EAT Magazine Vogue Entertaining & Travel Colorado Golf Magazine DiRoNa Award Recipient Hemispheres Magazine Wine Spectator Award of Excellence Mangia Art Culinaire Ski Magazine Wine Spectator Award of Excellence Wine Spectator Wine Spectator June 2000 "Larkspur, which is the newest and perhaps the best restaurant in Vail Valley, is actually located off the great hall of the Golden Peak base area, amidst ATM machines, equipment rentals and a souvenir shop - a setting that makes traditional fine-dining attire seem rather ludicrous. During the winter, hundreds of skiers trundle past daily in their ski pants and boots, not realizing that the building's other food option (besides a pizza place and a snack bar) offers world-class service and cooking, and one of the more intelligently chosen wine lists in the Rockies. "A Wolfgang Puck disciple who trained at San Francisco's Postrio, Larkspur's Salamunovich delights in using food as theater as well as nourishment. At Sweet Basil, he once concocted an entire nine-course meal that never required china, relying instead on skewers, overturned wineglasses and other kitchen implements, as service items. His imagination stretches even further at Larkspur, where every detail - from the design of the bar cabinet to the trompe l'oeil Caesar salad croutons that are actually cubed, breaded potatoes - is an attempt to tweak the expected into something better." "'We didn't want another log cabin; we're city people,' says Thomas Salamunovich, who has made $1.3 million in improvements to a $5 million space and opened the most dynamic restaurant in the area. Each meal is a dining adventure. Salamunovich has mastered a multicultural style of cooking that seems impossible to categorize: from southern-fried Cornish game hen to caramelized sweetbread-and-potato Napoleon. His adjoining market sells organic soup beans and other comestibles." - Bruce Schoenfeld, Wine Spectator, June 2000