Luxury Life & Style - Westside - (Page 78)

Saddle Peak Lodge delicious diversions PEAK PERFORMANCE This time, I thought we’d finally done it. Our young daughter has already dined in enough starred restaurants to build her own little Michelin culinary constellation. While we’ve had some near misses with Cheerios blanketing leather banquettes and sippy cups intermingling with Speigelau stemware, we’d always managed to go fancy and emerge unscathed. (At least no one’s kicked us out yet!) But as I climbed the three flights of stairs up to our table at Calabasas’s iconic Saddle Peak Lodge, I felt a looming cloud of dining dread. Tightly packed tables, tight-lipped diners in jackets and diamonds, tempting stuffed animals everywhere that were not exactly Gund or Beanie Baby. This had disaster written all over it, and I was furious with myself for not dialing up Mademoiselle L., our fantastic nanny, who’d have been only too happy to earn some extra weekend cash. No, we had decided to bring the teetering, teething one-year old with us to Saddle Peak, so there was nothing to do but dig in, eat as quickly as the kitchen would allow and depart voluntarily before otherwise encouraged to split. Such was my mindset as Mr. Sexton, the Petite Gourmande and I tucked into a cor- by Bonnie Graves ner table lorded over by an enormous stuffed elk head above. Since I live a California-sized stone’s throw away from Saddle Peak Lodge, I feel I can report with confidence that this unlucky specimen was not shot while roaming Temescal or Topanga Canyons. The décor is thus: a vaguely creepy homage to an old boys’ hunting lodge with the requisite taxidermied trophies, fishing creels and folksy furniture that I had encountered plenty while going to school and dining in New England. That this restaurant was just over the hill from Malibu, land of sunny celebrity shots and coastal weather catastrophes, seemed weird to me. Opened in 1920 with a history of Hollywood heavyweights driving the meandering mountain roads up to Saddle Peak for all sort of assignations, the atmosphere felt more than a little dated, and I feared the food would match. I can happily report that despite its oldschool and slightly kitschy ambience (one kind of feels like it’s a movie set or something), Saddle Peak Lodge is sending out some of the best food I have eaten in Los Angeles County, and I have eaten just about everywhere. This frankly surprised me, and as I watched my toddler chew on the cork from our Laurent-Perrier while my husband devoured the amuse-bouche of house-smoked salmon on warm blinis with crème fraiche and caviar, I was reminded of how appearances can be deceiving. I think our neighbors to the right would have been surprised by the wine knowledge of the frazzled young mother to their left. I was surprised in turn to observe their eleven-year-old heartily 78 Luxury Life & Style Premiere Issue 2008 Photos courtesy of Saddle Peak Lodge.

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