Snowmass Village, Colorado: Erik Cavarra features a NEW restaurant opening in Base Village: Ski season has started, and so has business at Base Village’s newest restaurant.
Ricard Brasserie and Liquor Bar, opened by executive chef Tim Goodell, of Los Angeles, will serve French country fare for breakfast, lunch and dinner in the space formerly occupied by Sneaky’s Tavern. It opened Nov. 23 with the early start to ski season and will be open daily starting on Thanksgiving.
The menu includes sharable dishes and large entrees — “comforty French food,” as chef Jeff Armstrong put it — such as onion soup, steak tartare, steak frites, roast duck breast and whole roast chicken. The restaurant will make most of its sausages and pates in house.
“In France, they would pull your chairs off the wall and you’d have a butcher’s-cut steak or a grilled pate, something along that line,” in a brasserie, Armstrong said. That’s what Ricard is going for with the menu and with the atmosphere, which Armstrong hopes will have a “casual, fun, lively, friendly kind of feel.”
A recipient of Food & Wine’s Best New Chef Award, Goodell also owns restaurants in Hollywood and Huntington Beach, Calif.; Chicago; and Bangkok. Ricard and Bia Hoi, a Southeast Asian eatery that will open nearby in December, are his team’s first restaurants in Colorado.
Goodell and Armstrong worked together on developing the menus, and Armstrong will oversee the two Snowmass Village restaurants. Ricard also will have a chef de cuisine and a pastry chef, which means house-made desserts and ice creams — like the Rocky Road, a combination of house-made crunch, dark chocolate, rice crispies, feulletine flakes, chocolate and marshmallow sauces, smoked almonds and chocolate ice cream.
Apres-ski drink specials and a food menu will be offered from 3 to 6 p.m. daily. Ricard will serve breakfast, and it also will have a coffee setup in the bar area every morning, with small food items such as croissants and muffins for skiers and snowboarders on the go.
Bia Hoi, which translates to “fresh beer” in Vietnamese, will serve Southeast Asian street food for lunch and dinner. The bar will stay open late and feature a “really cool craft-cocktail program,” Armstrong said. Bia Hoi is opening in the space most recently occupied by Burger Bar & Fish.
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