The Lodge at Glendorn pairs awe-inspiring natural beauty with the tender-loving-care of a world-class resort. Abundant blackberries on the property ripen in August, and the combination of foraging and fine dining is one of many reasons to go and experience the place for your yourself. TABLE contributor Jeff Swensen visits Glendorn at one of its most special moments…
A Deep Dive Into Nature at Glendorn
There is a place, nestled at 2000 feet above sea level in the northern Allegheny Mountains where Fuller Brook, cool and gin-clear, follows a winding course into the West Branch of Tunungwant Creek. From there, it flows northward from Pennsylvania into New York before it meets the Allegheny River, on its own northbound path until Salamanca, where it makes a left turn and runs south for 300 miles until it becomes the Ohio, later the Mississippi, and eventually the Gulf of Mexico. Carved out by the denouement of the last Ice Age and greened up considerably by subsequent warming, all of this has been much as it is, humans notwithstanding, for 12,000 years.
This place, The Lodge at Glendorn, the pristine-source headwaters for a huge swath of the Eastern United States, wears a coat of many colors. Its forest of Eastern hemlock, beech, black birch, sugar maple, and other species, canopies anunderstory of ferns, numerous wild mushrooms, ramps, raspberries, and blackberries. Its unwooded meadows and hillsides also host spectacular expanses of wildflowers.
The Start of a Legacy
In 1927, Clayton Glenville Dorn, frustrated when his children went away every summer to camp, bought 1200 acres along Fuller Brook, outside of Bradford. He outfitted it with all the trappings of summer camp so the children could spend the time with the family. He built a cedar, lodge-styled house and began calling the place Glendorn. It has been said that “no one passing through its gates has ever fully shaken its magic spell.”
In 2009 the property was purchased by Cliff Forrest, who assiduously tends to The Lodge at Glendorn, a world-class Relais & Châteaux resort dedicated to preserving the peace and tranquility so notable in its flora and fauna. Whether staying in a room or suite at Glendorn, or in one of the property’s several cabins, this is a place to restore one’s harmony. Immersing in the pleasures of nature each day and then enjoying the pleasures of a fine resort each evening establishes a wonderfully relaxing rhythm.
An Innovative Menu with Freshly Harvested Produce
One of the great pleasures at Glendorn is the food. In 2020, David Haick arrived as Glendorn’s executive chef. Haick is vigilant, imaginative, and has a keen understanding of the cycle of nature on the resort. With the various ephemeral ingredients offered up by the wilds of the property, Haick has infused the menu with rhythms of the seasons. “This place has made me a more patient chef, and Cliff Forrest has allowed me to be flexible in selecting the meals we offer our guests. We change the menus every day, and we are fluid and personal with the guests’ preferences.”
A Focus on Blackberries
Each August, for the past five years, The Lodge at Glendorn has had a weekend blackberry festival, where both chefs and guests forage along woodland trails, harvesting its bountiful wild blackberry crop. Their takings make their way into breads, compound butters, jams, main courses, and of course, desserts.
Blackberries grow in the wild on every continent except Australia and Antarctica. They have the highest antioxidant content per serving of any food. They are not true berries; each little bump in the berry is itself a fruit containing a seed, called a drupelet. Perfectly ripe in the third week of August each year, the blackberries are timeless in their millennia of ripening in the woodlands surrounding Fuller Brook. The youngest of Glendorn’s blackberry foragers also find them very timely as they eat every other berry that they pluck off the bushes.
Story and Photography by Jeff Swensen
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