I have long held that Buffalo, New York — where I spent a few formative years of my cooking career — is a city unjustly labeled as a one-hit food town. Chicken wings, chicken wings, chicken wings, right? Nothing but deep-fried bird parts and snow. But this is wrong. Well,…
“Look, Rhumba was never a restaurant that I was fully, culinarily happy with.” That’s Dave Query telling me this. Dave Query, owner of the now defunct Rhumba (above), of the very much funct Lola and Jax and West End Tavern and Zolo Grill. Dave Query, who I took to task…
Here’s everything I ate at Red Tango in one sitting last week, an enthusiastic order so large that the dishes could not fit on the table at one time, forcing the kitchen to stagger courses, the floor manager to wonder aloud if six or seven more people would be joining…
While South and Central American restaurants like Red Tango (see review) are just starting to get serious traction here, Denver has long been blessed with many fantastic Indian restaurants — and those Indian restaurants have been blessed with a very supportive and reasonably educated clientele. I can’t even count how…
Ceviche…fresh chips and chipotle salsa…empanadas and arepas con something-or-other with goat cheese…fried plantains, thick-cut and buttery, crisp at the edges and gooey in the middle. Plantains are hard to do even moderately well, and these were the best fried plantains I’ve had in Denver. Since I eat fried plantains everywhere…
A brief list of stuff I don’t like: Poetry, with the exception of a few pieces by the likes of William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot and the shell-shocked blasphemy of Siegfried Sassoon. The musical stylings of the Grateful Dead or any of their legions of hippie imitators. Vegetarianism used…
I’ve always been a little creeped out in empty restaurants. There’s that uncomfortable sense of being watched — because there’s no one else in the dining room to attract any of the staff’s attention. I feel like I ought to whisper, so as not to distract the bored cooks and…
The lineup was always heavy on jam bands and, eventually, Adam, Jeremy and Matt realized one of their fundamental problems: the fans of that trippy, spacy, Grateful Dead style music were all showing up stoned and stoned hippies don’t drink. Or at least not enough. What stoned hippies do have…
Fruition, which opened last month in the former Somethin’ Else space on Sixth Avenue, opted out of Denver Restaurant Week because owners Paul Attardi and Alex Seidel wisely decided that the crushing DRW scrum might be tough on such a new place. Still, it’s doing a respectable business this week…
A special report by Amy Haimerl Ugly Americans. That’s the only way to describe the party that was celebrating a fiftieth birthday at Bistro Vendome last night. Of course, if we’d really been sitting on the patio of a Parisian bistro, we’d be saying “Ugly Americans” with an accent and…
This was not the kind of place I was likely to review. It was not the kind of place where I was ever likely to eat, much less steal a menu from. And yet here I was, puzzling over a menu that I lifted from Reiver’s a week or so…
People are always trying to bring a taste of somewhere else to whatever place they now call home. Immigrant cuisine, nativist cuisine, fusion cuisine, recipes passed down through generations — they’re all attempts at preserving across time and distance memories that are tied up in food. This is a noble…
I know, I know… this is twice in one week that I’m making fun of the New York Times (see “$115,000 Worth of Pointless Revenge” a few blogs below for my first shot at the Old Gray Lady), but I just couldn’t let this one go without a comment. In…
We’re midway through Denver Restaurant Week, and reports are coming in. Restaurant Kevin Taylor? Full to capacity. Barolo Grill? Booked solid. Luca d’Italia? Ditto. Owner Frank Bonanno (above) has said that he couldn’t find a table for even his mother if she were to wander into Mizuna one night this…
Denver Restaurant Week, Day 2. A report by Amy Haimerl: I have a new culinary love. Not fois grae, not sweetbreads, not chili-infused chocolate or any of the other delicacies I’ve had the good fortune of trying while dining with Jason Sheehan and my other foodie friends. No, this is…
Big-time international restaurant owner Jeffrey Chodorow — who owns a couple dozen name joints in New York, Vegas and elsewhere, but who you may remember as Rocco DiSpirito’s money guy from that unconscionably awful reality show The Restaurant — got his name in the papers again last week. This time,…
If you are where you eat, a lot of people are Benny’s, since the Denver institution is usually packed with fans, including Leslie Fry, who offers this: Benny’s is my all-time favorite Denver restaurant. I have been there with family, friends, boyfriends, blind dates, out-of-towners, foreigners, children, grandparents, co-workers and…
Here’s Kate’s take on the quintessential Denver restaurant: It would have to be My Brother’s Bar at 15th and Platte. My stepdad has been taking me there since I was six and we would play “I Spy” while waiting for our gooey JCBs; he’d sometimes let me have a sip…
Another smart response to “You Are Where You Eat,” this one from Steve Poquette of Parker, touting Mezcal: It should be a restaurant where you would proudly take friends and family from out of town (as opposed to business associates). It should be a restaurant that you feel embodies the…
What does Denver taste like? In Bite Me, I’ve been writing about my hunt for the quintessential Denver restaurant, and readers have served up plenty of food for thought. The following, from Scott, aka “The Mayor,” is particularly choice: There is nothing more Denver than the Executive Lunch at the…
Denver restaurateurs have never been very good at taking the long view, but they’re going to get there eventually. And when they do, the mistakes of the past will seem ridiculous in hindsight. Someday, prospective chefs will be taken on a tour of the failed restaurant playgrounds of Denver’s gullible…
On any day of the week, Sherpa’s is waiting like a familiar, comfortable neighborhood bar — one that just happens to be staffed by sherpas and run by a former Everest guide, and serves momo, thupka, dahl bhat and aloo paratha. It’s a foreign restaurant yet oddly comforting, confined as…
