Devil’s Food Bakery

After my time at D Bar Desserts, I wanted to revisit another dessert bar. One major problem: Though Denver has seen a few dedicated dessert bars open, it has also seen just about all of them close soon after. Remember Emogene and how fast that nascent chain tanked? Though the dessert-bar concept might seem like a no-brainer on paper (everyone loves chocolate, right?), it’s pretty tough to pull off — because rather than having customers tie up a table for two hours and then walk out after having dropped fifty or a hundred bucks on dinner for two, that same two-top is occupied just as long, but by customers only dropping twenty bucks for a couple desserts. So like D Bar, in order to survive, most dessert bars usually augment their board.

That’s no guarantee of success, either. Just ask Devil’s Food Bakery, which has gone through a lot of iterations since it opened in 1999. It’s been a dessert bar and bakery, a breakfast bar, a three-a-day neighborhood bistro, a sandwich joint and a coffee shop. Most of the time, it’s been two or three of those at once; sometimes it’s been all of them at the same time. Right now, it’s offering breakfast and lunch seven days a week, and closing by 4 p.m. Devil’s Food has daily specials, lots of coffee and even some booze. But the big draw continues to be the stocked pastry case in the front: a finger-smudged and sugary attraction, tempting neighbors and window shoppers alike. And that pastry case also happens to be where Devil’s Food displays its best work.

When I stopped in for a bite last week, I skipped the salad-heavy lunch menu and spread of sandwiches in favor of the breakfast board: pancakes and omelets, waffles and quiches, glazed bacon and eggs and potatoes all coming from brand-name farms. But while I appreciate any house’s attempt at sourcing the best product, the kitchen then has to do right by it — and the Devil’s Food crew did not. My potatoes were inedibly burnt (the scorched bottoms poorly hidden by a layer of un-burnt potatoes mounded on top), my eggs dry and overcooked, my toast tasting strangely (though not unappetizingly) of garlic. I left most of my plate uneaten and went to the pastry case to see what of my morning could be salvaged.

Here I found the standard Devil’s Food offerings: the Devil’s Food doughnut, huge and gleaming under its shell of laced dark-chocolate icing, and the red velvet hedgehog, a hand-grenade-sized cake covered in spiky chocolate frosting with a core of cream cheese filling — as well as a spread of cookies, tarts and croissants. And though the Mexican wedding cookies were merely okay and the chocolate chip burned to a crisp, I did enjoy the doughnut and the hedgehog quite a bit.

Still, it was a shame that I had to go through so many other plates before I found something worth eating. Next time, I’m going straight for dessert.