A fish story: I never trusted supermarket seafood departments because too many questions went unanswered–like when the fish came in, how long it would stay at peak, or whether the snapper was from the Gulf or the Atlantic. But all of that changed when I met Carolyn Mason, seafood-department manager…
It may have been the Year of the Pig on the Chinese calendar, but in Denver, 1995 will go down as the Year of the Restaurant. Through official announcements, phone calls, word-of-mouth tips and simply stumbling into places, I counted no fewer than 67 new restaurants in the city alone…
We screeched to a halt in front of the Brown Palace Hotel in our luxury Toyota, two minutes late because the first movie we’d seen in a theater in sixteen months–yes, that’s how old our kid is; how’d you guess?–had 27 previews, 5 more than we’d counted on when we…
Attention, shoppers: It’s the eleventh hour, people. If you haven’t yet found that perfect gift for your foodie friends, you haven’t been looking. This year the sale of cookbooks and kitchen doodads has already passed all previous records (at least, that’s according to one Nebraska marketing company). If my credit-card…
Try to remember the last time the tuxedo-clad manager of a restaurant ran, actually ran, outside into the parking lot so that he could breathlessly call “Thanks again for coming, and drive safely” because he’d missed saying goodbye to you at the door. Can you recall arriving for dinner at…
Going to the dogs: Four out of five mutts surveyed in my neighborhood agree–the biscuits from Cosmo’s Dog Biscuit Bakery, at 1224 East Sixth Avenue, are better than your average puppy chow. The slightly insane-yet-ingenious business (named after a cat, by the way) is the brainchild of Laurin Wiltgen, who…
By now, even Americans raised on Spaghetti-Os know the infamous differences between Italy’s northern and southern cuisine–but that’s just the tip of the boot. In fact, anyone who’s been to fewer than half of the country’s twenty or so major regions can’t claim to be an expert on Italian food…
Dining, Italian-style: My discovery of Geppetto’s (see review this issue) helped fill the hollow left behind when a real class-act Italian restaurant, O Sole Mio, closed earlier this year. A group of Ethiopian restaurateurs has taken over the building at 5501 East Colfax Avenue. Now called Axum, the name of…
Heaven help us if someone does a study that shows eating dog food lowers cholesterol and helps us live healthier, longer lives. Within weeks Denver would be overrun by “poocherias,” and restaurants could get a leg up on the competition by offering the freshest, just-kibbled ingredients. All it took was…
Eat and be merry: Nothing works up an appetite quite like a day of Christmas shopping. Hey, the energy required to repeat “No, thanks, I’m just looking” a thousand times in three hours to salespeople haunted by the bonus checks of Christmas Past was enough to make me start munching…
Over the past year the neighborhood around Coors Field has exploded with new eateries. Now, with the baseball fans gone and a long, cold winter ahead, some of those restaurants are going to make lunchmeat of the competition. But until they do, people who work in LoDo have a smorgasboard…
An ugly day in the neighborhood: The employees at Chef Zorba’s Cuisine, at 2630 East 12th Avenue on Capitol Hill, say a year-old controversy is taking a toll on the restaurant–and that they’re paying the price. On two separate occasions in 1994, Zorba’s owner, Alex Pappas, applied for and was…
Even a restaurant that set up shop in the Sistine Chapel and employed Capuchin monks who devoted their lives to serving others would eventually have to rely on the quality of its food to keep it in business. You can only drink in beautiful scenery and subsist on sheer subservience…
On the market: After nearly nine years of purveying fresh, organic produce and superior gourmet deli items, Michael and Clare Nolting are washing their hands of Greens, at 1312 East Sixth Avenue–their grocery, folks, not their excellent restaurant at 1469 South Pearl Street. The market’s salad days have long since…
Few caterpillars crawl as much as Radek Cerny has on his way to the butterfly stage. After the Communist government took away his family’s farm in Czechoslovakia, Cerny (pronounced “chair-nee”) had to fight hard for his culinary training in Prague. He ultimately escaped the country by slipping away from a…
Brunch hunch: A co-worker recently asked me to recommend a good place to take his mother, who was celebrating a birthday, for Sunday brunch. The group would include children, so it was important that the place be kid-friendly and reasonably priced. After recalling (and not fondly, either) many of the…
You can’t make all the people happy all of the time–especially if you’re a restaurant. A few years ago, trendy dining establishments tried to offer something for everyone: a few beef and chicken dishes, some fish for the pretend vegetarians, a selection of pastas and maybe some pseudo-ethnic dishes. But…
Subsisting: Finally, downtown Denver has a sub shop worth raving about–Mangia Subs, which opened a few weeks ago at 1730 Glenarm Place. In addition to the fact that owner Dave Cavalaro uses only nitrate-free meats, all the sandwich ingredients are top-drawer in the flavor department. I had a sausage sub…
Judged by its cover, the Fourth Story is looking good. This restaurant has what might be my favorite dining room in Denver. There’s an endless supply of books to pull down and peruse, and in this library, eating and drinking are not only allowed, they’re very much encouraged. All the…
California, here I come: After Barbara Lane, Westword’s first food writer and then-restaurant critic at its partner paper in San Francisco, the SF Weekly, visited Denver this past summer, she returned home to tell her readers that it takes a trip to another city (and a truly bad meal at…
It started with wine dinners at a handful of restaurants, monthly culinary happenings where cellared vino was uncorked and paired with complementary dishes. Next thing you knew, everyone but McDonald’s was doing wine dinners. Then came the boutique wine sellers, a handful of small, focused stores that catered to the…
Soon after trying Denver’s version of Napa (see Cafe, previous page), I visited the original for the first time. The weather was beautiful, but my California dreams of a leisurely vacation strolling through vineyards sipping vintage wines went down the crusher with the grapes. Since it was the busy season,…
