Skiers Are Flocking to Saddleback’s New Restaurant, The Nest

Located at 3,620 feet, it boasts elevated comfort food and bird’s-eye views.

a couple enjoying a meal and the view at The Nest on Saddleback Mountain
By Nora Saks
Photos by Cait Bourgault
From our February 2025 issue

For decades, Saddlebackers have shared their mountain with the Bicknell’s thrush. Skiers arrive after the rare brown-and-white songbirds head south for the winter and clear out before the birds return to build their nests in the spring. So when Saddleback management began plans to build a restaurant smack in the middle of the thrushes’ coniferous habitat, they weren’t about to wing it. Opened last winter, The Nest perches lightly on posts more than three quarters of the way up the 4,120-foot-tall peak, near the terminus of the resort’s main high-speed chairlift. Stained-pine cladding on two exterior walls and a planted roof feather the triangular building into the forest. A third wall, composed almost entirely of glass, provides panoramic views that take in Rangeley and Mooselookmeguntic lakes. For the sake of Bicknell’s thrushes, the windows have monofilament screens that look like barriers to birds, preventing collisions.

976 Saddleback Mountain Rd., Rangeley.
207-864-5671.
Price Range
Breakfast $10–$15. Lunch $12–$28.
Hours
Thursday–Sunday, 10 a.m.–3 p.m. Seating is first come first serve and weekends tend to be pretty packed. Head over on a weekday to avoid the biggest crowds.
Mountain Lore
Every day at 2:30 p.m., Chretien makes the rounds, regaling diners with a tale about a yeti that will descend from the mountaintop and gobble those who don’t tip well or leave by closing time.

Inside the soaring, vaulted-ceilinged dining space, crisscrossing steel beams, painted in the room’s predominant warm mustard, effect an industrial tree canopy. A low-slung sofa and upholstered cantilever chairs and stools, arranged around dark-wood tables and a tiled bar, provide comfy places to land. “I call it the sky castle or my treehouse,” executive chef Coco Chretien says, “because it’s a little girl’s dream to be up here.” Chretien was working as a sous chef at North Haven’s acclaimed Nebo Lodge, in 2022, when she spotted an online ad Saddleback posted, declaring, “Chef, your restaurant is ready.” “I felt like it was speaking directly to me,” says Chretien, a snowboarder and North Conway, New Hampshire, native who was eager to return to her alpine roots.  

The Nest’s small but diverse lunch menu draws on Chretien’s Acadian heritage in dishes like chive biscuits doused in sausage gravy and hand pies stuffed with ground pork or sautéed broccoli and cheddar. It also dabbles in Mexican, French, and Japanese influences (a fan favorite is the whole-body-warming ramen made with pork-bone tonkotsu broth Chretien simmers for 24 hours). The unifying theme: comfort food, the heartier the better. “Butter, cream, meat, and lard are the staples where I, and a lot of my Saddleback family, grew up,” Chretien said. “Shying away from these luscious, more dense foods is something we’ve seen as a trend in our country for a long time, but I don’t want to hide them.” 

On a visit last winter, the dishes my dining companion and I tried were indeed luscious and dense. The day’s special, potato raclette, reminded me of a refined riff on poutine, with thickly sliced potatoes double-fried to a crisp and smothered in herb-studded Swiss cheese so silky it was like gravy. The heat of fluffy Atlantic lump crab cakes laced with Cajun-spiced remoulade was nicely balanced with a dollop of horseradish cream and smattering of pea shoots and sweety-drop peppers. But it was the hand pies assembled from Chretien’s dad’s recipe, consisting of rosemary-spiced ground pork and chunks of sweet potato encased in a maple-syrup-drizzled puff pastry so buttery and flaky it could star in a Dysart’s commercial, that all but guaranteed I’ll be flying back to The Nest on the high-speed quad.   

There were no desserts on the menu, but after sampling some of the drinks dreamed up by front-of-house and cocktail-program manager (and Chretien’s partner) Sylvia Brooks, we barely noticed. The New Orleans–inspired Hurricane, featuring dark and light rums, grapefruit and mango juices, grenadine, and simple syrup, tasted like sunshine in a glass, while the Snowball, a blend of white-chocolate liqueur, Malibu rum, and vodka, was creamy, coconutty, and downright luxurious.

This winter, Chretien is unveiling to-go breakfast options, available at a ski-up kiosk, and an expanded lunch menu with more hand pies and more local and global fare. “Who cares about following a map?” she said. “If I want to put tacos and mac and cheese on the menu, I can. There are no laws when you’re 3,620 feet above the ground.”

Down East magazine, February 2025

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