The overlooked Calif. fine dining outpost with a murderous mountain past |
Just beneath the foothills of 12,278-foot-tall Mount Morrison in the Eastern Sierra sits the Restaurant at Convict Lake, a wooden lodge-style building that’s ringed with quaking alders that burst with color just before the snow sets in each season. It has many of the details you might expect given its proximity to a popular mountain town, including a ceiling-to-floor fireplace and the large relief sculpture of a river trout hung up at the entryway.
That’s about where the comparisons end, though. Inside the dining room, night after night, the Restaurant at Convict Lake is doing something almost no other place for miles is doing: offering a classic fine dining dinner with all the Continental trappings, from French-style escargot to tableside desserts with a fiery flourish.
And to have done it here, on the shores of a lake with its own eye-opening American West history, for some 70-odd years, is all the more unique. Convict Lake, a daunting name when compared with its neighbors, Mono and June, earned it after a series of ultimately deadly events nearly 155 years ago, and in some ways, the restaurant continues to celebrate the complex land on which it sits.
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To reach the restaurant, all it takes is a long drive along the interminable U.S. Route 395, through shallow granite valleys and then west toward the sunset. Eventually, you’ll find it, almost at the base of a towering mountain named after a man who should have never been killed.
A sign for the Restaurant at Convict Lake.
Outside the Restaurant at Convict Lake.
A restaurant that preserves Eastern Sierra history
It’s not hard to find the story behind the Restaurant at Convict Lake’s location; the tale is debossed on the menu; you just have to flip it over. The two paragraphs share a brief retelling of the “unfortunate incident” at Convict Lake, as it’s described, which “led to the ironic naming of this beautiful area.” The brief history, as told by the county historian, speaks of robbery and a prison break — and makes for a surprising start to what is one of the region’s only truly white tablecloth meals.
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