Food & Drink

Phil’s Place, a watering hole at 3463 Larimer Street, was the unlikely setting Sunday for a book-signing event by Dick Kreck, the former Denver Post scribe who’s the author of Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family. After all, for close to sixty years the Smaldones ran Gaetano’s,…

T-WA Inn, which opened on January 1, 1984 as Denver’s first Vietnamese joint, is celebrating 25 years at 555 South Federal Boulevard by offering a four-course dinner for $25 per couple. The deal, which continues through Sunday, June 28, includes your choice of soup (chicken Thai, hot and sour or…

Great Divide Brewing Company and City, O’ City, the bohemian vegetarian restaurant, bar and bakery at 206 East 13th Avenue, are hosting Boozenfüd (useless trivia: “boozenfüd” has exactly six Google entries, all of which are related to this dinner), a multi-course meal featuring four Great Divide brews paired with four…

After twelve years, Dixons Downtown Grill, at 1610 16th Street, is finally introducing a happy hour. And it’s really making up for lost time. The happy hour, which starts today, will run from 3 to 6 p.m. seven days a week, and feature cocktail specials ($3 Ketel One John Daly…

By the time the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen ended yesterday afternoon, I’d already seen a whole posse of amateurs puke; another man suffer a seizure just after chef Michael Symor ended a fantastic cooking demo devoted to pork belly; Top Chef winner Hosea Rosenberg locking arms with knifed…

Since I found myself in Littleton Friday night, I decided to substitute a trip to the Southwest Plaza’s farmers’ market, at Wadsworth and Bowles, for my regular Saturday morning visit to the Boulder Farmer’s Market. Big mistake.If you bill yourself as a farmers’ market, more than 25 percent of the…

Biker Jim Pittenger, whose Biker Jim’s Gourmet Dogs won our Best Cart on the 16th Street Mall in the Best of Denver 2009, now has a second location — off the mall.Three days a week, he (or one of his minions) will now be on the plaza at 17th and…

Oops. Just posted this week’s Ask the Critic question, and already we have an answer (and a correction). Turns out that Bistro Vendome does, in fact, have exactly what Jim is looking for.  Right there on the brunch menu, between the soup a l’oignon and the croissants, there’s a breakfast…

The last couple of weeks, our regular Ask the Critic time-waster has been concerned with moms and dads and holidays and other assorted domestic questions.  This week, we’re getting back to the core mission of our Monday-morning discussion with an actual question by a reader. Jim writes: I spent 9…

For the past five years, the Third Way Center benefited from a major wine-tasting/fundraiser wine-tasting fundraiser in LoDo. But the event, scheduled for tonight, “was cancelled rather abruptly a week ago by the host/venue, leaving Third Way Center high and dry,” according to Tami Lack, Third Way’s director of administration…

Mighty Bites HoneyCrunch Kashi Rating: One-and-a-half spoons out of four Cereal description: Lots of different grains in this stuff: oat, wheat, corn, rice, rye, barley — pretty much everything included in the grain page on Wikipedia other than millet (which is just as well, since I don’t know what the…

At 6:30 p.m. tonight, Table 6, 609 Corona Street, welcomes Slovenian winemaker Aleks Simcic and master sommelier Laura Williamson for a four-course dinner paired with the rare wines of Edi Sincic from Goriska Brda. Not impressed? Ray Isle, Food & Wine magazine’s wine editor, called these wines the “darlings of…

The Denver Zoo hosted its twentieth annual Do at the Zoo last night, and Denver’s party animals were out in force, sampling tidbits from dozens of restaurants and getting wild! See for yourself on our slideshow…

You didn’t miss all this good stuff, did you?  No problem, we’ve rounded up the best of the Cafe Society week for you below.Hot dog eating champs battled it out in a Denver qualifier for the big 4th of July competition in Coney Island.  Jason Sheehan sought your opinion on…

This week, I talked about Dougherty’s — a fantastic neighborhood bar that’s perfect for getting into all kinds of lightweight trouble, which just happens to have a very decent restaurant attached and a chef in the back who knows his way around the cuisine of the whiskey-sodden Micks.I followed that…

Yesterday, I got a very nice note from loyal reader Jason Marsell, hipping me to some killer street food in one of the most unlikely of places.Pad Thai on the 16th Street Mall.I was both intrigued and highly skeptical — my first blush of overwhelming enthusiasm giving way to some…

Could be a fight to the finish to see which storefront pizza joint opens first: Denver Pizza Company — whose owner, Mark Huebner, can focus on finishing his Golden Triangle spot now that he’s been booted off The Bachelorette — or Mary Jane’s Pizza. Mary Jane’s is located at 2013…

See more photos at westword.com/slideshow.As expected, the first night of the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen was a culinary red carpet of celebrity chefs and the giggling, starstruck fans who couldn’t stop pawing them. And then there were the blowout parties, like the charity event hosted by Mario Batali,…

We’ve spent a lot more time looking at the home of the new Denver Pizza Company — a few blocks away from the Westword office at 309 West 11th Avenue — than we have watching The Bachelorette, even though one of the swains vying for Jillian Harris was from Denver:…

Head to the hills of Frisco this weekend for the mountain town’s annual two-day Barbecue Challenge, a heated event that brings together competitive grillers from across the country. The riotous pig races are always a big draw, as is the pancake breakfast, live music and parade of barbecue grills, barrels…