Crepe Nuts

Crepes ‘n Crepes is uncompromisingly, unabashedly and unstintingly French. The cooks are French. Owners Kathy Knight and Alain Veratti have imported all their iron crepe griddles from France. The ingredients and preparations — the Camembert and Chambord, ratatouille and sauce aux champignons — are French. And the space itself –…

Sazza

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m now old enough to remember when a pizza was just a pizza, a round crust (though the occasional square-crust party pizza was okay, too) that was always thin, but not too thin (certainly no cracker crusts, and outside of the high-school cafeteria,…

Pizza the Action

Potato pizza. Barbecued-chicken pizza. Organic spinach and wood-ear-mushroom pizza on a hand-tossed artisan crust. The occasional sushi pizza or nightmare of salmon, caper and crème fraîche notwithstanding, the World of Pie has benefited from such innovations — from the brave (and occasionally terribly misguided) adventuring of American pizza-makers unwilling to…

Sauced at Steuben’s

I’ve always been an Olde English (OE) guy. At the ripe age of eighteen, I popped my malt-liquor cherry while sitting with a high-school buddy on the stained shag carpet of my first, still furniture-less college apartment. We had just driven a borrowed Suburban the four hours from our home…

Anthony’s Pizza & Pasta

Anthony’s Pizza and Pasta (or, as it’s known around my house, “Ant-anees”) has long been my reliable Denver standby for New York-style pizza in a hurry. Do the locations do slices? Yes. Do they offer the triumvirate of New York styles? Absolutely: a thin-crust cheese and pepperoni, a thin-crust double-cheese,…

The Green Machine

As reported in Off Limits this week, absinthe is now legal in the United States! And I don’t mean that phony shit that’s like anisette dyed green or that Eastern European stuff that tastes like cough syrup or that legally gray gunk shipped under cover and marketed specifically for its…

You Can Put Pineapple on My Tombstone

I remember the first time I saw someone eating a pizza with pineapple on it. My friend Nick was sitting in his living room in Buffalo with a sixer of Molson Export and Beverly Hills 90210 on the TV, eating a Hawaiian pizza from La Nova covered with thin-sliced ham…

Barfly Taxonomy: The Addle-Pated Gazer

View larger specimen In order to make more sense of the world around us, illustrator and public house naturalist Nate Stone is compiling here a taxonomy of different barflies. While you’re out and about in Denver, if you spot any of these specimens please add your observations about their habitat…

Tibet’s Restaurant

There are some foods that become sacred through nothing more than fierce love and attachment. Your mother’s meatloaf, Sunday-morning pancake breakfasts, the roasted chicken your wife made the first time she cooked for you, pressed with the indents of her thumbs and speckled with fresh thyme. And there are entire…

Sparrow Flies the Coop

I have mixed feelings over the recent closure of Sparrow at 410 East Seventh Avenue. On the one hand, I was never a big fan of the place — having beaten it down once in a review (“Cry Fowl,” March 17, 2005) and then returning for a Second Helping last…

Walk the Plank

There are some nights that you just know are going to suck, and then others that sneak up on you. I had great hopes for my night at the Buffalo Rose. It was a beautiful drive to Golden: The air was crisp and clean, with a sky full of stars…

The Thin Man

It’s 11:59 on a Saturday night, and Blackjack Pizza won’t take my call. I dial and hit send, dial and hit send. Finally someone picks up. “BlackjackPizzawe’reclosed.” “Really?” “Yeah.” “At midnight?” “Yeah.” “On a Saturday?” “Yeah.” “Really?” Click. After six rings and a three-minute hold, Papa John’s agrees to speak…

Tokyoya Bowl & Bowl

Tokyoya Bowl & Bowl had every chance to be a restaurant I would love. It’s a small, stand-alone operation about the size and shape of a Taco Bell, stuck back in the corner of a commercial plot, and offering rice bowls and udon, gyoza, yakitori and tonkatsu — the classic…

French Twist

A few months ago, I got an e-mail from Sean — one of my original commandoes, a hired gun whose long and noble service to the cause dated back to my first days here. An ex-chef and patissier, Sean was one of the first guys to eat with me professionally…

So Louisville’s Got That Going For It, Which Is Nice

My personal commitment to the Froggish arts is nothing when compared to the two-line backstory of Uttam Lama, chef at the five-month-old Tibet’s Restaurant in Louisville. Uttam spent fourteen years as the chef at a Tibetan monastery. While there, he cooked for the Dali Lama. For culinary street cred, Uttam…

Barfly Taxonomy: The Midwestern Tufted Touchscreen Addict

View larger specimen In order to make more sense of the world around us, illustrator and public house naturalist Nate Stone is compiling here a taxonomy of different barflies. While you’re out and about in Denver, if you spot any of these specimens please add your observations about their habitat…

Radda Trattoria

It was long after midnight, and I was hours late for home, but it had been a great party — the tenth or thirtieth or fiftieth in a row; I’d lost count. We’d closed the restaurant, seen the last lingering tables out the door, then occupied the place like a…

Boulder Bites

While driving back from Boulder after visiting Radda Trattoria (see review), I got to thinking about the restaurant scene and how it relates to anthropology. Specifically, to “carrying capacity,” the term that anthropologists use to describe the size of population that can be sustained by a certain tract of earth…

Hair of the Salty Dog

I’m one of “those” people. You know the ones. The crazy people who talk about their dogs the way other people talk about their kids. The kooks who spend thousands of dollars on doggie daycare so that Daisy or Rex won’t be home alone. The people who allow their dogs…

Mt. Fuji, the Pinnacle of Absurdity

In retrospect, we should have ordered sake. We definitely thought about it, lingered on the cocktail page while our server stood impatiently behind the hot hibachi grill with the rest of the menus and her free arm outstretched, almost asked for the $22 bottle and five glasses. But then we…

Saigon Pho Grill

I don’t know why it surprises me so to find good Vietnamese food outside the neighborhoods with which I am comfortable. Federal and Alameda? No shock. Aurora? The town’s spilling over with great Vietnamese restaurants. But even though I’d heard that the stretch of Federal Boulevard running through Westminster was…

Boulder Lucky to Have Radda

Radda is a great restaurant, but it’s also a comfortable restaurant, an unassuming restaurant, a restaurant where families come to eat penne al cinghiale and chicken soup in a parmesan broth, made with winter vegetables, lemon and faro, and where rogue CU economics professors sit and argue vehemently about the…