Inside Mountain Creek, West Virginia State Parks’ New Appalachian Restaurant You Can Only Reach by Aerial Tram
By Matt Welsch, Executive Chef, West Virginia State Parks
There’s only a small gap between the platform at Pipestem’s Canyon Rim Center and one of the new tram cars, but stepping across it is exciting. The moment your feet cross that drop, you can feel it in your chest. As your weight settles into the car, the feeling expands.
The gorge opens under you, forest close on both sides. You may find yourself so entranced with the view, you don’t think to glance backwards about halfway down. Cascading off a rock shelf is a beautiful waterfall. And hidden beneath the ledge, behind the water, is a treat you’ll miss if you don’t know to look for it.
Ride down early enough, and you may catch the holler still breathing out the night’s mist before the day burns it off, a hallmark of these hills. The doors open onto the platform at the bottom of the Bluestone Gorge, the dining room right there waiting.
That’s the only way in. You can’t drive to Mountain Creek Lodge. No trail gets you there without a full day and a change of socks. For years, that meant a beautiful mid-century building at the bottom of one of the wildest gorges in the state sat mostly quiet. As of August 8th, you can see this hidden wonder again. Mountain Creek Lodge is once again letting rooms, the restaurant has reopened its doors, and the food matches the view.
Immense windows run the length of the dining room, the Bluestone River and the gorge floor spread out below, close enough to watch the fish jump while you eat. Tall enough to look up the hill towards the horizon that sits close and comforting, like a hug.
Chef Marion Ohlinger runs the kitchen. His path to Mountain Creek took much longer than your tram ride.
To understand what’s on your plate, it’s important to understand the path that led to it. Ohlinger grew up in Letart, West Virginia, learning to butcher and cure meat from his grandparents before he was old enough to drive. Then he left, and kept leaving, for the better part of a decade. He’s walked across Europe. Crossed the Andaman Sea by fishing boat. Cooked in Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar. Butchered in backcountry Alaska. Trekked the Andes and the Amazon. Thirty years in professional kitchens now, in more than forty countries on five continents, in all fifty states, running kitchens in Vail, Scottsdale, Seattle. He was named to the inaugural class of Best Chefs in America in 2013, took Morgantown’s Best Chef four times over, and was named West Virginia’s Best Chef in WV Living’s 2015 readers’ poll.
What brought him back? In a word, “family.”
What brought him to Mountain Creek? He chose this destination while on one of his many adventures when he said, “I want to come home.” And now he invites you in, as well.
In thirty years behind the line, Ohlinger has never reached for the current trend. His reach is far longer than that. All the way back through the thirteen generations his family has lived in the state to the heart of Appalachia. That food, and where it’s sourced, provides a depth deeper than the gorge itself. Told every day. With every plate.
Like everything he does, Chef Ohlinger defines his menu with real precision: ingredients native to these mountains, ones carried here by the people who settled them, or ones adopted because there was nothing else. Neither theme nor gimmick. The actual food of this place, cooked by someone who left to see the rest of the world and came back understanding exactly what he had here the whole time.
Crawdad fritters, fried green tomatoes, twice-fried chicken with crackling skin. Prime ribeye rubbed in sumac, dark and citrus-sharp against the char. Pork tenderloin finished in brown sugar and spruceberry, a fruit most people at that table have never tasted and won’t stop thinking about. Buttermilk-poached walleye pike. Duck confit that’s been rendering slow since long before that tram car ever left the platform. Weekend brunch, too, if dinner isn’t reason enough to make the trip.
Chef Ohlinger has said what he wants for Appalachian food is simple: a seat at the table next to Creole, Cajun, Pacific Rim, and Tex-Mex, recognized as a real American cuisine rather than a regional footnote. Mountain Creek is the argument for that, one plate at a time, in a dining room you can only reach by riding twelve hundred feet down.
Mountain Creek Appalachian Cuisine is open now at Pipestem Resort State Park, accessible by aerial tram from the Canyon Rim Center, with dinner service and weekend brunch. Reservations are recommended through Pipestem Resort. Get down there.