Empty restaurants make me nervous, skittish, worried that everyone knows something I don’t. I always get the feeling that I missed the ambulances or the SWAT team by a few minutes — that some weird action cleared the place out just prior to my arrival. Empty movie theaters affect me…
Next week’s Best of Denver 2006 will mark the end of several solid months of eating and note-taking, list-making and writing — but mostly eating. I have no idea how many dollars and how many hours I’ve spent scrambling around the city in a desperate fever to find the best…
Is Kokopelli a fertility deity — or just a dick? When I stepped inside Kokopelli’s (formerly Manny’s Smokehouse), I instantly loved the look and feel of the place, right down to the wonderful oxblood banquettes and the fabulous blues singer playing on a tiny stage draped with red curtains. But…
If not for all the evidence that I’ve had heterosexual intercourse, I’m pretty sure I could be a priest. As all you Catholics and everyone who makes fun of us know, we’re in the midst of Lent, when we get back to the “Judeo” part of our Judeo-Christian heritage and…
Saturday nights at Duo are loud and boisterous, a cacophony of sensualism that washes like crazy rogue waves back and forth across the floor and bar. The front door never stops swinging, releasing a blast of piano jazz out into the evening every time it opens, and the bar is…
I think I may know why chef John Broening was smiling at the end of my last meal at Duo (see review): I’d just been busted. Generally, I’m a pretty stealthy guy. This whole “anonymous critic” thing — with all the fake names and bogus identification and secretive phone calls…
I’ve always loved the drinking aspect of sports. I think that half the reason I took up golf is that it’s officially the only “sport” that has cocktail waitresses (aka cart girls). My second favorite drinking sport is skiing. There’s nothing that compares to that first sip of a cocktail…
I had high hopes for the “Sex and So Much More Show” at the Colorado Convention Center two weeks ago. Since it was billed as a venue for the free exchange of ideas on healthy adult relationships and their sometimes frightening variations, we figured there would be lots of people…
I was so close to walking out of the new Udi’s in Stapleton last week. Seriously, like thirty seconds away. I’d strolled into the casual, dimly lit bistro on a half-full night intending to order some takeout, had been handed a couple of fairly impressive menus at the counter, and…
Is this your first time here?” our server asked as he stood over our table — the last one available early on a Saturday night in the small dining room at Parallel Seventeen. And we nodded, meekly, acknowledging that yes, in fact, this was our first time. I hate doing…
While the rest of the country stupidly worries about Arabs guarding our ports, I’ve uncovered the surreptitious Hawaiian invasion of the American West. While Hawaiians are a large people not known for their stealth, they are actually quite cunning and capable of a subtlety rivaled only by the Belgians –…
I’m suddenly totally into Brazilians — the country’s cocktails, not the new/old fad of hairless pubic areas. Last week at Rodizio Grill, I discovered the Caipirinha (pronounced kie-purr-REEN-yah, $7.50), consisting of muddled lime, fine sugar and Boca Loca Cachaça, a Brazilian alcohol that’s the third-most-consumed liquor in the world. Made…
I’m considering having the health department launch an investigation into the margaritas at Señor Rita’s (5007 East Colfax Avenue). Recently, all of the Institute of Drinking Studies’ researchers plus several groupies descended on this new bar, which was brought to us by our heroes at the Elm next door, as…
There’s one thing that Mary Nguyen and her crew at Parallel Seventeen (see review) don’t do too well, and that’s make a decent cup of Vietnamese coffee. They have all the correct materials — Café du Monde coffee, sweetened condensed milk, a tin-drip filter, tall glasses filled with ice –…
Andouille gumbo and tortilla soup, fried mushrooms with truffled dipping sauce, enchiladas con queso and steak frites, crabcakes with chipotle coulis, pierogi, Asian pot stickers with ginger sauce, chicken piccata, cheeseburgers served with a bottle of Chimay Red, miso soup and Hawaiian tuna salad. And sushi (on request) from the…
Strange that Magnolia (see review) would have a sushi bar attached. Stranger still that Sushi Mara — the only sushi bar in Lafayette — is very good (see Second Helping, page 56). But after you talk with the restaurants’ owners, you realize that the combination isn’t that strange at all…
When Jesse Morreale told me he was taking over the old Le Delice space in Cherry Creek and turning it into a restaurant named Sketch, I thought it was a huge stretch. When this spot was Le Delice, it looked like a bad deli — and I couldn’t imagine how…
Lafayette has only one sushi bar. Fortunately, it’s a good one. Not just good, but creative. And not just creative, but intelligently so — which, when you’re dealing with a cuisine as rigidly structured yet infinitely adaptable as sushi, is even more necessary than good rice. Sushi Mara’s sushi bar…
I hated Black Pearl. I hated it before the place even opened. I hated the hype, the website, the menu. Even the building — the old Oodles space getting an expensive makeover to house the new restaurant — bothered me on some level I couldn’t quite grasp: the building just…
Just up the street from their Black Pearl restaurant (see review) Sean Huggard and Steve Whited will soon have a new neighbor. Lola is scheduled to depart its spot at 1469 South Pearl Street on February 28 (with a closing bash on February 27); by the end of March, it…
I grew up in the suburbs south of Denver, where the best restaurant was Mr. Steak — which I loved back then solely for its Texas toast. Today the Texas toast I like best is “Here’s to Texas, living single and drinking double — belly up!” And while I know…
Think Hollywood doesn’t have an agenda? Brokeback Mountain, a more socially acceptable version of Deliverance, is now sweeping awards ceremonies at which celebrities say it’s great that this story is being told, then go out and pick up twenty-something groupies so they can spend the night in front of a…
