A Day Trip + Dinner in the Catskills
On Saturday morning I woke up to a message from Maggie inviting me on an impromptu day trip to the Catskill Mountains with her and a few friends. Her friend Stephanie Bonnin of La Tropikitchen is doing a month-long chef’s residency at the Deer Mountain Inn and Maggie had a reservation for dinner with a seat up for grabs.
The Deer Mountain Inn is in Tannersville, New York, about 2.5 hours north of Brooklyn in the Catskills Mountains. We decided to leave early and arrive with enough time to hike and see some of the area's natural beauty before eating.
The entire drive up was gloomy, but the sun came out just in time for our hike. We went to Kaaterskill Falls, a 260-foot tall tiered waterfall on Spruce Creek. It was beautiful and busy! I guess a lot of people had the same idea as us.
The hike was very easy… if you can handle stairs. In fact, there are so many stairs that the park had a worker stationed at the front of the hike to warn visitors about what they were about to experience. He was basically like, “look, you’re going to need to take over a hundred stairs and at one point it will be slippery with ropes you can hold on to.” I did see some old people and some babies there, and there is a nice platform where you can gaze upon the double-waterfall from afar and then turn around and push the stroller back to the car. (I am imagining how much I would not want to carry a child up and down that many steps.)
I have been wistfully reminiscing over the natural wonders of California after spending the winter there. Seeing the striking beauty of a super-tall waterfall reminded me that the East Coast has its own natural wonders, I’m just more accustomed to seeing them.
Dinner with Tropikitchen at the Deer Mountain Inn was lovely. We sat on the porch, ordered as many dishes as possible from the menu, and shared little bits of everything as it came out. Those are the ingredients to a perfect meal as far as I am concerned, and after “social distancing” for so long it felt amazing!
The chef (featured in the New York Times) is Colombian-born and her menu is inspired by the dishes and flavors she grew up eating. An abundance of light, fresh ingredients with rich and heavy companions to create a flavorful balance. My favorite part of the meal was the fried whole sea bass (to no one’s surprise; I will order fried fish at almost every opportunity). That insanely huge chicharron in the upper right corner was a bit too much for me to handle, but we had a coconut shortbread cookie with ice cream at the end that truly rocked my life.
