No matter how good a server is, it’s tough to move the chef’s yak special. “I have two specials to tell you about tonight,” our waitress said, smiling, struggling to make eye contact as Barry — my go-to steakhouse guy — and I pored over the newsprint menu, looking for…
I was completing my list as the plane banked over lower Manhattan for its final descent into LaGuardia. It went like this. Fucked: Elvis; an Algerian in Paris; a future member of the British Parliament (unnamed); an architect and a poor artist; an Italian in Rome; an unkind college boy;…
Gas prices are over the top, but alternative-energy folks say we can save fossil fuels by harnessing energy from such sources as the sun and the wind. I recently set out to absorb some energy from both on the rooftop deck of the Tavern Downtown and wound up making my…
I love this time of year. The weather is completely unpredictable, and you can go from summer temps to blizzard conditions in the space of five seconds. But it’s totally worth suffering through an unexpected hailstorm that drives down new car prices, because ten minutes later you’ll be able to…
Every time I go to New York, I find myself liking it less and less. It’s not the people, the noise, the size — all that stuff used to bug me, but not so much anymore. Now, after six years and change spent west of the Mississippi, what bothers me…
The first time I went to Domo, I parked on the wrong side of the building, and I remember the annoying sound of my boots crunching on the gravel parking lot. Gravel anything — parking lots, roads, driveways — speaks to me of poverty, of not being able to afford…
One thing about restaurant people: They never sit still for long. Just last month, Kevin Taylor — who clearly didn’t learn his lesson about the difficulties of multi-unit ownership during his last round of closures in ’03 and ’04 — announced that he would be opening Rouge at the Teller…
Anyone who has lived in Colorado for more than five minutes has heard of the People’s Republic of Boulder. According to Wikipedia, the label “People’s Republic of” is placed sarcastically before the name of a left-wing university town and most likely “derives from the late 1960s, when The People’s Republic…
This week we continue our series on home improvement, courtesy of the Professor Emeritus for Stereotypical Wisconsin Drinkers, Mayor John Hickenlooper and the Wazee Supper Club (1600 15th Street). The Professor would seem an odd home-improvement tutor; he nearly had a heart attack at my home a few weeks back…
Mori is an unusual place. For starters, it’s housed in an old VFW post that’s done double-duty as a Japanese restaurant since 1948. But the building dates further back than that, to the 1890s, when it was a brothel (and a fairly popular one, from what I understand). Today, depending…
At Emogene Patisserie et Cafe, it was the bakery cases that hooked me — a glossy, sluttish, sugar-coated come-on speaking straight to my baser instincts and addictive personality. Biscotti and miniature cheesecakes, chocolate muffins glazed in shiny black icing, airy cream puffs, dense meringues and thick slices of almond cake…
Wow. Seriously, wow. You readers never fail to surprise me. I can talk about foie gras and caviar, confess to thoughts of whizzing on a restaurant’s carpet — and it’s just another day in the life. But I start talking about hot dogs, and all of a sudden the discussion…
From the outside, Mori looks slightly bunkerish, and with its weird VFW sign, I thought I might stumble into a concrete room filled with bitter WWII vets smoking and talking about “the big one.” But the minute I stepped inside the bright, streamlined space, my fears were assuaged by a…
Any good Minnesotan, Cheddar Head or even Iowegian knows a great, functional way to decorate the home. That’s assuming the women haven’t already taken over. Women will worry about filling bathrooms with soap and towels that no one is supposed to use while also insisting that there not be a…
My sugar-fueled romps through Emogene Patisserie et Cafe (see review) put me in mind of another place in the neighborhood, a longtime bastion of the patissier’s and chocolatier’s art. Andre’s Confiserie Suisse crouches on a corner outside of the standard Creeker territory, so it has a bit of that “hidden…
The first time I went to Istanbul Grill was about a week after John Lehndorff reviewed the place for the Rocky Mountain News. There were big photocopies of his review on the counter, a whole stack, and the servers were handing them to anyone who asked and almost anyone who…
I was running about ten minutes late for dinner at Istanbul Grill on Monday, April 17, and when I pulled into the parking lot, I found it full of police cars. Istanbul owner Emre Karaoglu and his sister-in-law, Gul Kapci, were standing huddled together out of the wind, watching cops…
The Pinnacle Club occupies the 38th-floor space that housed the swanky Petroleum Club back in Denver’s go-go oil days, and not only does it give a feel for the past, but it provides phenomenal views of the Front Range — all 360 degrees, if you want to walk around and…
Coming into turn three on Good Friday, the Mormon Representative and I effectively distanced ourselves from the pack of the damned. Devout types that we are, we decided there was no more fitting way to reflect on our blackened souls than to brew a batch of beer while barbecuing some…
For twenty years, House of Kabob has been jammed into this strip mall on Colorado Boulevard, tangled up with other Middle Eastern markets and restaurants. That’s twenty years of Persian cuisine, twenty years of kabobs and lamb tongue and herbed yogurt and pita. And while the room — done in…
I have now been to 250 Josephine Street more times than I can count. The address was predestined to fascinate me. As Papillon, it was ground zero (one of the ground zeros, at least) for Denver at its height of pre-millennium excess: a jumping-and-jiving bastion of high-tone, big-money weirdness with…
Bad enough that Chris Douglas and his crew had to take on the sorry history of the 250 Josephine Street address when they opened Tula there (see review). Bad enough that they have to deal with a crowd of diners who have long memories (when Ian Kleinman was cooking there,…
