The Lodge at Glendorn

Four courses before the pass

Four courses set the pace before the first plate leaves the pass. David S. Haick cooks as Chef at The Lodge at Glendorn in Bradford, holding the kitchen to a rotating prix fixe format shaped by the season and by nearby farms and artisans. The structure suits a chef who works in sequence. It asks each course to carry its own weight, then make room for the next one.

Haick came to this house after work as Executive Chef at Whiteface Lodge, a role that gave him the daily discipline of a resort kitchen: pacing, clarity, and the steady hand needed when dinner is not an isolated service but part of a larger house. His CEC and CHS credentials, dated 1998, sit behind the work without needing to announce themselves at the table. At Glendorn, the measure is the line: bison tartare held cool and clean, crispy Dover sole built around texture, lemon tart allowed to finish bright, Linzer cookie cut with memory rather than ornament, Bella Bella foie gras terrine given enough richness and no more.

A menu governed by the season

The dining program moves through a rotating four-course prix fixe menu, not a spread of options designed to cover every appetite. That constraint matters. It gives the kitchen a narrower frame and a clearer obligation to local farms and artisans, whose ingredients set the rhythm of the work. The pass has to read what is available, then translate it into a meal with order: beginning, lift, depth, finish.

Haick’s method favors legibility. The dishes named from his kitchen do not blur into one another. BISON TARTARE depends on temperature, cut, and seasoning; CRISPY DOVER SOLE depends on the interval between pan and plate; LEMON TART depends on acid holding the last course upright. The menu’s discipline is not austerity. It is proportion. In a hotel dining room, where guests may arrive from the trail, the cabin, or the fireplace, that proportion keeps the meal connected to the house rather than sealed away from it.

The house around the kitchen

The Lodge began in 1929 as a timber baron’s hunting and fishing lodge, and the room still keeps that older camp vocabulary close: redwood in the Main Lodge, fireplaces as working anchors, cabins set apart among forest and water. The property covers 1,500 acres at the edge of Allegheny National Forest, but the dining room feels intimate rather than expansive. It belongs to a house of 16 accommodations, where the floor quiets early and the kitchen works against the calm.

That calm changes the service. Soft light, wood smoke, and the weight of old materials ask for cooking with restraint. The plate cannot shout over the room, and Haick does not ask it to. The craft is still the cut, chill, and seasoning of Haick’s BISON TARTARE.