Chasing Rabbits

The Sea Arrives in the Mountains

Established in 2022 inside Vail Village's Solaris Plaza, Chasing Rabbits is the most conceptually ambitious dining and entertainment destination to open in Vail in recent memory. What the venue represents is a specific and sophisticated reading of what a ski town's social infrastructure can be: dining, cinema, a proper speakeasy, a library lounge, and a revamped arcade existing not in competition with each other but in deliberate conversation, building an atmosphere that draws guests in for a single meal and keeps them for an evening.

At the centre of this concept sits the restaurant, which approaches Mediterranean cuisine with a Colorado specificity that distinguishes it from every other Levantine-influenced table in the mountain west. The menu brings the sea to the mountains in a way that reads as entirely natural rather than incongruous — a spicy red snapper ceviche built with the acid and heat calibration of a kitchen that understands both the ingredient and the altitude; charred eggplant dip with hemp seed tahini that grounds the dish firmly in Colorado's agricultural identity; braised rabbit bolognese that delivers the depth of a northern Italian Sunday sauce with a protein that signals the kitchen's willingness to trust its audience; and a grilled whole branzino that is the correct showpiece dish for anyone who wants to understand what this kitchen does when it's operating at the peak of its ambition.

The Design & Atmosphere

The interior is the room that Vail's dining scene had been missing: a design environment with genuine ambition, where the materials, the lighting, and the spatial organisation have been considered as a complete statement rather than assembled from a resort restaurant checklist. The bar programme operates with the same seriousness as the kitchen — a cocktail menu that earns extended exploration, built by a team that understands structure, balance, and the specific pleasure of drinking well in a cold mountain town.

The surrounding entertainment offering means that Chasing Rabbits functions differently depending on what you need from an evening. A dinner reservation at the restaurant itself is a self-contained experience. The broader venue — speakeasy, library lounge, the cinema concept — extends the evening in directions that no other Vail address can match. The combination is particularly effective for first dates, where the ability to move through different registers of the space after dinner removes the awkwardness of the single-venue constraint that limits most mountain evenings.

Who Comes Here

Guests who research before they arrive and guests who were directed here by someone who already knew. The 2022 opening created a following among Vail regulars who had been waiting for something to fill a specific gap in the town's dining offer — a restaurant with genuine design ambition and a kitchen capable of operating outside the mountain-American and alpine European categories that have historically dominated the valley. The Mediterranean positioning draws guests who might otherwise consider a night off the mountain as a preview of a Mediterranean summer. The entertainment offer draws everyone else.