By Merv Hecht Palisadian-Post Columnist We’ve been traveling a lot. One trip was to Lake Arrowhead to deliver two of our grandchildren to overnight chess camp. After we dropped them off we decided to have lunch and followed a recommendation from one of the camp counselors to go to the Arrowhead Lodge for lunch. We expected the usual rural type lodge that one finds in what we think of as a “retro” setting. Boy were we wrong! The Arrowhead Lodge was so beautiful, the food so delicious, and the wine list so interesting, that we made reservations to spend the night there the following week prior to picking the boys up from camp. The following Thursday night we drove the two hours from Santa Monica to Lake Arrowhead and checked into the lodge. The room was beautiful. The lake was beautiful. The dining room was beautiful. We made dinner reservations for 7:30, and sat at one of the windows from which we could see the lake as the sun went down. We shared an appetizer plate. There was enough food on the plate for three or four people to share. Two of the dips were excellent. The guacamole didn’t have as much natural avocado taste as I would’ve liked, and there were so many almonds and olives on the plate that we took some back to the room as snacks for the next day. Then I was served my main course, beef short ribs. The short ribs, cooked exactly the way I like them off the bone. The meat was tender enough to be cut with the fork, and it had a slight tang of barbecue sauce on the top. It was served over a delicious yam pur’e, with horseradish-flavored coleslaw around the rim of the plate, and I knew the chef must have come from some special ethnic food background. I introduced myself to the manager and got the whole story. Some nice group of investors had recently invested $17 million to upgrade the lodge. They hired a chef from New Orleans, recently displaced by the disaster there, and stole a sommelier from the Flemings steakhouse chain. One of the things they decided to emphasize in the new dining room, along with a slightly New Orleans style cuisine, was’much to my pleasure’the wine list. And the wine list was superb, although a bit difficult for me to understand the first time I looked at it. First, there is a section that contains all of the wines available. Then separate “bins” by geographic area. A couple of the things I liked about the lists were that there were wines from all over the world, and there was a very good selection of wines by the glass. I ordered two glasses of Zinfandel at the same time in order to compare them. One was made by Ridge, one of the oldest and most traditional Zinfandel producers in California, and the other from a producer I never heard of, but quite a bit more expensive than the Ridge. The Ridge was delicious with the short ribs, but the other Zinfandel was over-wooded, and had a strong nose of coffee, which overpowered the fruit. All in all, I loved the dinner and I loved my little private wine tasting. Next time, I’ll review Harris Ranch.
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