The Laundry

A Historic Room With Honest Ambition

The Laundry occupies the Soda Creek Building — the actual home of the Steamboat Laundry between 1910 and 1977 — and has handled the conversion from industrial brick to restaurant with unusual restraint. The original bones are still visible: exposed brick, high ceilings, worn wooden floors that have absorbed more than a century of weather. What has been added reads as considered rather than decorative: warm pendant lighting, reclaimed wood tables, a long bar that doubles as a stage for the cocktail programme. The room works because it does not try to apologise for what the building was.

The kitchen is set up for sharing. Portions are designed for the table rather than the individual plate — small and medium shared plates meant to be ordered family-style, with a refreshingly creative menu that treats seasonality as a working principle rather than a marketing bullet. The kitchen smokes and cures its own charcuterie in-house, which is where much of the personality shows up: a pastrami-style brisket, house-cured salmon, a rotating rillette. The vegetable plates are as serious as the proteins, which is the unambiguous marker of a kitchen that respects the whole plate.

Cocktails are the headline act, and they earn it. House-infused spirits rotate with the seasons — a smoked rosemary vodka, an espresso-cardamom rum, a jalapeño tequila that lands harder than the name suggests — and the cocktail list is built around them rather than dropped in as afterthoughts. The bar team knows what they are doing; asking for a dealer's choice is rewarded rather than punished. Happy Hour, served daily between 4:30 and 5:30 pm, is one of the better values in downtown Steamboat for a room of this quality.

The Building & Atmosphere

What makes The Laundry work structurally for a certain kind of dinner is the sense of a room with its own narrative. Ski-town restaurants often fall into two camps — the mountain-lodge performance or the strip-mall denial — and The Laundry belongs to neither. It feels like a downtown Brooklyn room dropped into a Colorado valley: exposed brick, visible bar, the sense that the cocktail on the table was actually built rather than poured. The lighting is flattering, the music is present but not dominant, and the energy of the room rises with the hour rather than collapsing.

What to Order

Start with two or three of the smaller plates — the house-cured charcuterie board, a vegetable feature, something from the raw-ish list — and build upward. The kitchen's sharing orientation rewards ordering more courses than you think you need, because portions are built for that rhythm. Ask the bar for a cocktail flight if you cannot decide; the house infusions are genuinely distinctive and the list is long enough to merit exploring.