Cabin Club in Westlake has been a staple of fine dining in the Greater Cleveland area for more than 30 years and with good reason.
The steakhouse is one of the more intimate, unique settings for a dining experience in the area, giving patrons the feeling that they’re enjoying their meal inside a cabin in the woods and not directly on Detroit Road. That’s something Cabin
Club has always captured well, but still, minor tweaks to the restaurant and menu were necessary as time went on.
This fall, the restaurant was given a facelift both on the inside and the exterior.
We redid the landscaping, some new lighting out front and then as you walk in the property, all new flooring,” says Chris Kneeland, managing partner at Hospitality Restaurants, the group that owns Cabin Club.
That’s not all that’s new in terms of aesthetics. New mirrors behind and above the bar, new tables that are no longer covered by white linen traditionally found in steakhouses and new leather seating improve the restaurant’s interior. With the kitchen also in need of new equipment, the restaurant had to close its doors for a week this fall to complete the remodel.
“As we kind of reflected on the 32 years of the company,” Kneeland says of the decision to renovate, “we’ve always kind of taken a look at our properties and made small adjustments, rehabs, we’ve always made reinvestments into our properties.”
Despite all of those changes and upgrades, the dining experience hasn’t changed too drastically. Customers can still expect the same quality of steaks and other dishes while at Cabin Club, even if the inside looks a little bit different. The lobster bisque ($12) isn’t going anywhere and neither will the vast selection of cuts.
There are additions to the menu, too. Cabin Club’s menu now has new offerings such as its lobster pot pie ($49) and thick-cut bacon ($14) appetizer.
“We do a lobster pot pie,” says PJ Saracusa, vice president of operations. “It’s kind of your traditional pot pie, but it has a lobster veloute and on top of the pot pie sits a puff pastry and the puff pastry is about two inches high. On top of that two-inch high puff pastry actually has a cut out of a lobster.”
One of the other new additions to the menu is a side of tater tots ($12). That may sound abnormal for a steakhouse, but it’s something the Cabin Club team did plenty of research on.
“We were in Columbus at a restaurant, and they had great hashbrowns,” Kneeland says. “Our culinary director and our culinary creative guy came up with tater tots.”
“Call it four months and eight different renditions of a crispy potato because that was the goal,” says Saracusa. “That’s what we were looking for.”
Above all the changes to the space, additions to the menu, Cabin Club truly believes that the people are what makes the place special.
“Cabin Club is successful because of the people who work here,” Saracusa says. “We have servers who have been here over 25 years. Our general manager at Cabin Club has been here for 32 years. I think we're very successful with doing that, and the biggest part of that is the quality of the team that we have. And what they're willing to give, it's pretty amazing. It's really special.”
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