In my new Ski Diva mystery, FADE TO WHITE, there's a bar called "The Broken Binding." The main character, Stacey Curtis, works there. It's where skiers and locals gather to eat, have a beer, and trade lies. I love the backstory for the place:
From FADE TO WHITE:
Do you have a favorite ski bar? Where is it and what makes it special?
From FADE TO WHITE:
The restaurant was a long, low-slung place spread out along the main drag from Connecticut, just at the edge of town. Like every other ski-town eatery in the Green Mountain State, it had a past. It had gone up in the sixties with barnboard paneling everywhere and a moose head mounted over the fireplace, and it was called the Broken Binding until a group of German investors arrived and gutted it and jammed it with corny Bavarian décor and rechristened it the Edelweiss. That didn’t last, and when the Deutschmark went into a slump against the dollar for just a little bit too long the bikers moved in to destroy whatever progress the Prussians had made. The bloom, in other words, was off the Edelweiss. Locals who knew what they were talking about shortened the place’s name to the ‘Weiss and pronounced it with a V and stayed away, until one winter night when a snowplow finally took the sign down and nobody even noticed.
But now the old Binding was back, thanks to an infusion of cash and kindness from a retired investment banker named Pete Hardwick, the finest export that New York had sent to Vermont in a long time. The look of the place passed for retro these days although the barnboard paneling was new, and even the original moose head—discovered in an attic crawl space stinking of beer and cigarette smoke and a pungent old hint of sauerbraten—had been restored to a place of honor above the mantle.
Do you have a favorite ski bar? Where is it and what makes it special?