Seven Keys Lodge — Hotel in Estes Park

This is a comment about the restaurant. If you value your wallet and respect your palate, you’ll RUN QUICKLY AWAY from this place! The restaurant came highly recommended and I can only surmise this was a result of experiences from long long ago. While it was recently sold and under new management, the website touted a “new chef” 2 weeks prior, the new folks running the place and cooking the food appear oblivious to their impending financial failures because you can only slop the pigs and fleece your customers for so long.

The setting is historic and beautiful. The cocktails were well made. Unfortunately, that’s where anything positive ended.

Service was SLOW (it was well over an hour before we had anything in front of us to eat - even though the service was “family style”). The promised Wine & Beer Menu never materialized. They had no Pinot Noir on hand but the Cabernet came with added protein (a bug swimming at the surface). The meal began with “Pigs in a Blanket” - their artistic interpretation of this was to find a cheddar-infused Oscar Meyer hotdog, sliced on bias, and grilled. No blankets here - but the mustard was rationed carefully. The Hawaiian sweet rolls came fresh from their package with a slight warm-up, but the promised butter never made an appearance. The pork chops had the life cooked out of them but must’ve been held in reserve in the fridge. They didn’t quite make it back to room temperature by the time they hit our table. The rosemary grits were “imaginative” but a hockey puck would’ve been more tender. The green beans may have been picked that morning but they remained in their native state - raw and crispy. Dessert consisted of thinly sliced pound cake, a strawberry or two, and a few blue berries - topped with whipped cream that was on the verge of going bad. All of this for the amazing sum of $60 per person (excluding drinks)!

If you want to be taken for a fool, make a reservation for tonight. Otherwise,...

The definition of a rustic mountain lodge: nothing is square, the bathrooms are shared and the view is amazing.||The lodge shows its age (it’s a victim of some…deferred maintenance…I hope the new owners will attend to), but it’s conveniently close to a number of good trails in Rocky Mountain National Park, making it a perfect hotel to hike from and to, and its promise of food and drink service means its remoteness shouldn’t be an inconvenience.||Unfortunately, one night of our two-night stay the owners closed food service for the night so the family could attend a sendoff without giving us a heads up (they’d posted it on social media a couple days before and a hand-written sign appeared sometime between our afternoon arrival and when we planned to eat). It was disappointing to learn last minute we would have to get into town for food after a long day of hiking. ||The food we did have was fine, thought the menu the night we were able to eat at the lodge was limited to smaller items, and the drink inventory seemed limited, too. The included breakfasts were tasty and were a hardy start for a day on the trails.||This was our second stay (previously we’d visited it as The Baldpate Inn about five years ago), and I’m happy the humming bird feeders remain. It feels as though the new owners are still figuring out the finer points of running a hotel, restaurant and bar, though the entire family was...

The definition of a rustic mountain lodge: nothing is square, the bathrooms are shared and the view is amazing.||The lodge shows its age (it’s a victim of some…deferred maintenance…I hope the new owners will attend to), but it’s conveniently close to a number of good trails in Rocky Mountain National Park, making it a perfect hotel to hike from and to, and its promise of food and drink service means its remoteness shouldn’t be an inconvenience.||Unfortunately, one night of our two-night stay the owners closed food service for the night so the family could attend a sendoff without giving us a heads up (they’d posted it on social media a couple days before and a hand-written sign appeared sometime between our afternoon arrival and when we planned to eat). It was disappointing to learn last minute we would have to get into town for food after a long day of hiking. ||The food we did have was fine, thought the menu the night we were able to eat at the lodge was limited to smaller items, and the drink inventory seemed limited, too. The included breakfasts were tasty and were a hardy start for a day on the trails.||This was our second stay (previously we’d visited it as The Baldpate Inn about five years ago), and I’m happy the humming bird feeders remain. It feels as though the new owners are still figuring out the finer points of running a hotel, restaurant and bar, though the entire family was...