My friend Laura has been going to the Double Musky Inn since her parents took her there as a kid in the eighties, and she talks about it the way people talk about a very good dentist — you don’t go often, but when you do, you’re glad it exists. I finally went with her last fall, driving the forty-five minutes south from Anchorage to Girdwood on the Seward Highway with the inlet flashing silver on our left and the Chugach mountains doing their thing on the right. The drive alone is reason enough.
The Double Musky sits on a wooded lot just off the main road in Girdwood, a few minutes from Alyeska Resort. It doesn’t look like much from outside — weathered wood exterior, low roofline, covered in Mardi Gras beads and antique signs and general Cajun-Alaskan chaos. They don’t take reservations, and on weekends the wait can stretch past two hours. People bring lawn chairs. There’s a bar inside where you can wait with a drink, and honestly the bar part is fine; the walls alone will keep you occupied.
The food is the point, though. The menu is Cajun-influenced, which sounds odd for Alaska until you eat here and realize it makes a strange, specific sense. The pepper steak is the dish that gets mentioned most, and it deserves the reputation — a thick cut in a peppercorn cream sauce that is rich without being cloying, served with rice and bread that you will use to clean the plate. The Cajun shrimp appetizer is good. The crawfish étouffée is better than it has any right to be this far north. I had the prime rib because Laura told me to and I am not a person who argues with Laura about food.
Entrees run roughly $35 to $55, which puts this in the special-occasion column for most people. That’s appropriate. This is not a weeknight dinner spot; it’s a birthday dinner, an anniversary, a celebration of something, or a reward for having driven the Seward Highway without stopping at every overlook. Dessert is mandatory. The chocolate mousse cake has been on the menu for decades and the reason is obvious.
What the Double Musky does well, beyond the food, is atmosphere — not manufactured atmosphere, but the real kind that comes from a place that has been doing the same thing for a long time and has accumulated the evidence. The staff knows the menu cold. The kitchen doesn’t rush. The whole operation feels like it’s been running on its own internal clock since 1962, indifferent to trends, which in a culinary moment obsessed with pivoting is genuinely refreshing.
Get there early if you’re going on a Friday or Saturday — early meaning around 5 p.m. if you want any reasonable shot at eating before 8. The drive back along the arm at dusk, with the bore tide doing whatever it does and the light going pink over the mudflats, makes the whole evening feel like more than just dinner. That’s the thing about the Double Musky: it earns the trip.
