Crooked Creek Saloon

Crooked Creek website

401 Zerex Street

Fraser, CO 80442

Back in Fraser after a fun day in Grand Lake, my parents, Megan, Julien, and I went to the Crooked Creek Saloon.  It’s an easily recognizable building.  It’s a wooden structure with a picture of a blond saloon girl in a red negligee high on the wall.  The outdoor walls are also decorated with wagon wheels.  When you walk in the front doors on the corner of the street, you enter the bar area.  It looks like a typical small local bar with dim lighting, a pool table, and random arcade games in the corner.  Once you walk across the bar, you come to a set of swinging saloon doors that lead into the dining room.  That’s where you wait to be seated.  Inside the dining area, the place takes on a whole different feel.  It looks more like a family restaurant.  There is also an excellent patio that looks out over a back lawn complete with a horseshoes set.  We tend to avoid it at dinner when it’s cloudy to avoid getting rained on.

Since it was a Friday, we were at Crooked Creek for the Prime Rib Special.  The special is served with a potato choice and a choice of salad bar or soup bar.  All of us ordered the special except for Megan.  She got the vegetarian burrito with enchilada sauce.  The size of the burrito overwhelmed her but she managed to devour it.

I chose the soup bar to start with since they had cream of corn soup.  I was a little disappointed in the soup just because it wasn’t very creamy.  It was more like a regular vegetable soup.  The main dish was much better.  The monstrous prime rib covers the huge plate.  It’s served with horseradish sauce and something here in the States we call “au jus” sauce.  This sauce is a sort of broth made from the drippings of the meat.  “Au jus” is French and literally means “with juice.”  It can be served with prime rib or French Dip sandwiches.  Having grown up with this phrase in the U.S. I had assumed that the term actually came from France.  When we asked Julien about it though, he had never heard of it.  I realized then how silly it would be to list a meat dish on the menu as being served “with juice.”  Suddenly my whole French Dip ordering part of my life felt like a lie.  Either way, the sauce adds even more moisture and flavor to an already delicious piece of meat.  I ordered a baked potato as my side.  I ordered it with “everything” on it meaning everything that they offer as a regular topping.  What I got was a “loaded” baked potato complete with butter, sour cream, bacon, cheese and green onions.  There was an added charge for it but it was a tasty potato.

We had a great time and ended up being too stuffed to order dessert off the menu.  Of course we also knew that, once we rolled ourselves up the hill back to the condo, my leftover birthday Oreo ice cream cake was waiting for us.