Following service this past Saturday, Adega suddenly went dark. It came as a helluva shock. I mean, this was Adega. No place in the city had gotten better reviews locally or more love from the national press than this hip outpost at the corner of 17th and Wynkoop streets. Chef/partner…
There was this one time, at band camp…. John Burr has had a lot of big ideas. In 1993 he established Soundstructure Studios, providing spaces where acts can rehearse at full tilt without hearing the music of the band next door or subjecting their neighbors to songs that might make…
We here at the Institute of Drinking Studies got into journalism for the same reason as Woodward and Bernstein, George Will and Woody Paige: to get girls. We’re still big fans of hard-hitting reportage, and when we see something like the piece 20/20 did a while back — an entire…
Chicken-fried steak, chicken-fried steak, chicken-fried steak, gyros. All through lunch and well into the afternoon, this is what customers keep asking for at Diana’s Greek Market and Deli. Three out of five orders (and sometimes five out of every five) are for pounded, breaded and deep-fried beef, slathered in peppery…
I’m not going to order lobster anymore. Or perhaps I’ll just limit myself to lobster once a year. Twice, tops. One of the quirks of this very strange job is that every food-related luxury, every delicacy, every rare and wonderful thing is now available to me pretty much all the…
After my disastrous meals at Del Mar Crab House (see review), I started feeling nostalgic for the simple, rookie mistakes of Go Fish Grille, a seafood restaurant that I’d given a mixed review back in December. In comparison to the terrible, terrible things done to my dinner at Del Mar,…
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. The minute I set foot in the Donkey Den, I thought about the old joke where Saint Peter lets a man try both Heaven and Hell in order to decide where he’d prefer to spend eternity. He goes to Heaven first, and…
We here at the Institute of Drinking Studies have determined that good bars are more a state of mind than a physical place. Good bars share similar attributes: not just plentiful booze, but an atmosphere that suits your mood and purpose on a particular night. If you’re looking for serious…
I have only one problem with Japon: the wasabi. It tastes chalky, pasty and dry, and its texture affects me like nails on a chalkboard. And since I’ve been known to order tekka maki to go just as an excuse to eat wasabi off my finger, a sushi bar’s wasabi…
In this cash-and-carry world, nothing is inviolate and everything is for sale. Even memory. Especially memory. There’s good money to be made in strip-mining nostalgia, and for those who find a ripe vein — like the folks at Wynkoop Holdings, who moved their heavy gear into northwest Denver this year…
While Gaetano’s (see review) makes a Mafia Disneyland out of this town’s Italian heritage, Patsy’s, another northwest Denver institution a few blocks away, at 3651 Navajo Street, continues to make history — and great homemade pasta. Patsy’s doesn’t have any Mob stories (that I know of), but it did have…
Welcome to the newest dive in town. When we entered the bar at the new Downtown Aquarium (formerly the barless Colorado’s Ocean Journey), my friend oohed and aahed. “Gosh, it looks just like a grotto,” she said. Yes, but more like the Disneyland grotto on the Pirates of the Caribbean…
There are signs I may be getting old — although I like to attribute them to things like global warming and international terrorism. Gray hairs pop up in odd places; I spend as much time peeing as I do drinking beer; hangovers last at least 48 hours; and I haven’t…
While I’m not crazy about what the folks from the “Wynkoop Family of Restaurants” have done with Gaetano’s (see page 52), they’ve done just fine by the Cherry Cricket. Maybe that’s because rather than having a downright cinematic past like Gaetano’s — where dinner was served to gangsters and gun-runners,…
Walking into Sapa, the first thing you see are the green, green hills of home. Before that, it’s just a box — a nice box, fronted with a curving path leading to the door, lots of French windows and a nice patio wrapping around one corner, but a box, nonetheless…
Just in time for those record-setting temperatures, local pastry man John Hinman has opened the Gelato Spot at 1439 South Pearl Street, the former home of the Paris Flea Market. Hinman’s turned the odd little space into an Italian garden complete with patio seating and a shady gazebo. It’s the…
Dylan’s Ass Deluxe 30 South Broadway 303-722-1550 I don’t really understand why, but I just adore Deluxe. Does it have the best bar in town? Not even close — in fact, the bar lacks both depth and breadth. Best food? I’m a huge fan, but I’m no professional food critic…
You should never have to wait for some things: for sex in a pornographic film claiming to have a plot and “acting”; for beer in a bar; for red lights; for people to move out of the left lane on the highway; for delivered pizza; for the football season to…
10920 South Parker Road, Parker 720-851-8559 The two restaurants in the mini-empire of Yume Tran and Jeff Nghiem are almost exact opposites. Where Sapa is sprawling, Indochine is tiny. Sapa is meditative, Indochine is cozy. And while Sapa’s interior is cool and green, Indochine is all black lacquer and tapestries…
When I moved “out West,” I never thought I’d make it. Not really. Not way down deep, where a boy’s roots grow. When I first came here with thoughts of commitment — as opposed to the little visits I’d made in the past, tooling around Santa Fe and Boulder and…
When I get to thinking about diners, as I did in this week’s review of Sam’s #3 , I start making lists. Best of this, greatest that — it’s my Nick Hornby High Fidelity obsession shining through. And while his scruffy obsessives did their thing mostly with records and songs…
Six degrees of Kevin Bacon. Sometimes Denver seems so small that the concept of six degrees of separation feels vastly overstated. (Say, like when I discover that Patrick Osborn, this paper’s Drunk of the Week, was drinking in the very same place I was, as happened this past week.) When…
