Game Creek Club

So this place is awesome. Plain and simple. From the ambiance, to the service, to the food — simply awesome.
Places like this are not my comfort zone in terms of food, but my wife urged me to branch out and we really had a memorable night.
Worth every penny.

The BF and I were super excited about going to dinner at Game Creek as it is an entire production to get up there. Plus, I don’t ski, so getting to go up the mountain is pretty exciting to me. This place is not just about the food, it is about the entire experience.
We had reservations at 7:30pm so we had to be at the Eagle Bahn Gondola at 7pm. We checked in with the Game Creek person who knew the reservation name before we even told them and handed us warm blankets for the ride up. That was SUPER COOL to ride the gondola at night and see all the lights… and then watch them fade away as we got higher and higher. When you disembark the gondola, your snow cat driver greets you and puts you in the heated snow cat for the 10 minute ride to the restaurant. OMG I loved this snow cat thing. A couple of steep hills made it exciting and it felt like you were in a tank in the middle of nowhere. Until it went down a steep embankment and dropped you off at the door of Game Creek. That right there was cool enough.
We were immediately greeted and seated when we came in. I’d say the décor was upscale ski lodge/​hunting lodge. We got our wine order in and started deciding on our dinner. You can choose to do a three course meal, a four course meal, or the chef’s tasting five course meal. And not everyone at the table has to do the same.
The BF and I decided to say WTF and do the five course Chef’s tasting as it looked good. The couple with us did the four course meal and it all went off seamlessly. Chef’s tasting included the following:
Wagyu carpaccio with parmesan aioli dotted on it, arugula, and smoked salt. This was paper thin and had little croutons on top of it also.
Pea risotto made with parmesan and lemon oil — oh my… I had no idea I would like this so much. It was thick and rich and tasted like English peas except creamier and better. I would eat this on the daily.
John Dory with fennel confit, asparagus, and saffron curry vinaigrette — perfectly cooked fish with a spicy/​sweet thing going on.
Elk with a beet potato cake, smoked mushrooms, and huckleberry sauce — I do so love medium rare meat with a sweeter sauce. Sweet and savory is where it is at! This was delicious elk.
Passion fruit with white chocolate, meringue, and raspberry coulis — it was warm and fruity on the outside and then inside it was cold… almost like a Baked Alaska but with passion fruit and raspberry sauce. An unexpected dessert… but I really loved it.
Our other dining companions really enjoyed their four courses also and we all left full and happy. And maybe a little lighter in the bank account… but you can’t take $$ with you and I like to spend it on fun experiences like this. Service was good — not overly nice but not completely non-​existent. We lacked for nothing throughout the evening though so it was up to par.
On the way out the snow cat comes to get you and takes you back to the gondola and then you go back down the hill to Lionshead to head home or to the bar or whatever else you want to get into.
Awesome experience! I definitely recommend this as a special dinner night during your stay in Vail.

What an experience! First class lux all the way. After skiing Dawn Busters, where 3 lifts are open only to members, they offered an amazing lunch spread of fresh seafood, including scallops, crab, oysters amd shrimp. Amazing views, super friendly staff and an incredible experience.

The staff was amazing. The atmosphere is calm and relaxing. The food is SO delicious. Its totally worth watching the sunset while riding the gondola up to the mountain top for dinner.

We wanted wine, but the sommelier was too busy to bother coming to our table. While the food was superb, the service was as cold and icy as the mountain this over priced place rests.

You start your adventure off with a nighttime ride up the gondola… Which is spectacular. Then from there you take a 10 minute ride in one of the snow cats that are heated! One of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had!
As you walk into the restaurant, the atmosphere and staff are nothing short of awesome! Greeted with a smile and warm welcome was nice. Bartenders were the same and had great suggestions and were knowledgable of the wine list.
It is a pre fixed menu when you get to your table… And an expensive one at that. $ 100
Our appetizers were great, salad and soup was great. The palate cleansers were awesome! (we wanted more coconut sorbet!)
The entrees were not as good as you would have expected with the prices you pay. I had the celery root entrée and it has zero flavor. The fish entrée was the same… Zero flavor. The entrees were not creative and very average.
I would only highly recommend this place because of the cool transportation to get to and from.

This place was amazing! We went on New Years Eve and had the perfect spot to alongside our meal watch the fireworks at Beaver Creek. The meal itself was phenomenal, we chose to do the special 5 course meal made for New Years Eve and decided not to look at it to be surprised. It was a surprise and not a bad one a fantastic one! Every course was perfect and the service was friendly. Overall we had a great time across the whole event from riding to the place in the snowcat to leaving. I would definitely recommend this place!

The Game Creek Club is severely overrated. Yes, the scenery is great but you see the same view when you exit the gondola where casual food is available. In the summer, which is when we went, from the gondola station you ride an airport shuttle bus down a dirt road to the restaurant. Patrons were allowed to wear whatever they wanted. People on our bus were dressed in jeans and flip flops.
The service at Game Creek Club was horrible. It took 35 minutes to receive our appetizers, and the other courses were delivered in a similarly slow fashion. Part of the issue was that there seemed to be only 2 waitstaff and they haphazardly waited on tables in various parts of the dining room which likely contributed to the delays. Towards the end of the meal, the bartender was even pressed into service to deliver food.
The courses were tiny. My tofu entrée had precisely one piece of tofu which was the size of a credit card ½ inch thick. My husband got ice cream for dessert which consisted of 3 melon ball sized scoops of vanilla ice cream. (Keep in mind that the least expensive option is a $ 70 three course meal.) We were told that substitutions were not allowed.
Given the chronic lack of service, we had to go up to the hostess stand to ask for our check.
In closing, this place felt like an expensive tourist trap and we were glad to get back on the airport shuttle bus and leave.

My only taste of this place was at the 2015 Taste of Vail, and man oh man was it amazingly good! I had the lamb bowl with quail egg and in full disclosure I had more than one bowl of it. I just didn’t want it to end.

I can’t believe this restaurant doesn’t have more reviews. This may be the best restaurant + experience I’ve ever had.
We went to Game Creek on the last night of our ski vacation in Vail, Co. To get to the restaurant, you take the Gondola up first then jump on a snowcat which drops you off at the front door of the club. We had the snowcat to ourselves as the sun was setting on a beautiful March night.
We opted for the 4-​course meal which was an appetizer, soup/​salad, entrée and desert. Their tasting menu was 5-​courses but they allowed us to pick from the tasting menu to complete our courses. I chose the shrimp appetizer, the cauliflower soup, the scallops and the chocolate mouse desert. Everything was INCREDIBLE. My date chose different items so I was able to taste many of the fabulous dishes they offered. We also ordered a bottle of wine and were greeted with a pâté bite to start. Our waiter Scott was very knowledgeable, helpful and attentive. Each dish was delivered and described in detail by a separate wait staff. They sent us back with a few wrapped up cookies and treats following dinner (though I couldn’t eat another bite).
Overall, pricey night but most certainly worth it for the food, service & the completely unique experience. Go there for a romantic night. 5 star experience all around!

The food is very good, but the service is so poor the food quality is irrelevant. The staff is extremely condescending despite their less than par quality service. Absolutely not worth the cost. Many other great places in Vail with superior quality and half the price.

I was in Vail for a conference last week and came up to the Game Creek Club for a dinner party on the lower level. The setting, service, and food were excellent! My only gripe is that I wasn’t able to ride shotgun in the snowcat — there’s always next time!

Great service, food was amazing (especially the beef steak with the sweet bread), dessert was exquisite, as well as the complimentary macaroons, pricey but worth it, the ride up is also something out of this world

This restaurant is all about EXPERIENCE! If you want a dinner experience that you will never forget, you should try Game Creek Club. The night starts by taking the Gondola to the top of the mountain in Loinshead Village. From there you get on a Cat that will drive you out to a restaurant about 8 minutes away. The food itself was excellent. You have to like to try different things, because everything has a different twist. You can choose between 3, 4 or 5 course meals. The food itself was very good, but like I said it all has a twist of some sort. Not like just going to your average Ruth Chris or Morton’s.
If you have a picky pallet, if you get motion sickness, or if you want to get home right after dinner then this is not the place for for you. But if you are adventurous and want an experience that you will always remember, this is a cool restaurant and I highly recommend it for you!

Expensive… absolutely. This is one of those restaurants that you do only occasionally and know that it’s going to cost you. That said, the food and service were both excellent and of course the view is spectacular.
My fiancé and I started out our meal with an amuse bouche of foie gras. Frankly, it wasn’t the most satisfying bite to start with, but an interesting one none the less. I started with the Pork Belly, followed by Lobster Bisque. My fiancé took a chance and ordered the sweet breads which she had never tried previously and loved them. Fried perfectly, they melted in the mouth. This all set the tone for an excellent dinner to follow. I had the Lamb while my fiancé had the Waygu Beef, both prepared perfectly and hers covered with a Hollandaise Foam which was another new one for her.
Our wait staff was attentive and knowledgeable and did a fantastic job. Again, yes it pricey but this is one of the rare places that you need to try at least once!

Can’t speak to the dinner experience, but hands down this was the best brunch experience I’ve had in my life. For the record, I think dropping $ 35 on breakfast is pretty crazy, but this is worth it.
We ate there this past Sunday and really enjoyed the buffet. Everything was good, and a few items were exceptional (how they managed to make banana bread so sublime is beyond me). The service was professional and friendly, the view is beautiful (obviously) and the overall experience was great.

A great fine dining choice in Vail if your looking for a unique dining experience. A pre fix menu with limited choices, but my husband and I both enjoyed our meal selections. Great view and ambience. Excellent service!

How I wanted to give this place five stars; the potential for greatness is there. OTOH, it fell short enough of the mark that I was almost tempted to knock off another star, hence four stars.
First, the good stuff: spectacular view, gracious service, the van ride from the gondola fun and the driver wonderfully courteous and helpful. The ambience is pure luxe: opulent and elegant but not ostentatious furnishings and serveware («Mountain casual» dress code, though, didn’t match). The menu is inventive and ambitious. Though the cost is almost as high as the altitude, it was not out of line for a destination restaurant. Having drinks on the gorgeous deck was a wonderful beginning. Moreover, it was a very nice touch that the restaurant paid in full for our gondola tickets (a not-​insignificant expense, as we’d learned earlier in the week) and, had we tarried past the last gondola down the mountain, would have driven us all the way back down to Lionshead. And much of what we ate and drank was delicious. Oh, and did I mention that jaw-​droppingly gorgeous view, especially at sunset?
But culinarily, Game Creek fell just short of my expectations (Kelly Liken had set the bar very high the night before). The execution of the menu items was hit-​or-​miss, matching neither the «intentionally vague» (as our server initially told us) descriptions nor concepts. Several signature items, such as actual game (elk) are not available on the prix fixe menu, but only on the half-​again-​as-​expensive «Chef’s Tasting Menu.» And said menu had a beet salad – my husband (like so many men) detests beets. We couldn’t substitute either way, not even at an upcharge for the entrée. Moreover, there was no a la carte menu offered that would have allowed us to order exactly what we wanted from the menu items, at any price. We ordered the four course no-​beets prix fixe, requesting wine pairings, but were not told in advance how much extra the pairings would be (as opposed to the Chef’s Tasting Menu, which sets out the difference between with-​and-​without-​wine prices).
Hate to be churlish about an amuse-​bouche, but the sweet gelee on the paté de foie gras was thick and almost chewy. The pork belly app was cloaked in a sweet Asian glaze that was so hard and crunchy that it not only made a meat that was supposed to melt in the mouth (especially one marinated 24 hrs) difficult to cut (!) but overwhelmed it – there seemed to be more glaze than pork. Though the Filipino slaw was a nice touch, there were gratuitous sweet sauces that, given the pork’s glaze, were redundant in taste, even superfluous (and in the case of the «Vietnamese caramel,» treacly and not in the least «Vietnamese»). Our salads – husband’s summer vegetable & my watermelon-​feta-​heirloom tomato – were excellent, however. Little did I know they’d be the meal’s high points. Husband’s was paired with a nice OR Pinot Noir; mine, however, with a Beaujolais Nouveau… in JULY?! Really? Creative way to use up something nearly over-​the-​hill. (An acidic and complex white or rosé would have been better).
My husband had the halibut – which was the size of a postage stamp (unusually small even for a multi-​course nouvelle cuisine menu) and way overdone. My lamb chops were a more generous portion, but «Mediterraneanized» to the point of obscuring the meat’s inherent flavor. Unlike the CO lamb chops I had at the much cheaper Bistro Fourteen, these were smaller, cooked nearly to well-​done, tough, and tasted more of their seasonings & marinade than of the lamb. All of that made the taste and texture nearly unidentifiable as lamb – it could have been mistaken for well-​done beef were it not for the bones. And the promised accompanying yogurt (which I’d expected to be akin to tzatziki or raita) turned out to be a squirt of yogurt-​flavored foam the size of a small gumdrop. (I’ve had molecular gastronomy done right, but this wasn’t it).
For dessert we chose the cheese plate. It came paired with a 2003 port (type and provenance never identified) that was overly sweet and inappropriate for all but the WI blue cheese (which was bland, dryish and nearly devoid of veining). Odd that in a town known for its profusion of local bounty (including cheeses) there wasn’t a single CO offering on the plate. True, the meal was seasonal but nowhere near locavore. Mignardises? Just two small filled chocolates incorrectly described as «truffles» in a little cellophane bag – and one was caved in.
Our server was earnest, eager and pleasant, but clearly a neophyte when it came to the nuances of food and wine at that level (no pun intended). He had trouble pronouncing several wine names that were fairly well-​known and could impart little information about the provenance of much of what we were eating and drinking (he seemed to have been repeating a script). He’ll grow into knowledge and expertise, but it was still jarring to have been «present at the creation» at that price point.

The best restaurant in Vail! We ate at a lot of the top places but the food and service was by far the best in Vail. This is Michelin level food without pretentiousness. The ride up in the SnowCat by Roy was one to remember.
My kids had a fantastic time with him as well as really enjoyed their filet mignons. I had Salmon which I thought would be fair but it was spectacular. Cooked perfectly and also accompany with the perfect sauce. My husband had duck and wolfed it down before I could get a bite.
The service was outstanding, been to a lot of NYC restaurants but this was the top! Made Flame at the Four Seasons seem like a diner.
Wish we had discovered it earlier in the week, we would have eaten there more. Other restaurants we went to Flame, La Tour, La Bottega, Nobu — they were good but not amazing. Except for porkbelly carbonara at La Tour.

This place has an inspiring view and menu! For a non skier (like myself), it was fun to take the gondola to the top of Vail Mountain! Then its just a short ride on a shuttle bus to the restaurant that is tucked away on one of Vail mountain’s back bowls. The Gondola ride is free with a reservation, which was a savings of $ 26 buck-​a-​roos! Like most of Vail, the décor is a European style chalet. While quite beautiful inside, the large wood deck had the most stunning views!!!
I went with 3 girlfriends, (in shorts and T-​shirts) and we started the party on the deck for a cocktail before dinner. Our server was Alex and could not have been sweeter!!! My girlfriend who was celebrating her 50^th birthday wanted a Mojito (which was not on the menu) and he didn’t blink about making sure he could accommodate her request. As Tony the Tiger would say, the mojitos were GRRRRRRRRRREAT!
In the dining room, our server was Reef. Again, sweet, professional, didn’t seem bugged by our endless questions about the menu. He was terrific! You have a choice between a three, four or five course meal. Being girls, we opted for the three course meal. It was $ 70 for a three course meal and a $ 10 upcharge if you chose an item from the chef’s tasting menu. I had sweet corn bisque for my starter, elk with a sweet potato purée (which was on the chef’s tasting menu) for my entrée and a chocolate bomb of deliciousness for dessert. Everything was too die for! The three course meal was plenty! And if the dinner and dessert weren’t enough, the chef sends you home with a chocolate lollipop, which I am eating right now. SO GOOD!
Regular summer operating days/​hours are Thurs-​Sat for dinner, 5:30 — 8:30pm, and Sundays for brunch 11am-​2pm. Also, on Thurs-​Sat from 5:30−7pm on the deck, they have featured drink and appetizer specials. They will close on September 1^st, so hurry in!
Another reviewer said that the club was private, it may have been in the past, but it isn’t any longer. We were not members. Thank goodness! Because I love this place and can’t wait to go back and take my hubby!