The River Room........Part I

Over the course of the next five or six chapters, I will attempt to tell but a small part of the heaven and hell of thrusting one's novice-ass self into the restaurant business. Those with similar aspirations, pay heed.

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I like to cook - a lot. I like to cook for family, for friends, for holidays, for relaxation, for fun, for serious and mostly, for myself, as like all cooks, eating and enjoying what you cook is at the end of what it’s all about. Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years got to be where they weren’t about anything more important than opportunities to showcase my culinary skills to an adoring, friendly and mostly familial, kept crowd.

There are millions of us out there who share this passion for cooking, and most of us are smart enough to understand the chasm-atic delineation between farting around in your home kitchen and cooking in a commercial endeavor. The ones that aren’t smart enough end up borrowing money from banks, friends, family and personal savings to learn that difference after they’re about three-quarters of the way from going tits-up in the restaurant business.

Never did the original plans for buying The Riverside include me being the chef and cooking for a paying crowd. I knew that putting out a Thanksgiving feed for 25 family members wasn’t the same as consistently and competently dishing out six to eight different menu items to a busy 40-seat restaurant. What I felt I did have was a vision for what a good restaurant was supposed to be, what type of atmosphere and service would make people feel special, and what type of food our patrons would find appealing. I felt I knew this because of my prior experience of traveling the country and eating in literally thousands of restaurants – from local diner ‘meat & threes’ in Dangerfield, TX and duck blood soup-serving Croatian buffets in Cleveland, OH, to some of the finest and most famous restaurants in California, New York and everywhere in between. I shudder, and am a bit ashamed of myself, when I begin to calculate the amount of money I’ve spent dining out both for business and personal meals; I could feed a lot of hungry people well with the gratuities alone.

The River Room Restaurant in The Riverside was added to the west side of the building in 1971. It is 40’ long and 14’ wide, with 14 tables that seat 42 diners. There are five tables that seat two diners – two-tops, in restaurant lingo – that run along the western wall; all have excellent views of the Colorado river, Mt. Bross and the more than occasional spectacular sunsets. The room was impeccably decorated by Julie, always changing with the seasons, with fresh flowers on the table in the summer or small artfully-arranged centerpieces the other 11 non-summer months. There is a wood burning stove in the middle of the room that is no longer used, serving now as a substrate upon which faux greenery and twinkling lights have found purchase. The soft visual experience is topped off by an aural delight, that of the lilting strains of carefully selected classical music (with an occasional show tune – those Grand County cowboys are crazy for show tunes) gently floating through the air.

The previous owner didn’t build the room, having purchased The Riverside in 1980, but he did have the vision to make it into a one-of-a-kind, white table-cloth, elegant dining room; the kind of place that you know the second you enter, it’s not a place where you’ve come for a $7.00 burger in your camos. In fact, if you walk in clad in camos, if you’re the kind of patron we’re targeting, you’re saying, “Oh shit, I’ve got camos on, and even though I’m in Grand County where camos are at the high end of the sartorial ladder, this is not a camos kind of place.” You make amends for the fact that you’re ill clad by sitting down, ordering a $9.00 martini, a $24.00 Rib-Eye, and now acting, that in spite of your outlandish, but geographically proper garb, you belong in this place.

It was The River Room that made me fall in love with The Riverside. My best memories as a customer involved long dinners with family and friends during our holiday visits, the snow gently falling outside on the frozen river, while we sat safe and warm, and more often than not just a little inebriated, talking, laughing and whetting our appetites while waiting for the sumptuous feast that Jamie, Abe’s cook, was preparing. (Sumptuous, at least, when compared to the other fine dining establishments in Hot Sulphur Springs.......of which there were none.)

After every Christmas visit to The Riverside, on the subsequent ride home to Kansas, Julie and I would discuss the dream of what we, as owners, would do to make this wonderful place….more wonderful. The excited chatter of “why doesn’t Abe do this?” and “if we owned it, we’d do that” made the bleak, frozen, unappealing vistas of eastern Colorado and western Kansas, combined with the rote yardstick that is I-70, glide quickly by as we headed back to the New Year and the resumption of our daily grind. That distillation of the warm post-holiday/vacation feelings of staying in an out of the way wintery haven, fresh with memories of good friends, family and food, topped off by 10 hours in a car spent upon reflection of good and introspection of what could be, distilled the fuel for the engine that ultimately drove us to Hot Sulphur Springs and The Riverside.

Unfortunately, all of this windshield time happened before IPods were invented.

To be continued............