamey flavors of the buffalo paired perfectly with the slightly nutty notes in the cheese.
The tamale was bizarre. I would never have ordered it, except that the waitress assured us that, "I don't normally eat tamales, but this one is great." Inside the corn husk were tender morsels of venison, bits of mushrooms and spicy red peppers all combined with some of the softest tamale filling I had ever tasted. This stuff was closer in consistency to good risotto than it was to that kindergarten paste that you typically find inside tamales.
Next we opted for the restaurant's famous Wild Game Bolognaise and the chef's signature Crispy Pork Shank. The wild game bolognaise was outstanding - a plate of papardelle dotted with tender bits of venison and elk in a hearty tomato-based sauce. This was comfort food of the first order - reminiscent both of the Elk Bolognaise from Trio and of many of the game-based pasta dishes we enjoyed in Tuscany.
The pork shank is another dish that I was prepared to look past until our waitress recommended it. It arrived as a Fred Flintstone sized pork shank on its end rising out of a bowl of sauce like some porcine iceberg. The outer skin is crisped to perfection - what my Southern friends would attest to as "good cracklings" and glowed golden brown in the dim light of the dining room. Inside, the meat was tender, pink, succulent and fell off the bone in ribbons, cascading into the moat of tangy, vinegar-based sauce below. The caramelized cippoline onions that garnished the dish tied it all together, proving an adequate foil for both the opulence of the pork and the bite of the sauce. I wasn't quite able to finish this dish, but I desperately wanted to.
The waitress left us alone for a bit of a breather as we worked through the rest of our wine and buoyed our strength for a run at the dessert menu. In the end, we couldn't avoid the "New Orleans Style Beignets." Jazz Fest is just around the corner and when the waitress admitted that these were made to order, we had to try them. The piping hot balls of fried dough arrived at our table in a paper cone, having been freshly dusted in powdered sugar. On their own, they were outstanding, but dipped into the accompanying pool of melted semi-sweet chocolate, they were divine.
Suffice it to say, if you can stomach the other guests at SRG, the food is well worth the trip.
Struggling to come up with something to make for dinner, the answer arrived in my weekly vegetable delivery: a bunch of organic baby beets. I washed the greens, trimmed them from the root and tossed them with a quick vinaigrette. Meanwhile, I baked the roots in an aluminum paquet and tossed some chicken breasts on the grill (seasoned with the aforementioned Matiz Herbed Sea Salt). I diced the chicken and beets and tossed them (still hot) with the beet greens. The result was a delicious (and highly nutricious) dish that is pure summer.
