Dine & Dash: Wine and ice cream 🍽
Mini reviews of Monument's Cloud Wine and Lolley's Ice Cream
Cloud Wine
Attached across a courtyard from and sharing a kitchen with Monument’s Bistro on 2nd, Cloud Wine offers its own limited tapas menu but also serves off the Bistro’s menu by request. That’s handy on a weekend night around 7 p.m. when we’re in the area for other work (a visit to Pikes Peak Brewing), and craving something substantial, but we don’t have a reservation. No worries, Cloud Wine had a couple tables open and was happy to receive us.
The Bistro had been back on my radar as it had been several years since I last visited, and Russ Erbe blew them up on social media recently raving about their arctic char entrée. So we amble in under the wine and tapas bar’s low ceilings and squeeze into a two top in a small dining room adjacent the bar. The affable bartender, on his last night before taking off for career work he tells us, gives excellent service. He used to cook at the Bistro as well so he easily fields questions with good detail.
We do get the arctic char — plated over wild rice with asparagus and roasted beets with radicchio and pecan-apple chutney garnishes — and also some sautéed shrimp with Calabrian peppers in a sherry-butter sauce with toasted baguette points. Plus a side of papas bravas since a nearby four-top table was so enamored with them that they ordered a second round. We pair those with half glasses ($5.50 and $6.50; which I appreciate, being the driver) of Oyster Bay Pinot Noir from New Zealand’s Marlborough region and Nicodemi Montepulciano d’Abruzzo from Italy’s Colline Teramane region. Both are wonderful, the latter bigger with robust dark fruit notes and the former softer with some earthy and lightly oaky elements. Bottles top out in the $50 and $60 range, by the way, so you won’t overspend to enjoy a good wine.
The buttery, herb-forward wine broth with the prawns proves an easy success and the peppers bear a respectable spicy kick, especially in whole form, backed up by some sharp garlic slivers. Definitely start with the dish if you go. As for the potatoes, ours were bland and raw-tasting inside, likely just needed to be boiled in salt more (or at all), but the final crisping via frying left a nice outer texture. The sauce is the show, though: a quattro formaggi mix of Pecorino, Fontina, Parmesan and Gorgonzola seasoned with chipotle spice. The complex blend delivers wine-friendly smoky earthiness, rich creaminess and a back end funkiness from the blue cheese element.
As for the char — cousin to salmon and lake trout with aspects of both — sourced from Lake Dillon according to Erbe’s post, the flesh is a pale pink and unctuous like salmon, while the flavor is slightly milder like trout. It’s delicious and indeed you should try it if you haven’t. They crisp up the skin well enough though the topping relish rehydrates it the longer it sits. The soft pecans compliment the fish’s inherent, faint nuttiness and the apple element lends sweet counterpoint, backed up by the beets’ natural sugariness. They’re left with an unadulterated this-is-a-beet flavor, while the asparagus too is grilled simply and left to speak for itself. Our wild rice is on the mushier, oatmeal side of textures, a little wet and not as elegant as the fish.
The minor stumbles show that the Bistro and tapas bar have room to grow and tighten up — “mature” if we were talking wine terms — but where they are now hits a high enough mark to deserve a visit. It’s certainly the finest dining in the immediate area and small-town charming and sincere.
Lolley’s Ice Cream
Lolley’s opened at the beginning of 2021 in downtown Monument and was a sensation out of the gate. I wrote them up for the Indy at the time and was highly complimentary of everything.
Their branding and design work is slick (thanks in-part to local artist Mark Ludy), the shop is bright and very cute and they utilize local dairy and natural ingredients (no preservatives). They’re also fully gluten free and offer vegan options. My go-to, in fact, is their cocoa coconut vegan, imperceptible from regular dairy ice cream and a total delight (for chocolate fiends like me). On this particular night, we pair it with the limited-time winter special flavor of Monument Moose, made with milk chocolate ice cream, fudge chunks and swirls of peanut butter and caramel sauce. So yeah, more chocolate, and peanut butter (my other sweet tooth achilles) and not so much caramel that it cloys in any way.
I could go on about how much we dig this place — venturing to it every time we’re near Monument when time allows — and how sad we were to learn too late of an early February Ice Cream for Breakfast Menu they created as a single-day special that we missed by a matter of hours. It featured ice cream topped waffles and parfaits plus a Mochi Thai’m glazed donut with caramel pecan ice cream and more toppings, and build-your-own sundaes. Hopefully they do another sometime because it looked screamin’ fun and worth the morning indulgence on a weekend.
Anyway, the last example I’ll give of why we love Lolley’s is the notably friendly staff. We were there just a few minutes before closing and they received us without hurrying us along or making us feel bad. When we were leaving, right as they were locking the doors, another couple had just pulled up and was half way up the sidewalk. The staffer could have easily turned them away, but instead, he unbolted the door and leaned out and said “come on it, I got you.” Legend.
