Wild Sage

If you haven't made it down to Eagle for dinner lately, there are an increasing number of reasons to point the car west.

One of them is Wild Sage, which opened in Eagle Ranch in 2023 in the former Assembly space with a menu built around seasonal cooking, fresh herbs, locally and regionally sourced ingredients and a surprisingly prominent role for vegetables.

But while Wild Sage is relatively new, one of the people behind it is anything but new to the Vail Valley restaurant scene.

Executive chef and managing partner Kevin Nelson is a name longtime locals may remember from Terra Bistro, for years one of Vail's more distinctive restaurants. And once you know Nelson's history, Wild Sage starts to make considerably more sense.

A Long Island native who began working in restaurant kitchens as a teenager, Nelson arrived in Vail in the early 1990s and joined Terra Bistro in 1993. He was named executive chef in 1999 at just 30 years old and would eventually become managing partner and owner, spending more than two decades helping shape the restaurant and its culinary identity.

Long before "farm-to-table" and "vegetable-forward" became ubiquitous restaurant language, Nelson was building menus around seasonal, natural and organic ingredients, drawing inspiration from Asia, the Mediterranean and the American Southwest.

Terra Bistro accumulated its share of recognition along the way, including a DiRoNA award and Wine Spectator recognition, but perhaps more interesting than the accolades is how consistent Nelson's approach to cooking has remained.

By 2016, he was describing Terra Bistro's philosophy in refreshingly uncomplicated terms: whole foods, natural foods and organic foods, prepared from scratch. Ideas about what constituted healthy eating had changed considerably during his years at the stove, but the commitment to good ingredients hadn't.

Sound familiar?

Spend some time with the Wild Sage menu today and the connection becomes pretty apparent.

Wild Sage isn't a vegetarian restaurant — committed carnivores aren't going to go hungry — but vegetables aren't treated as the obligatory supporting act. Here, ingredients like beets, cauliflower, mushrooms, corn and carrots are allowed to be the reason you ordered the dish in the first place.

It's not Terra Bistro reincarnated. It feels more like the latest evolution of an idea Nelson has been working on for more than 30 years.

Some Insider readers actually encountered that philosophy recently without necessarily knowing the history behind it. When we covered the Eagle Mushroom & Wild Food Festival this summer, we highlighted the Wild Sage Culinary Experience, a four-course, wine-paired dinner built around foraged and cultivated fungi and created by Nelson.

After selling Terra Bistro shortly before COVID, Nelson left Colorado and headed to Roswell, Georgia, where he opened A-street, a New American restaurant that allowed him to continue playing with the international influences that had characterized much of his cooking in Vail.

But Colorado apparently wasn't quite finished with him.

Nelson returned to the Valley after connecting in 2022 with restaurateur Casey Glowacki, another chef by training and a graduate of the New England Culinary Institute.

Glowacki had followed a very different path to Eagle County.

Raised in Colorado, he spent roughly two decades in Charleston, South Carolina, where he founded Five Loaves Café and eventually built a restaurant operation that grew to seven locations and more than 300 employees before selling his interests and returning west.

In 2019 he acquired the Edwards wine-and-cheese shop Eat! Drink! and the neighboring meat and seafood market. Eat! Drink! subsequently became Drunken Goat, while the market continued as Cut Meat and Seafood.

If you've eaten at Drunken Goat, you'll recognize some of its DNA at Wild Sage. That was intentional. When Wild Sage was being developed, Nelson said the new restaurant would take some culinary cues from the Edwards restaurant while leaning more heavily into fresh herbs, healthy ingredients and vegetarian choices.

The result is something different enough to have developed an identity of its own.

Wild Sage wasn't the end of the Glowacki-Nelson partnership.

In early 2024 they opened Capitol Public House directly across from Wild Sage in the former Boneyard space — a location some longtime Eagle residents will remember as the Dusty Boot.

Where Wild Sage gave Nelson room to explore the lighter, produce-driven side of his cooking, Capitol Public House deliberately headed toward elevated comfort food: burgers, pizza, fish and chips, a serious bourbon and whiskey selection and plenty of Colorado beer.

That particular experiment ended this September when Capitol Public House permanently closed, but the space isn't staying quiet for long.

Glowacki is now combining it with the adjacent Eagle location of Cut Meat and Seafood to create Capitol Market, an expanded neighborhood market, café and miniature grocery concept. Cut is remaining open during the renovation, with Capitol Market targeted to debut in November.

It makes for an interesting little collection of businesses: Drunken Goat and Cut in Edwards; Wild Sage and, soon, Capitol Market and Cut in Eagle.

And perhaps more interestingly, the concepts keep changing rather than simply being duplicated from one location to the next.

Which brings us back to Wild Sage.

Eagle's dining scene has changed considerably in recent years, and it's tempting to view all of that as something entirely new. Wild Sage is a reminder that some of what's happening down valley is being driven by people with very deep roots in the Vail Valley restaurant world.

In Nelson's case, those roots stretch back more than three decades.

For longtime locals who remember Terra Bistro, Wild Sage offers an opportunity to see what one of Vail's veteran chefs is doing in a very different setting, at a very different point in his career.

For everyone else, none of that history is required.

You just need to be hungry.

Wild Sage is located at 1143 Capital Street, Eagle, CO 81631. The phone number is 970.705.1689 and reservations can be booked here.