I miss Leon a little already. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad to be back from my East Coast adventure — but he was something special. To lift a line from the good doctor (Hunter Thompson, that is), Leon was “one of God’s own prototypes — a high-powered mutant of…
A new moon’s rising over Denver’s bar scene with the Luna Hotel, a super-chic boutique inn that just opened in the heart of LoDo. Saunter up to the stylish street-level bar for some out-of-this-world high-end cocktail creativity, including the signature Luna-Tic, which comprises a hush-hush mix of fresh juices and…
Bennigan’s. We have Bennigan’s to thank for Christian “Goose” Sorenson, executive chef at Solera. Coming to the Mile High City from his native Wyoming, where he’d been a frat-house cook in Laramie, Sorenson thought that working the line at Bennigan’s was the top restaurant job to which he could aspire…
While the food Solera serves all us regular folk on regular days is just fine (see review), the food coming out of the kitchen on Monday, April 28, was better. And not better by a little, but by leaps and bounds. Better by orders of magnitude. Better in a way…
For many people who work in Denver’s City & County Building, the basement cafeteria is a feared, last-resort stop. But Jacques Yang, the cafeteria’s new chef, is out to change that. He sees it as the perfect spot for a homestyle meal, one that can sustain a person through a…
With his natty British accent and talent for wooing the ladies, James Bond and his “shaken, not stirred” martinis are the epitome of cool. And if the debonair 007 happened to hit Denver during his his never-ending mission to quash evil, you’d probably find him sipping one of Indigo’s namesake…
When I am through with this industry — when I no longer feel (as I sometimes still do) the strong magnetic pull of kitchen life, the strange urge to put on my old whites and checks and stumble blearily into the 5 a.m. quiet of a house not yet awake;…
The duck feet did me in. I’ve eaten some pretty freaky stuff in my time and have had duck (and chicken) feet on more than a few occasions, but after spending several days gorging myself up, down and across Denver’s Far East intersection at Alameda Avenue and Federal Boulevard, the…
As friends and family can attest, I have many quirky habits, such as only eating candy that is yellow or red. (Forget green M&Ms and blue Skittles — bring on the Hot Tamales and lemon drops!) So naturally, when it comes to alcohol, my new favorite libation is the Strawberry…
It would be so easy to make fun of the Royal Hilltop. It’s just another theme restaurant, after all. A British pub theme restaurant. A non-smoking British pub theme restaurant, tucked away in the back of a strip-mall so far out in southeast Aurora that it might as well be…
We have had an interesting 24 hours at Luna.” That’s how the conversation started when Wendy Aiello, who’s doing PR for the new hotel, got me on the red phone here at Bite Me World HQ last Friday. First, the easy stuff. The space at 1612 Wazee Street that had…
Leave it to Uncle Sam to kill a good buzz. Heavenly Daze tapped the first kegs of its Hemp Lager in late March, and the beer quickly become the Denver brewpub’s second-best seller. Credit for that goes to the beer’s exceptional flavor (it’s made with hemp seeds), eye-catching tap handle…
As tulips pop up and ski resorts shut down, patio season hits Denver with almost as much force as last month’s Blizzard of 2003. With the sky staying light later, this is the perfect time of year to linger on the patio of the Park Tavern & Restaurant with a…
It was a cold night in Boulder when Laura and I walked out of Rhumba, the three-year-old Caribbean stepchild of the Jax/Lola/Zolo Grill family. The sky was silvery-gray, like old steel, with clouds hanging close over the Flatirons and a mean wind whipping scraps of newspaper, cigarette butts and crushed…
I don’t usually go to restaurant openings. There are several reasons for this, chief among them that the events themselves — filled with back-slapping and pasted-on smiles — generally bear no resemblance to how the places will look on their first day of actual service, and the food is nothing…
When the weekend rolls around, some people — we won’t call them boring, but they’re not exactly exciting — enjoy quietly reading the Sunday paper over a cup of steaming coffee. But real drinkers understand the pleasure that a brunch cocktail can bring, and there’s no better place to enjoy…
Midway through my first meal at Vega — somewhere between cleaning up every scrap of delicious oxtail tamal and toppling a pretty but ill-conceived Napoleon of salmon ceviche, thin-sliced cucumber and jicama, and moving it around the plate to make it look like I’d enjoyed it — I had one…
It was a little tough back then,” Sean Yontz, now of Vega (see review), says of his ten years with Kevin Taylor. “We all, all of us, worked 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. every day. I saw more of Kevin than my wife or my son. I spent my life…
For most twentysomethings, the name Adam Sandler calls to mind the hilariously bad mullets of the Wedding Singer or the classic hockey-golfing of Happy Gilmore. So for a Gen-X member, it’s hard to write an item about a certain cocktail without including a line from Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song”: So drink…
By my twelfth cup of coffee, the walls were starting to vibrate. My tongue tasted like a leather strap dipped in Pennzoil. Through the big front windows, I could see the lights of Romantix glowing through the fog hanging close over I-25, interrupted now and then by the dirty white…
Well, folks, it’s over. Last week you saw my rookie-year picks for the best of everything Denver’s restaurants have to offer, and I gotta tell ya: While I had a blast eating my way through the city (and beyond) over these past months, no Best of Denver issue ever comes…
Venice oozes romance, with its picturesque canals, meandering gondola rides and the chiming bells of St. Mark’s Square. But it’s also a very long, expensive transatlantic trip away. So instead of making the voyage, try sweeping your lover off his or her feet with the Peach Bellini at Maggiano’s Little…
