Perfect Landing

I ran out of books on Father’s Day. I read fast, so this happens a lot, but like a drunk who always keeps a fresh bottle on hand for when his current one runs low, I like to have another book in the pipeline before I hit the last chapter…

Bite Me

I’ve put some strange things in my mouth — rats and worms and hooves and eyeballs — but there’s other stuff, purely pedestrian by comparison, that I won’t touch. Not even for money. Brussels sprouts, for example. Blech. Brussels sprouts are nothing but foul little cabbages with none of a…

Drink of the Week

On a recent girls’ night out, we snagged a table on Tommy Tsunami’s street-side patio, the perfect spot for an evening of sushi, people-watching and gossiping up a storm. Tsunamis — those giant Japanese tidal waves — have long been feared by seaside villagers and fantasized about by extreme surfers,…

This Spud’s for You

There are two items on the menu at Zaidy’s Deli: potatoes and everything else. Zaidy’s does great things with potatoes — truly phenomenal things for which it deserves a medal. Now if only those bastards at the American Farm Council’s tuber division would get off their asses and start planning…

Bite Me

We’re coming down to the wire. Before old-guard members of the Denver City Council surrender those big, comfy chairs to ten incoming freshmen, they’ll almost certainly vote on a proposed smoking ban for this city. Mayor Wellington Webb has made such a ban his top priority before he leaves office…

Consumed

A camping trip without fire is as pointless as non-alcohol beer and Boca burgers. Howard Oliver learned that hard lesson back in 1996, when a fire ban at a Colorado campground extinguished his family’s plans for campfire cooking. To ensure that no one else finds such a damper put on…

Drink of the Week

My idea of a night out at a baseball game is arriving at the bottom of the third inning and leaving at the top of the seventh. During those three-plus innings, chances are extremely good that I won’t ever know who’s at bat or what the score is; I’ll probably…

Ex Marks the Spot

It had been two years and three days since I last put on my whites and checks, and the ex-chef was convinced I was getting soft. I used to love my chef’s clothes: the clean white jacket — heavy cotton, starched stiff as a board — and loose-fitting check pants…

Bite Me

Yup, it’s that time again: The mailbags here at Bite Me HQ runneth over with letters, faxes, e-mails and the assorted detritus of this strange biz, so before they begin runneth-ing over into the next cubicle, I figured I’d deal with a few of them. First up, I’ve been getting…

Drink of the Week

I’ve always been curious about the Chinook Tavern, which is named for the gentle westerly winds that warm the Front Range each winter. So after an early evening of shopping in Cherry Creek, we popped in for a much-needed cocktail. Although Chinook is known for its German food — as…

You’re Darn Teuton

The dining room at Cafe Berlin was empty when Laura and I walked past. Next door, Dario’s had a few tables, and the smell of roasting meat, garlic and red sauce licking out onto the street would ensure that it soon had a few more. A couple of early drinkers…

Bite Me

You know things are getting ugly when Charo, of all people, is threatening to drag your ass into court. The cuchi-cuchi girl is shaking all kinds of things at Bart DeLorenzo and his Spanish-themed nightclub/steakhouse empire, Sevilla Entertainment, which had booked her show into Sevilla Las Vegas, the second in…

Consumed

Sure, Canada has at least one “mad” cow. But what American beef eaters don’t know is that the United States has millions of cows that, if not yet mad, are certainly uncomfortable. “They appear to be happy walking up to a full bunk of grain every morning,” Dale Lasater says,…

Drink of the Week

People have searched for centuries for the fountain of youth — but now all you need to keep that forehead as smooth as a baby’s behind is a shot of botulinum toxin, better known as Botox. And if you’re looking to hang with the hippest of the high-end, wrinkle-free hip,…

Bite Me

I tried to stay out of this fight. Really, I did. Way back in January, I made a promise to keep my nose out of politics and stick to food. I managed to give the whole Freedom fries/Freedom toast controversy a pass, because, frankly, it seemed too insipid to even…

Drink of the Week

Tom Collins High Street Speakeasy 3862 High Street 303-298-9333 I’ve always wished I could have partied through the Roaring ’20s — with their bathtubs full of gin, fabulous fashions and gangster-owned, back-alley bars. But now, at the High Street Speakeasy, it’s easy to go back in time and drink to…

Azure Like It

It was the end of my third meal at Indigo. The dinner plates had been cleared, the white tablecloth combed down. While Julie — my cover for this night’s clandestine activities — and I were picking at the rag ends of the dessert we’d shared, I waited for the hammer…

Life Before Frisee

Comfort food is dead. I keep hoping that if I say that enough, it will actually come true. Comfort food should be pronounced dead, because it’s gone as far as it can go in the white-tablecloth-and-heavy-silver restaurant cosmos. It’s a horse that has been ridden hard, whipped to within an…

Bite Me

Five minutes, okay?” “Five minutes. I’ll just run in and run out.” “Okay.” I fiddled with the radio, trying to get something good on the vintage-’70s push-button console. Matt got out of the car, two plastic bags full of Styrofoam takeout boxes in his hands, then leaned back toward the…

Consumed

Carol Fenster was raised on wheat produced on her family’s Nebraska farm by her father, an internationally acclaimed wheat grower. For forty years, she, like most Americans, ate a diet heavy in wheat flour. But she also endured four decades of recurring sinus infections, colds and poor health, even though…

Drink of the Week

As Denver’s wet and wild spring continues and the South Platte River roars like the mighty, muddy Mississippi, why not head south to New Orleans — or maybe just Greenwood Village — and dive into a Streetcar Named Desire, the signature drink at Bourbon Street Pizzabar & Grill. Named for…

Slice of Life

When I’m in need of an energizing, centering, head-clearing taste of the Big Apple, I usually go to New York Pizzeria, a little hole-in-the-wall strip-mall joint in Glendale. But last month, I realized it had been a long time since I’d made a trip back to the state that spawned…