Bully’s Ranch, Vail, Colorado

Bully’s Ranch is in the Sonnenalp Hotel, which is a good thing to know when you’re in Vail. They only take dinner reservations for hotel guests, and you can always find a couple of seats at the bar for dinner, now matter how crowded Vail is.

That’s what Nancy and I did on our Vail date night. Earlier in the day, we’d walked up to the Betty Ford Garden and heard the New York Philharmonic rehearsing for that night’s performance. We ambled over to the creekside next to the amphitheater, and listened to soloist Kelli O’Hara sing with the orchestra. She won a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for her performance as Anna in the Lincoln Center’s revival of The King and I, which Nancy and I saw on one of the COVID-lockdown free broadcasts. She has a beautiful soprano voice, and has performed at the Metropolitan Opera as well as on Broadway. It was sensational — the orchestra, the voice, the setting. The opportunity to walk along a mountain stream and listen to a major orchestra is one of my favorite things about Vail.

The concert was sold out, so Nancy and I determined to stroll back after dinner and catch part of the concert streamside. We couldn’t get reservations anywhere, but Bully’s Ranch was on the way and a cinch for seats at the bar. Luck prevailed, and we got a good corner position so we could see each other, and the bar area was wide open to the air.

Through some Cosmic Disturbance, Nancy and I switched orders. That is, I ordered the sort of thing Nancy orders, and Nancy ordered something she never orders. It started out normally, with a very good bruschetta for Nancy, about which she was enthusiastic,

and a Caesar salad for me, with a very good dressing and Spanish anchovies.

Caesar salads used to have torn lettuce. Now they always seem to have big lettuce leaves, and you toss it yourself. This would have been a problem had they not applied the dressing so thoughtfully.

Then the warp in the Universe. Nancy ordered the wagyu burger, medium rare!

Nancy never orders burgers. I’m the one who orders burgers and she always goes with fish or a salad. I ordered trout, which Nancy orders a lot — almost every time she sees it.

As you can see, Nancy’s burger was pretty rare — just the way I like it. It was great beef, of course, and not packed too tightly. Just what a burger should be. And it came with a portobello mushroom and some broccoli slaw. Add a fried egg and a grilled jalapeño and it would be perfect. The portobello was good, but the broccoli salad was, in Nancy’s words, “overdressed and underseasoned.” I’m tempted to say, “I dated a girl like that once,” but I won’t.

My trout was good, topped with a warm arugula salad and some zucchini spaghetti. The salsa verde there on the side was really, really good.

The remarkable thing is that Liza and Michael went to Bully’s the next night while Nancy and I entertained Ella and Lily, and they did exactly the same role reversal. Cue Rod Serling. (Michael, “Mr. Burger,” ordered a Margherita flatbread and a Caesar salad, while Liza had a burger with bourbon barbecue sauce on the side — good if applied judiciously.)

The down side was that due to the general flight of workers from labor force participation, dinner took a while. The wait wasn’t bad. We watched some Olympics on television, and we watched the crowd, notably a guy in a terry robe. That was fine, but we were eager to get to the concert.

At last we did, and hustled up to the amphitheater. Actually, at my age it was more of a pavane, but we arrived in time to catch Aaron Copeland’s Rodeo. The crowd started pouring out, inspired by a desire to get on the shuttle and/or escape the threatened thunderstorms. Nancy and I slipped in for a bit of the coda, and to hear the encore, which we knew from the rehearsal would be Kelli O’Hara singing “I Could have Danced all Night.” Wow!

It was a great day, a great night, and a good warm-up to our 46th anniversary. You really should go to Vail in the summer, if only for the music, of which there is much of many genres. Walk by the stream to listen to rehearsals, and have a good dinner at Bully’s Ranch, but talk about what each of you plans to order, and get ready to exchange plates.

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