Mountain Creek Restaurant

This is a seasonal restaurant that you can only access by taking a beautiful tram ride into the canyon at Pipestem State Park. The ride is free if you eat at the restaurant. We visited as a family and ordered four separate entrées. The cost ranges from 25 – 32 $ per entrée. The view is amazing and the experience lovely but the food is subpar at best. My food was cold and the surf and turf my son ordered was very small. Do not order the duck. The crab cakes were probably the best out of the four meals. They have a decent wine list but only one house wine by glass. No beer on tap only bottles. My suggestion would be to go for appetizers and drink to enjoy the beautiful view. The meal is certainly not worth it. I had crème brûlée for dessert, it was ok and the cobbler was good.

We had dinner at the Mountain Creek restaurant last night. The Tram (really a gondola) ride down to the restaurant is great. This is a fine dining experience & we were not disappointed. It is expensive, and the view of the river from the dining is super. My wife had the trout which she said was excellent. I had a vegetarian cabbage roll that was very good & Ornish friendly for those on a special diet like myself. We both had the squash & thought it was wonderful.

Mountain Creek restaurant was a horrible disappointment. Not sure if this is the quality the local West Virginians appreciate but I can assure you it doesn’t fly anywhere else and I have traveled to a lot of places around the world.
1. Giggling teeny bopper at the sister restaurant who took my reservation over a week ago was a moron because this restaurant never got the request. I just happened to call a couple hours before arrival for a different reason and got the news that my name wasn’t listed.
2. Terribly understaffed resulting in poor service memorial weekend. No excuse for management to not recognize when busy weekends are upon them. Usual 20 something’s calling in sick to get drunk with their friends is the cause. Very odd if this place is supposed to be fine dining. They didn’t even have a bartender. The waiters had to do that job too. Really?
3. No automation. Hand written reservation book, no computerized booking and incredibly long times to wait for our cards to be run. To the point that it was comical. It’s 2014.
3. Our food took 2 hrs to receive. Yes 2 hrs. We even had to ask for bread ourselves. Then one steak had to be returned to be cooked properly so add 20 minutes. I recognize service in the south can be a bit slower than what I am used to but this was ridiculous.
3. Most of our food was raw. Yes raw. Not rare. Raw. Green beans. One of our steaks. A pork chop. Never experienced raw pork before except in Germany. Apparently this was a way for them to move plates out of the kitchen. We thought there was an error in the bill regarding how well the steak was requested to be cooked but there it was, medium. So it was the kitchen that screwed up.
4. Scenery outdoors was beautiful. But the building was 1960s oversimplistic. Needing upgrades. Restaurant ambience was the same. Completely out of date.
5. We came on motorcycles and as a result if our 3 hr ordeal, had to ride to our resort via curvy rte 3 up the mountain in the pitch black. Very stressful experience.
All the waiter (who I won’t fault because he was a pleasant young guy. Just overworked) offered us was a free dessert for one if the members in our party. We rode an hour just to come here and it was the biggest disappointment of the year so far.
Glad we didn’t get a room at the park. I would have also been disappointed. Not everyone likes to hunt, fish and camp when in west VA.