The Carlin: Embracing The Wine-Dine-Stay Concept In Breckenridge
Game-changing Colorado restaurateur and alpine ski racer Phillips Armstrong distinctly remembers the feeling of traveling and competing in Switzerland, seeking out the best restaurants and discovering they all had guest rooms upstairs. He became enamored with the cozy, small-scale Swiss chalet restaurant-inn offerings and vowed to bring the concept to Colorado’s high country.
“In America, we have boutique hotels but not restaurants with rooms. I was just really intent on bringing that to an American ski town,” says Armstrong, who grew up outside of Philadelphia and now lives in Steamboat Springs.
Armstrong made a name in the industry with his Denver pop-up series Hush Concepts and his Steamboat hits — the original elevated culinary comfort Aurum quickly followed by Table 79 Foodbar. After opening Aurum Food & Wine in Breckenridge in 2018, the swift-moving entrepreneur set the resort town dining and restaurant design bar even higher with the 2023 launch of the long-awaited Carlin.
Photos courtesy of The Carlin
The boutique hotel-restaurant-tavern concept delivers sophisticated, clean and Colorado-sourced design — a multi-milliondollar complete gut and renovation of a longtime scruffy Breckenridge pizza joint — into a threestory hospitality experience. The Carlin’s chic marble and pine main level greets you with hand-plucked historic ski artwork, flawless nautical design and a raw bar (unprecedented in Breckenridge) built around relationships with bicoastal sustainable oyster farms and lobster and crab boats. The open-kitchen format features a wood-fired oven that churns out bubbly, umami crumb oysters, puffy gougeres and a charred scallion crab cake flanked by braised greens and a delicate creole corn purée that Armstrong raves about.
Downstairs is dimly lit with a speakeasy vibe, offering its own upscale American tavern menu of buttermilk fried chicken, Thai sausage and Manhattan strip steak frites served alongside a bold Prohibition-style cocktail menu. Bartenders get creative with mixtures like the Innkeeper Elixir, made with Breckenridge gin and herbyspicy fernet, and a kicky margarita spin dubbed Tequila Mockingbird built around smoky mezcal and habanero bitters.The four-room inn upstairs operates as an Airbnb, with a private elevator and immaculately appointed accommodations doused in Coloradomade goods looking out over Main Street and Breckenridge Ski Resort. The hands-off approach grants guests a parking spot, ski locker and keypad code to access Armstrong’s take on a Scandinavian boutique inn. Guests settle into top-of-the-line everything — plush oversized beds with Frette 100% cotton linens, Rishi botanical teas, towel warmers, ready-to-drink craft cocktails and private balconies revealing the TenMile Range and the Breckenridge gondola just one block away, waiting to whisk skiers to the resort’s five renowned peaks.
Each modern boutique room is named for a Summit County mine, extending The Carlin’s moniker that struck Armstrong while driving through the middle of Nevada and seeing a sign announcing one of the largest gold mines in North America. That gold thread that weaves through Armstrong’s Destination Hospitality dining concepts in Steamboat, Breckenridge, Aspen Snowmass and, coming in late 2024, Maui continues at The Carlin.
Gilded touches by iFurnish Design lead designer Courtney Sheldon gleam throughout the building’s hardware, in ice buckets and wine openers — tempting Airbnb guests to uncork the $60 in-room bottle of Nebbiolo. Fischer Fine Art + Design owner Karen Fischer selected artwork by local photographers and Breckenridge Heritage Alliance collection prints, nodding to the area’s mining roots and pulling in Slim Aarons’ iconic elite vintage ski culture imagery. Denver-based Raw Creative handled The Carlin’s design, embracing a textured ocean-meets-mountains aesthetic across light wood booth backings, soft gray and tan seating and deep blue dining space detail. The result is a shining example of what happens when a fine home builder — in this case Ivan Stanley — takes on a custom construction restaurant project.
The Carlin chef de cuisine Zach Brace has cultivated direct partnerships with seafood purveyors on both coasts to offer flown-in-fresh raw bar delights.
“There are three totally different designs on three different floors,” Armstrong says. “There’s a nautical undertone on the main floor. I wanted to show people you can get really fresh seafood in the same amount of time a restaurant in New York would.”
The Carlin Chef de Cuisine Zach Brace has cultivated direct partnerships with purveyors like Cotuit Oyster Company on the east coast and Taylor Shellfish on the west coast to offer flown-in-fresh raw bar delights. Briny to creamy oysters, snow crab, plump mussels and more greet diners as they enter the warm space, and a cut and catch of the day — think flaky, sweet mahi and a buttery Wagyu sirloin — keep things diverse.
As of press time, the chef-driven menu was being shaped with approachable, hearty, post-ski dishes fashioned around cuts of duck, roasted chicken, short ribs and a savory cozy chicken and dumplings rendition — all furthering Armstrong’s dedication to being more than a seafood restaurant.
Armstrong wears a pleased grin when he sees guests grasping his concept, resonating with the play-eat-stay model and booking out The Carlin’s guest suites months in advance for the week of Christmas.
“It doesn’t get any more convenient,” he says. “Ski, have dinner, have a drink, walk upstairs to your room. You have everything you need.”
It’s quintessential spoil-yourself Breckenridge at your fingertips.
Originally published in the Winter 2023-24 issue of Spoke+Blossom.