Warming trends: It’s that time of year when restaurants start implementing their seasonal menus. Exhibit A: the Creekside Grill. I’d love to tell you all about two recent meals I ate there, but most of the things I tried aren’t on the revised menu. This time, the dishes land deep…
The owners of Greens restaurant have a few things to say about the importance of location. “Don’t underestimate it,” says Michael Nolting, speaking for himself as well as for wife Clare and Greens’ chef, Hugh O’Neill. “We now know that the incantation `location, location, location’ is the absolute truth.” And…
Diamond in the roughy: When I can’t stomach another bean burrito but still long for those south-of-the-border spices (and prices), I opt for the less-refried Peruvian cooking. Although one of my favorite places, Sergio’s in Lakewood, recently closed its doors, El Chalan, at 2257 West 32nd Avenue, is still going…
Restaurateurs keep stampeding into LoDo–but frankly, the joints already there are starting to run together. They attempt to offer the newest, the hippest and the hottest, but instead of a wide range of choices, we all seem to be dining at cadiranchchampbrewfirewazkoophousegrill, ordering brewchew (overpriced food that goes well with…
Brew news: Oktoberfest always reminds me of one splendid autumn evening when we sat in Munich’s ridiculously touristy but fun Hoffbrau Haus with a bunch of eighty-year-old Germans who spoke not a lick of English. In lieu of verbal communication, they kept nodding their heads at us, grinning and drinking…
Blessedly spared from Catholic schooling by a mother forced to convert long before Vatican II, I nonetheless endured the rigors of CCD (that’s Catholic Sunday school to the lay folk), with its ruler-wielding nuns and interminably long prayers. One Sunday Sister Agnes didn’t appear at class, and half an hour…
A cure for the common cold: The ice cream in Italy is unlike any other in the world–and certainly unlike any in Denver. Although the term “gelato” is used to advertise the products of several local companies, none really comes close to the super-rich, super-creamy Mediterranean stuff. I should know:…
There’s nothing like having a child of your own to give the phrase “family-style dining” real meaning. Finding restaurants that are kid-friendly is only slightly more difficult than finding restaurants that are happy to have you pay your bill with Monopoly money. Enter Armando’s Trattoria, which not only calls itself…
Throwing a Fit: Call me crazy, but it seems to me that instead of paying for a product to remove pesticides and wax from our produce, consumers instead should be supporting our local organic-produce farmers. The product is called Fit Produce Rinse, and it’s being tested only in Denver right…
If there are people somewhere on the face of the earth who don’t know about The Fort, it’s not because Sam Arnold hasn’t tried to reach them. A shameless promoter who hawks his Morrison restaurant like a culinary snake-oil salesman, Arnold has made this replica of a southwestern trading post…
Get it while it’s hot: Now here’s reason to celebrate. So far, the section of Larimer Street up near Coors Field–now known as the Ballpark Neighborhood–has managed to keep its classic character relatively intact. While nearby LoDo is suffering through the invasion of the insipid sports bar, the only new…
The cash-poor college years can push many people to extremes. So it was only slightly surprising when, during a budget-minded trip to Pizza Hut, my then-boyfriend accepted a dare to down the entire contents of a shaker full of cracked red pepper. The stakes: $50–but he probably would have done…
Bawk is cheap: A crew of media cheapskates–myself not included, although I have firsthand reports from reliable sources–met recently at the Broadway Brewing Company to swill microbrewed beer and conduct a blind (as opposed to blind-drunk) taste test of three rotisserie chickens. Bird #3, which was later unveiled as Boston…
If Jimmy the Greek were putting odds on Jimmy’s Greek restaurant, he’d probably say it was a sure thing. But then, Jimmy the Greek doesn’t know that Denver diners are a real handicap for Greek restaurants. The Jimmy of Jimmy’s–really Demetrios Lemonidis, “but everybody calls me Jimmy because of the…
At the beginning of the year, Pour La France! got the seven-year itch and decided it was time to try something new at its Denver and Boulder locations. So out came fresh paint, a snazzy set of china–and a revamped menu that no longer pulls solely from French roots. Still…
They’re out: If you’re wondering about the picketers in front of Greens restaurant, at 1469 South Pearl Street, last week, here’s the scoop: Taylor St. John and Madrid St. Angelo, a gay couple charged in the January 1993 Mt. Olivet cemetery desecration incident (they cut a deal with the Jeffco…
French kitchen god Escoffier advised that an omelette is “really scrambled eggs enclosed in a coating of coagulated egg.” And in The Way to Cook, one of Escoffier’s disciples, Julia Child, writes that “the eggs should be soft and tender inside, enclosed by a cloak of lightly browned coagulated egg.”…
The evening Westword’s Best of Denver issue came out, my husband and I stopped at Carmine’s on Penn–which had just been named Best Italian–and were amused to overhear owner Larry Herz chatting with a table of twenty or so diners sitting right next to us. They were talking about…me. The…
The word on Carmine’s on Penn: You either love it or you hate it. If you love it, as I do, you appreciate the casual, fun setting and the huge portions of inexpensive Italian food. If you hate it–as many others apparently do, judging from the calls I’ve received from…
Jerk-offs: Soda fountains always make me nostalgic for a time I never even lived through (growing up, though, I was enamored of my grandmother’s Norman Rockwell print of two nerdly types on a prom date nervously sharing a soda). Denver still has a handful of soda fountains, some of which…
It’s hard to imagine, but as recently as a hundred years ago, no one but a few goats and some crazy rugged individualists cared much for traveling into the mountains. Hey, who could blame them? You either had to pack in your own food, live on berries–or kill your dinner…
Thrown for a loop: Not surprisingly, it was in a bar that John Hickenlooper, an owner of the Wynkoop Brewing Company, came up with the idea of paying a $5,000 bounty to whoever introduced him to the future Mrs. Hickenlooper. So far, though, all the scheme’s paid off with is…
