Ride the Elk Camp Gondola up from Base Village this fall and you will pass within sight of a construction fence where a restaurant used to be. Ullrhof opened in 1969, sat about 325 skiers at a time, and had been the mid-mountain stop for two generations of lunch breaks before Aspen One dismantled the whole building last year. It has not served a plate of food since. It will not serve one again until the mountain opens for the 2026-27 season.

That is not a small gap to paper over. Ullrhof was one of a handful of true sit-down restaurants on the Snowmass side of the resort, and for the entire 2025-26 ski season it simply did not exist. What happened during that missing winter, and what changes now that the building is finally coming back, tells you more about how this village actually eats than any list of new openings would on its own.

Fifty-Six Years, Gone in an Afternoon

Aspen One broke ground on the Ullrhof rebuild in the spring of 2025 as part of an $80 million package of mountain improvements, roughly half of which, $42 million, went into this one building. AVSC coaches were photographed that September building an airbag training platform out of repurposed wood from the old structure, which is as clear a sign as any that the original Ullrhof was not being renovated. It was being taken apart.

What comes back is a different building in almost every measurable way. Capacity roughly doubles, from around 325 seats to more than 500. There is a new upstairs bar and lounge that did not exist before. And the mechanical systems change entirely: Aspen Skiing Company CEO Geoff Buchheister told Aspen Public Radio the new Ullrhof will run without propane or natural gas, calling those systems something the company no longer wants to hold itself to. The result is Aspen Snowmass's first fully electric on-mountain restaurant, built through a partnership with Holy Cross Energy.

For a building that fed skiers lunch for 56 straight years, that is a genuine break from how the mountain has always cooked.

What Filled the Gap

With the mountain's biggest mid-mountain restaurant offline, the rest of Snowmass's on-mountain dining had to absorb the difference, and Aspen One used the same construction season to change several of them at once.

The clearest direct replacement was at Spider Sabich. The race and picnic area there had sat mostly dormant for years, and Aspen One brought it back specifically as Ullrhof transformed, installing The Hot Dogger, a quick-serve pop-up built through a partnership with the Los Angeles company Sumo Dog. It is not a substitute for a sit-down lunch, but it gave skiers a slopeside option in a spot that had not had one in a long time.

Elk Camp Restaurant got its own expansion the same summer: a new 120-seat deck on the east side, with a retractable umbrella and a glass wall system that lets the space work through the shoulder seasons and not just in July. Because Elk Camp sits at the base of the gondola and bike park, that deck now does double duty, catching bikers heading down from Snowmass Bike Park in summer and skiers looking for lunch once the lifts are running.

Two other spots quietly changed identity rather than capacity. High Alpine moved to a rotating menu that shifts what country's cuisine it is serving from week to week. The Alpin Room, previously more of a general fine-dining room, became a French-inspired restaurant under chef Emily Oyer. Neither of those moves adds seats to make up for Ullrhof, but they mean the food at the top of the mountain this year looks different than it did two winters ago, not just smaller.

Layer onto that two brand-new lifts that debuted the same season Ullrhof went dark, the Elk Camp Six-Pack replacing the old quad and the Cirque T-Bar doubling capacity at one of the highest lift-served points in North America. Snowmass had not added two lifts in a single season in almost twenty years, and it did it in the same stretch it lost its main mid-mountain restaurant. The lift lines got shorter right as the lunch options got tighter.

Meanwhile, in the Village

None of that construction touched Snowmass Base Village, but the plaza went through its own kind of turnover, and it ran in the opposite direction from the mountain.

Slice of Italy had been a Base Village fixture since 2018, a counter-service pizza and pasta spot where families in ski boots grabbed a table between runs. In 2025 it became Montevino, and the change was not a rebrand so much as a repositioning. The new restaurant runs a sommelier-led wine program built around Barolo and boutique Colorado vineyards, serves hand-rolled pastas instead of counter-service slices, and books reservations in 90-minute windows rather than walk-up tables. Same address at 69 Wood Road, same base-of-the-mountain location, a genuinely different kind of dinner.

So in the same twelve months, the mountain lost its biggest sit-down restaurant and gained a pop-up hot dog stand in its place, while the village's most casual dining spot became its most reservation-worthy one. That is not two unrelated stories. It is one village recalibrating where casual and elevated dining actually happen, on the mountain and off it, at the same time.

What This Winter Actually Looks Like

Ullrhof is scheduled to reopen for the 2026-27 season, which means the gap closes roughly a year after the building came down. The Hot Dogger, the Elk Camp deck, and the reshuffled menus at High Alpine and the Alpin Room do not disappear just because the original building is back. What changes is that skiers get an option back that had been missing for an entire winter, at more than double the size it used to be.

For anyone who spent last winter wondering where the old lunch spot went, the short answer is that it is still coming back, just later and bigger than it left. For anyone deciding where to eat this season, the honest answer is that Snowmass now has more places to choose from than it did two years ago, spread across a wider range of what a meal here can actually look like, from a hot dog at Spider Sabich to a glass of Barolo at Montevino.

The full rundown of what's open and what's new each season lives on Snowmass Village's own event and dining calendars, but the pattern underneath it is simpler than any single listing: this was the year the village decided lunch and dinner didn't have to look the same way they always had.

For a broader look at how Snowmass Village's seasons unfold, from mountain openings to summer trail conditions, PJ Bory's winter guide tracks what's changing on the mountain each year, restaurant by restaurant, lift by lift.