Cool River Cafe - Buena Vista — Restaurant in Buena Vista

I am obsessed with this place. We fell in love with their Breckenridge location this summer and had the opportunity to go back about a month ago, at which point the staff there let us know that this location existed 30 min from us; not gonna lie, I cried 🤣

The food is fresh, and they use a unique variety of ingredients in their dishes that you wouldn’t normally see in a similar dish elsewhere, setting them apart. The staff is fun and helpful (some of the younger staff doesn’t quite “have customer service down” (don’t really engage when they interact with you (like running food), are oblivious to the fact that a customer might want to sit in the spot they at blocking while taking to a friend that came in, etc), but it is obvious that it’s not malicious and they are just learning (and it’s a minority of the total staff)). I just get giddy every time my husband agrees to make the trek (since we have plenty of options 5 min away instead of 30 min away).

When we go, we usually eat there and get food to go for 1-2 more meals because we like the food so much 🤤 it’s a little challenging to find vegan options, much less healthy, tasty ones in this area, and these guys absolutely knock it out...

Place is on point! We're a band, HeartByrne, on tour, and checked this place out to be pleasantly surprised how delicious everything was! The eggs were cooked perfectly, which yea, you would think is easy to do, but believe me, we're on the road and we eat at a lot of places and often they're too runny, too hard, cold, etc. The smash browns, their version of hash browns, were delicious! The bacon was on point, which again is hit or miss at a lot of places, overcooked, undercooked, chewy, thin, etc, but not here, fantastic! They provide real butter for the bread, another thing that is often missed with many restaurants using vegetable oil butter, which I'm guessing is cheaper to provide? Finally, the pastries! The donut holes are amazing! They're gluten free, which is a nice perk but not even worth mentioning because their as good as any gluten donut hole I've had. The texture is lovely and the taste is wonderful with the perfect amount of sweetness. Grateful for gems like these, especially for a band on the road that relies on places like these for fuel /...

Obviously this is all subjective. The food isn't fancy but got 5 stars because it was really good for the type of food it was. We had two turkey rueben sandwiches on rye. Good portions and it came with chips.

We also had a raspberry bar and it was nice and tart and had an oatmeal crumble. It went well with the drip coffee, which was also not a cheap tasting coffee like you get in some places.

It was a little pricey but no more than similar settings and they gave us free refills on iced tea.

There is indoor and outdoor seating. We dined inside (versus to go). I like the fact that they are using paper/compostable cups and washable plates. Shows some effort on environmental impact. The indoor environment was chill and the employees were friendly and seemed to enjoy what they were doing. I felt like we could have sat there for an hour and they wouldn't have cared. One of the supervisors, Allie, stopped by and spoke with us for probably 5 minutes and remembered our names when we left. It's little stuff like that that makes a...