A year and a half have passed since the sign went up for Villagran, at 1512 West Alameda Avenue. At the time, it looked like Maria Garcia and Marco Angeles, who’d operated the Villa Real food truck at the same address for years, would open their brick-and-mortar restaurant any day. Finally, Villagran turned on the open sign and welcomed customers on May 1.

May is heating up with seasonal and local ingredients, great outdoor cooking and plenty of new restaurants to check out. Peas and carrots are at their peak sweetness — making them perfect even in a dessert! And new potatoes and spring lamb are making appearances on menus too. Here are…

Grower’s Organic co-founder Brian Freeman has been working in the organic produce business long enough that he remembers when people would tell him that organic farming was just a fad that wouldn’t last. But that was before Grower’s Organic launched in 2005 as a wholesale company focused on putting quality…

Chef/restaurateur Richard Sandoval opened his first Denver restaurant, Tamayo, on Larimer Square in 2001. He followed that one soon after with Zengo in 2004 on a brand new plaza at 16th and Little Raven streets. Back then, the place was packed nightly even though the Riverfront Park neighborhood was new…

Next Door, founded in Boulder by The Kitchen owners Kimbal Musk and Hugo Matheson as a kind of “Kitchen Light,” just opened in the new Eastbridge Stapleton development. This is the fourth Colorado location for the group, which is also launching the brand in Memphis, Tennessee this spring and will…

Graduation season is here. For most students across Denver, that means final exams, family events and a big sigh of relief once the ceremony is over. But for students enrolled in Ready for American Hospitality, graduation is just the beginning of fulfilling a dream — after surviving the nightmare of…

April in Colorado was a time of uneven transition and rapid change — whether we’re talking about seasonal changes or the Denver restaurant scene. While the number of new bars and eateries slowed from this time a year ago, other happenings made for plenty of ups and downs, for restaurant…

Chef/restaurateur Lon Symensma is about to embark on a restaurant voyage that will expand his influence over the Denver dining scene considerably in the coming years. With the imminent arrival of Concourse Restaurant Moderne, Symensma will have three restaurants in his stable — after ChoLon and Cho77 — and has…

With food photos this tempting, we know you’ll want to run out and eat these five dishes right now — but you’ll have to wait a few days for all but one. You can eat your fill when three new restaurants open next Tuesday and Wednesday, or you can buy…

Southern food is one of the country’s hottest dining trends right now, as evidenced by the growing number of Denver eateries serving food from south of the Mason-Dixon line. The latest is Tupelo Honey, which brings its brand of New Southern cooking from Asheville, North Carolina, where the company was…

This week’s feature story, “Disappearing Denver: Looking Back at Buildings We’ve Lost,” reminisces about old favorites — from the Tabor Grand Opera House to Celebrity Sport Center — that shaped Denver’s architecture and entertainment scene before giving way to the forces of modernization. Restaurants too, have come and gone, as a…

The Park Tavern & Restaurant at 931 East 11th Avenue has been slowly getting an overhaul both inside and out. After completing as much of the work as possible while keeping at least part of the twenty-year-old restaurant and bar open, owner Louie Belegratis closed the place for most of April…

Chef/restaurateur Justin Cucci doesn’t do subtle. From the “gastro-brothel” excess of Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox to the reclaimed mortuary mish-mash of Linger, Cucci’s restaurants turn unlikely spaces into full-on barrages of all of the senses. His newest, El Five, is no exception, converting the fifth floor of a LoHi office building…

Rooster & Moon closed at 955 Bannock Street last September, leaving one less option for coffeehouse dwellers in the Golden Triangle. A glimmer of caffeinated hope arose in January, when Eighth Day Coffeehouse announced its intention to sign a lease, but the deal never happened. But now coffee lovers —…

Matthew Lackey was the opening executive chef at Arcana, the subject of this week’s restaurant review by Gretchen Kurtz. Lackey passed away on April 10, 2017, after a rock-climbing accident at Mount Princeton. He was no longer with Arcana, having parted ways only weeks after the Boulder restaurant’s February 2016…

Thanks to Taco Bell, Americans know the chalupa as little more than a outsized taco, a puffy fried flatbread of questionable origin stuffed with the Bell’s standard ingredients. But even in Mexico, the chalupa takes on various forms and isn’t always easy to identify by sight alone, depending on the…

Maybe we’ve got the munchies from all the pot smoke lingering in the air after yesterday’s 4/20 activities, but our watch list this week is filled with craveable burgers, sandwiches, fried chicken and pizza. But there’s also a new French bistro and some equally French-inspired pastries. Here are seven spots…

Phillip Simonson is obsessed with chocolate — but not just any chocolate. As a kid, he eschewed cheap, mass-produced milk chocolate and finally developed a love for the good stuff as an adult, when he discovered artisan, small-batch producers. He founded Chocolate Lab and introduced his truffles to Denver seven…

There’s a new bakery in Denver, rising from some familiar names in the restaurant world. Alex Seidel and Matt Vawter of Fruition and Mercantile Dining & Provision have teamed up with Keegan Gerhard and Lisa Bailey of D Bar to form Füdmill, a wholesale pastry production company that launched this week…

Nearly a year ago, Elise Wiggins left her longtime position as executive chef at Panzano to pursue her vision of opening the Italian restaurant she’d always wanted. And the day has finally come; Cattivella opens to the public on April 19 at 10195 East 29th Avenue.

The Royal opened on Tennyson Street just over two years ago, serving burgers and burger accoutrements in an up-and-coming Denver neighborhood. The original owners were Josh Epps and Christina Smith, who also run two locations of breakfast eatery Jelly, at 1700 East Evans Avenue and 600 East 13th Avenue. But there’s a…