UPDATE: We have a winner of our DSTILL Showcase contest, in which we asked Cafe Society readers to answer this question: What were the first five distilleries to open in Colorado that continue to operate today? Congratulations to Lee5324, who correctly guessed all five: Stranahan’s, Peach Street, Peak Spirits, Mystic…

This bar, like many bars, offers a bartender’s choice, a throw-caution-to-the-wind cocktail that’s custom created by someone who you hope will wow you with their mixology magic. The cocktail in the above snap was unlike any I’ve ever had, a marriage of lemon, sugar and sparkling rosé dominated by bitters…

Cafe Society served up four Guess Where? contest posts last week, ranging from a textbook-perfect daiquiri from the Capital Grille to a terrific thin-crust pizza (that beat out the more popular deep-dish pizza) at Denver Deep Dish, which resides inside Bar Car, to a plate of chilaquiles that made everyone…

Billed as “Denver’s largest gathering of local food producers, manufacturers, growers, retailers and restaurateurs,” the 2014 Local Food Summit, hosted by the Mile High Business Alliance, in partnership with the City of Denver, kicks off this morning at 10 a.m. at the McNichols Civic Center Building with a full day…

In 2005, a former repo man with a rather impressive rap sheet stemming from a reckless and wild youth plunked down a hot dog cart on the 16th Street Mall, in an area of downtown that already pimped plenty of wiener beaters, but this wasn’t your average hot dog cart…

In just a few weeks, spirit hounds from here and afar will descend on Denver for DSTILL, a week-long celebration that trumpets more than fifty craft spirits producers from Colorado and around the country, all of whom will gather under the roof of the McNichols Civic Center building on Thursday,…

It’s the deep-dish pizza at this joint within a joint that gets all the accolades, but after trying both a deep-dish pie and a thin-crusted pizza, I’m firmly entrenched in the thin-crust camp. Don’t get me wrong: The deep-dish pizza is very good, but the thin crust, in my opinion,…

A few weeks ago, when I spoke to Jon Mendoza, he had just been let go from Uncle, Tommy Lee’s noodle shop in Highland. But while Mendoza, who was Uncle’s chef, vented his frustrations about getting the boot, he also made it very clear that his departure from Uncle would…

Sometimes you find the best examples of a certain dish at a restaurant that you’d never expect would serve that dish, much less do it better than just about anyone else. But that’s exactly what happened with the chilaquiles in the above snap. Not only was it an unexpected surprise…

Aniedra Nichols Elway’s Cherry Creek 2500 East First Avenue 303-399-5353 elways.com This is part two of my interview with Aniedra Nichols, exec chef of Elway’s Cherry Creek; part one of our conversation ran yesterday. What’s the best food- or kitchen-related gift you’ve been given? I’ve had quite a few, but…

CitySet, the impressive restaurant project in Glendale at the intersection of Colorado Boulevard and Cherry Creek Drive, just got another big culinary boost thanks to Hugo Matheson and Kimbal Musk. Today they opened The Kitchen Next Door Glendale, the second outpost of the original spot in Boulder that resides adjacent…

Aniedra Nichols Elway’s Cherry Creek 2500 East First Avenue 303-399-5353 elways.com This is part one of my interview with Aniedra Nichols, exec chef of Elway’s Cherry Creek; part one of our conversation will run tomorrow. “Instead of watching cartoons, I was either glued to all of the old cooking shows,…

For the past several months, there’s been a flurry of activity on the southwest corner of Holly and Cedar, an intersection that sits on the cusp of Crestmoor and Hilltop on a plot that was once an old gas station, now long gone. But Rob Naiman, who grew up in…

As we reported a few weeks ago, Cochon555, the nationwide swine tour and chef battle that trots from city to city in an effort to ballyhoo the benefits of heritage-breed pigs, is stopping in Denver on Sunday, March 9, specifically at the Ritz-Carlton, where five local chefs — Jennifer Jasinski…

Unless there’s a beach and an umbrella in the vicinity, the likelihood of my ordering a daiquiri is slim. Still, there are exceptions to every rule, as evidenced by the daiquiri in the above snap — a proper, perfect daiquiri made a long, long way from the sand by a…

Walk inside this Ethiopian restaurant, and you’ll encounter a sparse dining room that has all the allure of breaking the law (and getting busted), but if you can ignore the bare bones setting to concentrate solely on the food — a huge departure from the sea of sameness that you…

Cafe Society dished out five Guess Where? contests last week, ranging from a breakfast of decadent banana Fosters French toast from Fooducopia to a copper vessel of excellent chicken tikka masala from Khazana Indian Cusine to a porkarific pig burger from a place that trots out a stellar happy hour…

Denver Restaurant Week — the first of two this year — began in earnest on Saturday, and while there are plenty of foodniks (and restaurant staff) who bemoan the frenzied chaos of what some call “amateur dining week” (and “amateur diners”), Denver Restaurant Week is nonetheless a terrific opportunity for…

“Thought this would be a good place to get chinese to nurse a killer hangover. It’s dingy inside and the kind of place you think your missing cat would end up at…Do yourself a favor…and keep on walkin’.” That sums up the sentiment of one Denver Yelper, who reviewed China…

Bruxie (pronounced Brucks-ee) Gourmet Waffle Sandwiches, a fast-casual joint that got its start in Southern California, namely Olde Town Orange, is invading Denver, opening its first store outside of California in March at 1000 South Colorado Boulevard, in the same strip mall that houses Tokyo Joe’s, Pinkberry, Modmarket and, until…

The chef sitting next to me at the bar where I ate this burger was on his day off from the line at Mizuna, and he admitted that he’d been here twice in the last week just to wrap his jaws around the pork burger stacked with wild mushrooms and…