In dire need of lunch at the base of Breckenridge, I skied on over to Coppertop Bar & Grill to meet up with the fiancee while she was on a little break from ski school. Realistically, very little is expected of ski mountain food. The restaurants have a captive audience, jack up the prices and provide more warming and high energy foods than truly good food. So when I moseyed on over to the food area at Coppertop, my expectations were quite low. But wait…did I just see a dude walk by with curly fries covered in cheese sauce? Scratch that, my expectations hit the roof.
So the first thing I did after choosing to go with a burger was ensure that they could hook me up with those same cheese-doused fries and they certainly could. They didn’t disappoint and even told me they could throw chili on top. I didn’t want to overdo it, though, so instead I doubled up on cheese by ordering a bacon cheeseburger, with pepper jack cheese. I was impressed that they were actually grilling up each burger as they were ordered and didn’t have a whole set pre-made. Plus, they were actually grilling them…with real fire, which was also pretty sweet.
Soon enough, all was ready and I got busy with my foodstuffs. I found the curly cheese fries to be everything I had hoped for. The beauty of topping curly fries with cheese is that they are especially resistant to sogginess, and in fact the cheese began to get a bit gnarly and cold before the fries buckled.
As for the burger, it tasted exactly like I would expect a summertime grill burger to taste. You know, the kind you eat on Labor Day over at your buddy’s place while knocking back a Silver Bullet. In that context, it was a good burger and probably better than usual considering the 0 degree weather outside.
On the other hand, this burger and cheese fries cost me something like 20 bucks, which is about double what I would pay for such food in a normal marketplace. But alas, Coppertop had a captive audience and while their prices were wildly inflated, I certainly can’t complain about the taste of what I ate.