Half-Time
Mt. Snow's lodges might come up short in ambience none has much of a view, for example but there are plenty of them, with four operating on weekends. What's more, the main base lodge alone has four separate food outlets.
On a busy weekend, the place to go for decent food and elbow room, is the Carinthia base, which serves basic burger fare. If you happen to be at the main base, the"scramble" system at the cafeteria, with food stations rather than a single, long line, seems to do what it was designed to do get people in and out relatively quickly. For a little privacy, clunk your way up a couple of flights of stairs, where you'll find additional seating. If you aren't into food scrambling, Cuzzins Deli serves pretty good sandwiches, and there's a sun deck right out front for consuming them.
The lodge at the summit serves basic cafeteria food in a dim dining area not much to recommend, except that lunching here saves a trip down to the bottom and back up if you've committed yourself to skiing the North Face trails for the day. If the lift lines aren't long, it certainly is worth having lunch at the base instead the eight-minute quad-chair ride makes the top-to-bottom-to-top round trip pretty quick.
The Post-Game Show
Cuzzins at the base calls itself a deli and it is a deli during lunch but come the apres-ski hour, the singles gang fills the place to overflowing on weekends. They're there to jump-start a weekend party scene that will later move on somewhere else perhaps the nearby Snow Barn and churn on late into the night.
If you're not necessarily eager to tap into the dedicated party scene, there are more than 50 restaurants in the Mt. Snow and Wilmington area, making it something of a pig-out paradise. The one place that's earned the lion's share of the acclaim is the Hermitage, an inn that doubles as a cross-country touring center. The Hermitage wine cellar is of big-city-restaurant caliber, and where else can you find an inn that raises it's own game birds?
Don't expect to score much insider ski information at the Hermitage, though. The place is a little too tony, and perhaps a touch touristy, for that. You're more likely to find a local crowd at Deacon's Den one, because it's close to the mountain; two, because it serves decent pizzas at a fair price; and three, because there's live music on weekends. But Deacon's and the Hermitage are just bookends of the dining scene; there are many good choices in between.
One reason for all the choices is that the Wilmington area does a fair tourist business throughout the year (there is little local industry here but tourism). One of the big summer/fall attractions is antiquing. So if you don't care to ski, there are several trash-to-treasures stores in the area. I'm not guaranteeing it, but since the summer antiquing is usually brisker, merchants are more likely to surrender a bargain or two in winter.
Places to stay? The White House in Wilmington is a wonderful, though pricey, spot if you're a country-inn type. If you've got kids, and you hate driving in the morning, stay at the Snow Lake Lodge a half mile from the mountain. The rooms are barracks basic, but the place has things like video games, a good-sized pool, and large-screen TV, etc. to keep kids who stay free mid-week occupied.
from Away.com
