Life at the Inn: Breakfast, the Gallery & the Library

An inn of five rooms succeeds or fails on its rituals. This page preserves the Tarabino Inn's — the eight o'clock breakfast, the art on every wall, the library fire — as the inn itself described them. Archival record; these amenities are not offered here.

Breakfast at Eight

The inn served a full breakfast at 8:00 a.m. sharp, at a shared table, with a menu that adjusted to the tastes and dietary needs of the guests at it. The kitchen asked about restrictions at booking and meant it — vegetarian guests were a stated specialty. The structure never varied: a sweet or savory entree, meat, fresh fruit, juice, coffee, and tea.

What gave the breakfast its reputation was the rotation. The egg dishes cycled through Italian strata, tortilla española, migas, and frittatas — a little tour of the borderlands Trinidad sits in, Italian by heritage and New Mexican by neighborhood. The sweet side answered with lemon-blueberry blue corn pancakes and cinnamon French toast, the blue corn another nod south toward Raton Pass. Guests leaving before eight, or sleeping past it, could arrange a continental tray the evening before — the kind of accommodation a five-room house can make and a fifty-room house cannot.

Victorian dining room table set for breakfast with blue corn pancakes, fruit, and coffee in china cups — The full breakfast: one seating, one table, a rotating menu with Italian and New Mexican accents.

An Inn Hung as a Gallery

The Tarabino Inn doubled as a fine art gallery for artists residing in and around Trinidad, with a collection spanning a variety of mediums hung throughout the public rooms and halls. This was less unusual in Trinidad than it would be most places: the city has a serious art history — the A.R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art anchors Main Street — and the state later named Trinidad one of Colorado's certified Creative Districts, a designation only a handful of communities held when the inn's pages first boasted of it. Guests came down to breakfast through a hanging of working artists' canvases; more than one painting left the house under a guest's arm.

The Library, the Fire, and the Games

The inn's sitting room was a proper library: shelves around a fireplace, a book exchange that operated on the honor of travelers, and a stack of board games that came out on snowy Highway-of-Legends evenings. With only five rooms upstairs, the library never crowded; it functioned the way the house's parlors had for the Tarabino families — a warm room where the evening collected.

The inn's library with fireplace, full bookshelves, and leather reading chairs — The library: a fireplace, a book exchange, and the games shelf.

The Amenity List, As Published

For the record, the inn's published amenities, transcribed from its final-era pages:

Fine art gallery throughout
Full breakfast; tea-time treats
Cable TV; telephone; wireless internet
In-room refrigerators
Library with fireplace, book exchange, and games
Hair dryer, iron and ironing board
Soap, shampoo, make-up removers
Off-street parking

The list reads modestly now, but its argument was location and fabric, not features: a house within walking distance of the county courthouse, downtown, and the museums of the historic district, where the "amenity" was waking inside the best-preserved merchant's mansion in town. The view didn't hurt either — the inn's own pages noted that Fisher's Peak could be photographed from the property.