The deck off the Periodic Table overlooks the Catamount golf course and the peaks behind it, and by five o'clock on a Wednesday in August it fills with plates that have no business existing at 7,000 feet: mesquite-grilled fish, citrus ceviches, salsas charred over an open flame. This is La Costa, the restaurant's Baja Coastal Kitchen concept, and if you have not tried it yet, the math is not on your side. When the restaurant launched, its summer season was built to run from June 1 through Labor Day, and the twice-a-year concept swap has followed that same cadence ever since. If it holds again this year, the clock is short: Labor Day falls on September 7, which is three weeks from today. When the season turns, the entire menu disappears, not just the seasonal specials.
That detail matters more than it sounds like it should, because it points to something most people get wrong about Catamount Ranch & Club. The club is private. The golf course is private. The lake is private. But one restaurant on the property has never worked that way, and understanding why tells you more about how this community actually functions day to day than any amenity list can.
One Restaurant, Two Total Reinventions A Year
The Periodic Table opened at Catamount in December 2019, built by Destination Hospitality, the group behind Table 79 Foodbar in Steamboat and Aurum Food and Wine in both Steamboat and Breckenridge. From the start, it was designed to do something no other restaurant on the property does: it throws out the entire concept, twice a year, and starts over. Not a new special. Not a refreshed wine list. Décor, cocktails, plateware, and every dish on the menu change completely when the season turns.
Right now that means La Costa. Wednesday through Sunday, doors open at five, and the kitchen at 33400 Catamount Drive is turning out the kind of coastal Mexican cooking you would expect closer to sea level than to Mount Werner. Once Labor Day passes, that entire menu goes away, and nobody outside the restaurant group has said yet what replaces it. That is by design. The whole point of the concept, according to the group's founder when the restaurant first opened, is that guests walk in expecting a normal dinner and leave having had an experience they did not see coming.
The Menus That Came Before
The rotation is not a rumor. It shows up across years of documented seasonal changes, and the list of past concepts is long enough to prove the pattern is real rather than a one-time marketing stunt:
- Fjällen, a New Nordic Cuisine concept built around Scandinavian technique, ran this past winter with dishes like potato blini and lingonberry compote
- A modern Asian cuisine season, built around traditional flavors and contemporary technique
- An Argentinian Steakhouse concept
- European Riviera fare, plus cuisine drawn from 1940s Havana and 1920s New York
- Classic dishes of New Orleans
- A New England seafood season with fresh clam chowder, smoked clams and mussels, and Indian pudding, complete with a hard end date for the last lobster roll of the year
Nothing repeats. When a theme ends, it ends, and the restaurant's own staff have said as much publicly: everyone develops a favorite dish, and everyone loses it when the season turns.
Why A Private Club Opens One Door
The obvious question is why a private club would run a public restaurant at all. The answer, back when the concept first launched, was straightforward. Catamount needed a reason for people who were not members to actually make the drive out, see the course, and experience the club, and a rotating theme built around real culinary ambition was the plan for making that happen.
It also reflected a shift in what the club expected from its own food service. As Catamount's PGA general manager put it at the time the concept changed direction, "It's no longer the hamburgers, the hot dogs and the pastrami sandwiches." The Periodic Table became the public-facing proof of that shift, open to anyone with a reservation, while the rest of the club's dining stayed exactly as private as everything else at Catamount.
That split holds today, and it is worth laying out plainly, because the access rules are easy to get wrong if you are new to the community:
| Venue | Public or Members-Only | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| The Periodic Table | Open to the public | Wed–Sun, 5–9pm, current concept is La Costa |
| Golf House Restaurant | Members only | Sits on the ninth hole, limited dinner nights in summer |
| Lake House Grille | Members only | Hosts recurring seasonal events for members |
| Pool Grille | Members only | Seasonal, tied to Lake House operations |
| Whistle Pig Grille | Members only | One of three member-only dining rooms on the property |
One door in, three walls around everything else. That is the actual shape of dining at Catamount, and it is a more interesting arrangement than most people assume when they hear "private club."
What Ends When Labor Day Does
The restaurant's calendar is not the only clock running at Catamount right now. The golf course, a 7,088-yard, par-72 Tom Weiskopf design that has been ranked among Colorado's top ten courses, generally plays into mid-October before the mountain weather closes it down. The lake, 530 private acres open to residents for boating, paddling, kayaking, and fishing without needing a state license, follows its own seasonal rhythm as the water cools.
But the Periodic Table's clock is the tightest of the three, and it is the one running out first. If the season holds to its usual pattern, La Costa closes around Labor Day, three weeks from today. The space goes dark for a stretch while the group retools it completely, and it reopens with a concept nobody outside the kitchen has said yet. Whatever it is, it will not taste like Baja, and going by the pattern, it will not repeat a theme the club has already served.
If you already live at Catamount, or spend enough time here that the deck overlooking the course feels like part of your routine, this is the kind of detail that is easy to miss until the reservation window has already closed. The public side of a private club only stays open on its own schedule, and right now that schedule has an end date on the calendar.
For everything else happening in the neighborhoods across Steamboat and the Yampa Valley, The Vanatta Group keeps a close eye on the details that actually shape daily life here, not just the ones that show up in a listing description. If you are thinking about property in Catamount Ranch & Club or anywhere else in Routt County, schedule a private consultation and let's talk about what the neighborhood actually looks like this time of year.
