Restaurants

As a countdown to the Best of Denver 2010, coming April 1, Cafe Society is serving up a hundred of our favorite dishes in Denver. Send your own nominations to cafe@westword.com…

Apparently, there really is such a thing as a free lunch. Today, from noon to 2 p.m. Croc’s, the Mexican bar and grill at 1630 Market Street, is offering just that — and the catch is that there really is no catch. Okay, so you’ve got to keep your spending…

My recent review of Red Trolley — the Highland neighborhood ice cream shop turned hot dog parlor, breakfast bar and coffee shop — was a strange one. The ice cream (the stuff the shop was founded on) is excellent almost across the board, and while I wasn’t crazy about all…

Ali Baba Grill,109 North Rubey Drive in Golden, already serves the best hummus and most addictive baklava in the area, and owner Fiyahd Aoutabachi has already shared the wealth beyond Golden, expanding his Lebanese and Mediterranean offerings out to Highlands Ranch with a second location at 8800 South Colorado Boulevard…

The first VFW post in the country was founded in Denver in 1899, in a building in the Golden Triangle. A century later, VFW Post #1 moved around the corner to 955 Bannock Street — and attempted to recall its glory days by calling the bar Stewart’s 1899 Saloon. It…

Just got off the horn with Jeffrey Musat, general manager of Encore (2550 East Colfax Avenue) and Black Pearl, the New American restaurant at 1529 South Pearl Street whose (now) former chef, Micah Watkins, wrapped up his last day on the line yesterday. Stepping into his shoes, Musat tells me,…

Partners Michael Brockhoff and Sam Roots have plans of longevity for the vacant quarters at 5280 West 25th Avenue, the cursed building that most recently held the extremely short-lived Johnie’s Bar-B-Que (and prior to that, Tiki Torch and Okoboji Inn). The two have completely gutted the space, which will soon…

As an ongoing public service, we would like to draw your attention to another FDA food recall. (As we reported here last week, the FDA recently recalled nearly 111,000 pounds of frozen beef steak fritter.) Why? Because any opportunity to explore the many euphemisms for spending hours in the bathroom…

Now that the venerable Wellshire Inn (3333 South Colorado Boulevard), long the go-to spot for special occasion dining on the Big Three restaurant holidays, has closed down its regular restaurant service and gone event-only, a reader wants suggestions for Christmas dinner/ I generally spend my Christmases at home, surrounded by…

It’s not often that I’ll spend $17 on a burger and fries — even if the burger is a double and the fries are the grabby shoestring variety that have been responsible for an undetermined number of my butt pounds. But while both the “classic” burger and judiciously salted skinny…

After 25 years in its current location at 300 Josephine Street, the Cherry Creek Egg Shell will be moving this month to the former home of Mel’s, at 235 Fillmore Street. “The new, improved Egg Shell will feature an outside patio with heat lamps and a full bar,” its website…

As a countdown to the Best of Denver 2010, coming April 1, Cafe Society is serving up a hundred of our favorite dishes in Denver. Send your own nominations to cafe@westword.com…

Heirloom Gardens, the Denver-based urban farm whose founder, Sundari Kraft, was profiled by Joel Warner this past summer, is heading into winter with a series of new cooking classes. The classes emphasize basic Indian dishes, seasonal soups and breads and other scratch-made courses. The idea of from-scratch cooking is a…

It’s funny to watch the evolution of a restaurant scene from the inside; to track, over time, how the pieces all come together. The first thing any burgeoning scene needs is a solid groundwork of excellent restaurants and pretty good restaurants. A few is not enough. There needs to be…

Stoners, beware! Mary Jane’s Relaxing Soda does not contain pot. But 28-year-old soda jerk Matt Moody, the drink’s inventor, insists that Mary Jane lives up to its name. “It’s not a high, but it would be close to draw a comparison and that was kind of its nickname,” he says…

​Anyone who buys a DINR deck is a winner: For $50, you get 52 cards, each offering a $10 discount at a local, independent restaurant. You can buy the decks at any Tattered Cover location or at www.eatdenver.com — but you can also win one right here. Every Friday for…

What you may have missed this week on Cafe Society while you were loudly proclaiming your allegiance to or against eating murdered animals — tasty, tasty murdered animals, particularly pig. Speaking of meat, murder and animals, Kate Kennedy issued the five most shocking food facts from Food, Inc., a controversial…

Has anyone else noticed that the number of products claiming to make your life better seems to have spiked in recent months? And it’s no longer just about selling the idea of making your life easier or more convenient: Now it’s all about products that claim to have something to…

We snagged a sample of one of these Mile High Magic Bars from Tony’s Market not too long ago, and it was so good that we vowed to go back for more. Little did we know what was waiting for us. A bite-size sample is a deceptive representation of something…

There’s a new menu in town, and while there’s 50 or so dishes on it that I can’t wait to eat, I started the countdown yesterday with the toasted housemade mozzarella sandwich served on a wooden board. To which restaurant do I owe a debt of gratitude for taking me…

Tonight, from 7 to 11 p.m. at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (1750 13th Street), hunters, gatherers, foodies, bookies and the rest of Boulder’s earth muffins will converge to support the Growe Foundation, a Boulder non-profit that advocates healthy food choices for kids and teens and implements garden-to-table programs…

As a countdown to the Best of Denver 2010, coming April 1, Cafe Society is serving up a hundred of our favorite dishes in Denver. Send your own nominations to cafe@westword.com…