Confectioners’ sugar ices the valley rim. Fog hugs the pine-scented air, like steam from a sizzling meat platter. Half Dome’s peak rises in the distance, a huge, half-eaten scoop of granite ice cream.
All right. So maybe food images don’t come to mind when visitors first lay eyes on Yosemite, quite possibly our best national park. But a new chef at the Ahwahnee Hotel, the park’s historic lodge, is out to make the park a year-round destination not just for great vistas and outdoor fun but also for superb food and service.
“Prime rib with au jus is off the menu. No more veggie of the day,” says Jim Anile, the new executive chef. “That’s not where the Ahwahnee is going.”
In time for its 75th anniversary celebration this year, the hotel is undergoing a culinary makeover. The old glassware has been replaced with Spiegelau crystal from Germany. Longtime servers and cooks are being retrained. A new menu, unveiled recently, features a more adventurous style of cooking–and few of the old standbys.
Anile, a native of Allentown, Pa., is bent on shaking up an American institution, which was built in the 1920s to draw an upper-crust clientele into the park.
“We’re still doing the same thing we’ve been doing for 20 years,” he says. Meantime, Americans have become much more discerning, and demanding, about what they eat.
“People don’t want to be intimidated,” he says. “They want to be wowed.”
The hotel, one of the finest in the national park system, has long been a popular hangout for old-money Californians and tourists on a splurge. Its immense dining room seats 350 under a vaulted ceiling trussed with rustic timbers.
Wine tastings and chefs’ holidays draw thousands to the lodge each fall and winter. At Christmastime, winners of a lottery for dinner reservations celebrate in laid-back baronial style.
Since arriving in late summer from the swanky Bacara Resort and Spa on the California coast near Santa Barbara, Anile has overseen the action in the hotel’s vast food-preparation area, which covers 6,500 square feet of floor space and has 23-foot ceilings. “The gym,” he calls it.
The kitchen has its own pastry shop and a bread shop that dates to the Navy’s takeover of the lodge during World War II. Unusually large for a 123-room hotel, the kitchen was never downsized after architects scaled back the original number of lodgings by more than two-thirds. That is fortunate, because the kitchen staff of 52 prepares as many as 1,500 meals a day during busy spring and summer months.
Anile learned his way around food preparation at his family’s Italian restaurants in north Texas. Though he lacks formal training, he was a top chef in Dallas, where the restaurant scene is once again attracting national attention. He has spent time in Thailand, and Asian flavorings are among the clearest influences in his cooking.
At 31, he couples youthful enthusiasm with an edgy ambition to compete with the best restaurants in Northern California.
That isn’t always easy in this remote mountain location, where delivery of fresh ingredients can be difficult. Park Service regulations further tie his hands. The government must approve the menu and its pricing.
At the same time, Anile has certain things working in his favor. One is the “spectacular venue.” Those who have made it to Yosemite find themselves “in a great environment and a great state of mind. They’ve had enough time out of the rat race to wind down and relax,” he says.
“Perception is nine-tenths of the game,” says the chef, who majored in marketing in college. “We have their full attention.”
Besides, with no other deluxe restaurants in a park nearly the size of Rhode Island, “where else can they go for dinner?”
At Christmastime, winners of a lottery for dinner reservations celebrate in laid-back baronial style in the Ahwahnee’s dining room.
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IF YOU GO
DINING ROOM DETAILS
There is a dress code for the Ahwahnee Dining Room. Men can get by with a nice sweater; for women, a dress or a nice pair of slacks. Jeans and shorts are discouraged. Open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Dinner reservations are recommended. Phone: 209-372-1489.
The annual Bracebridge holiday extravaganzas are by application only. The next lottery (for the 2003 dinner) starts in December.
Chefs’ holidays are held in January and early February, with master-chef cooking classes and special dinners. Vintners’ holidays, a series of two-day wine tastings and banquets featuring some of America’s best wines, are held in November and December. For reservations and information: 559-253-2001.
It is not necessary to stay at the hotel to participate in any of these events or to eat in the dining room.
Rooms in the park, including campgrounds, often fill up months in advance. Central reservations (including Ahwahnee): 559-252-4848. There are rooms outside the park, but many are far from Yosemite Valley. One of the closest is Yosemite View Lodge: 888-742-4371.
— P.W.