What to eat if you're looking for the vintage soul of Nouveau Girdwood
Notes on: stoners/Teslas, expensive bagels, The Merc, septuagenarian tie-dye, miso butter noodles, strawberry slab pie and wild yeasts
A few years back I was gifted a massage at the brand-new Nordic Spa for Mother’s Day. The place was just cresting the wave of Nouveau Girdwood then — hella spendy, with the placeless, trendy “rustic-ness” of a Pendleton blanket tossed very deliberately on an Instagram cabin bed.
When I got on the massage table, my therapist let me know that he wasn’t supposed to work but they called him in after he’d smoked weed already. He was pretty burned out, he sighed. He monologued about some legal problems and dynamics with friends who lived in a treehouse, then asked if it would be cool if we ended early.
A person might be mad about a $200 Mother’s Day half-massage with a chatty stoner, but there was a comforting truth to it: you can try to “elevate” the Alyeska Resort out of Girdwood by doubling the prices and updating the carpet, but you can’t take the Girdwood out of the resort.
If you want to love Anchorage this week, journey …
