When autumn is unseasonably warm, ski areas can at least make enough snow to satisfy hardcore skiers, and retailers counting on Christmas sales know that the holiday spirit has to hit sooner or later. But how do you get people to eat a steaming-hot bowl of chicken noodle soup in…
The calls are coming in fast and furious about Lori Midson, the latest restaurant critic for 5280 magazine, who seems to have pushed a few buttons in the October/ November issue. Callers in the restaurant biz take issue with the fact that Midson, once the public-relations person for the Colorado…
Dealing with the press isn’t part of the curriculum at the Culinary Institute of America, where leeks take precedence over leaks. So CIA grad Daniel Block had to learn his lesson the hard way. Block, now the executive chef for The Swan at the Inverness Hotel, was nineteen when he…
So, are sake lounges the next century’s martini bars? Judging from my experience with the Mori-garita, maybe not. But Mori Japanese Restaurant (reviewed this week) isn’t the city’s first Japanese eatery to add a sake lounge. Domo, a country-style Japanese place at 1365 Osage Street, turned its lobby into a…
The first time I reviewed Brook’s Steak House (“Prime and Punishment,” September 9, 1996), I was with Barry Fey, who spent much of the meal cursing, mainly because the meal was not very good — with one notable exception: his porterhouse, which was so heavenly, so richly flavored and textured,…
The raspberry sauce was the icing on the rice cake. For two decades, Mori Japanese Restaurant held down the fort on the very edge of the urban frontier, in an actual veterans’ outpost at 20th and Market streets. And until just a few months ago, to step into Nisei Post…
In his November 4 column, Denver Post man-about-town (and Friday restaurant Dish-er) Bill Husted touted the paper’s new Web dining hookup with US West and Dex, the alleged phone company’s own man-about-town. That dashing Dex has been busy, what with loading the site with Post restaurant picks as well as…
It was the third time the woman had asked the server to give her a few more minutes. “I just can’t decide,” said the thirty-something gal, who was obviously getting no help from her equally perplexed date. “Could you just come back one more time?” The server graciously agreed, returning…
We thought our first meal at Señor Pepe’s (reviewed this week) moved at a snail’s pace — and it did. But on a recent trip to La Junta, we really experienced life in the slow lane. We couldn’t get a decent meal for love or money — and what we…
Sometimes it pays to be a regular guy. At Señor Pepe’s, the regulars are treated like royalty. As for the rest of the riffraff, let them eat cake. If they can ever catch a server’s attention, that is. Because unless you’re known by one of the staffers at this Denver…
You won’t find the real thing at La Brasserie (see this week’s review), and French food in general is not Denver’s culinary strong point. But there are a few good choices out there — especially if you’re willing to drive an hour or so. One of my favorite French restaurants…
Welcome to the Hotel California, restaurant-style: You can order anytime you like, but you can never eat. It wasn’t always this way at Denver’s former Hotel Paris, brought back from the dead a decade ago as the trendsetting La Coupole. But that restaurant closed mysteriously one day this past spring,…
Papa J’s Italian Restaurant and Lounge (see review) isn’t the only Big Daddy of red sauce north of Denver — there’s also Papa Frank’s Restaurant and Lounge at 6570 West 120th Avenue in Broomfield, in the Villager Square Shopping Center. And Papa Frank’s has a history, too: owner Tom Rizzi…
Since it opened several years ago, eating at Japon has been a little like fishing in the Pacific — although we often reeled in keepers, the going could get rough. On my first visit to this whimsically decorated Japanese restaurant, the cooked items were far superior to the raw (“A…
Service with a smile. Not harried help with a grimace. Not a smile paired with the total cluelessness that you might actually need a fork to get that food into your mouth and that you might want your meal before it is the temperature of that guy’s body they found…
Not too far from Vasil’s EuroGrille (see this week’s review) sits the Inverness Hotel and Golf Club (200 Inverness Drive West in Englewood). The Garden Terrace serves breakfast, lunch and dinner daily, but the all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch — which has snagged Best of Denver honors two years running — and…
Meet the king of the middle road. Plunked down next to I-25 in an asphalt jungle of hotels and motels that have no restaurants, much less room service, Vasil’s EuroGrille enjoys a captive audience. Too bad those captives won’t find anything particularly enjoyable at Vasil’s. If this is a EuroGrille,…
Unlike at Casa Bonita (see review), everyone is fully clothed at Hacienda Colorado, 5059 South Wadsworth Boulevard in Lakewood — and the food is delicious. But the two eateries do have something in common: the Black-Eyed Pea. The corporation once owned Casa Bonita, and Hacienda co-owner Tim Schmidt owns all…
The cute college-age guy is wearing nothing but a pair of denim shorts, and he’s obviously freezing his butt off. He sticks his hand into the waterfall, shivers, then turns to his diving partner, another cute college-age guy, and asks, “Man, can’t they turn the heat up?” as he runs…
No restaurant is happy about no-shows, but the smaller the place, the harder it’s hit when people make reservations and then fail to cancel them — much less show up. The Beehive avoids this problem altogether by taking reservations only for groups of five or more. “We stopped taking reservations…
Remember tapas? The Spanish tradition, which calls for serving up little tidbits of food meant to be snacked on with drinks, enjoyed another wave of popularity in Denver during the last year or two, then receded back into restaurant-trend oblivion. But one survivor remains: Ilios. Owned by Dee Diamond, who’s…
Ready or not, here they come. When husband-and-wife team Tim Elenteny and Janice Henning decided to open a restaurant in the space formerly occupied by Diced Onions, the San Francisco transplants didn’t know a lot about Denver’s dining scene. “We thought we’d come in and get all set up, have…
