On our first visit to The Oven, the server working the short bar near the front door leaned across the counter and casually asked Laura and me where we lived. It seemed a little creepy, and definitely forward. I mean, sure, we’re an attractive couple (Laura’s good-looking, anyway, and I…
Adega is many things: a hip, fine-dining mecca; a LoDo anchor that helps keep the neighborhood from degenerating into nothing but club nights and drunken Let-Out brawls; a showcase for some of the best, smartest New American cuisine on offer in the Mile High City (or anywhere else); and a…
For the past month or so, National Public Radio has been featuring a project called “This I Believe,” airing essays from listeners — famous people, regular joes, politicians, pipe-fitters and everyone in between — willing to rise to the challenge of condensing and codifying their personal beliefs. The final product…
Hanson’s has always been one of the easy ones — a restaurant I can’t help but like. It’s the sort of place you find one night when every other table in the neighborhood is booked, then return to whenever you have an open Friday night and no reservations. For families,…
I’d finished my last meal at Rioja — my last official meal, that is — and I couldn’t leave. My party and I were done, had been done for maybe twenty minutes already. We had to-go boxes sitting on our table, our jackets in our laps, credit cards and fistfuls…
I’ve never quite known what it is about Mel’s that makes me feel so at home. More than any other spot in the city, Mel’s just feels like a restaurant — the kind of place where you know you’re going to be well cared for and well fed, then leave…
Indo-Hawaiian fusion. A French restaurant-slash-sushi bar that opens at nine o’clock at night and cooks through to the morning. I’ve heard a lot of bad ideas in my time, have seen a lot of suicidal business plans and even been involved in a couple (an Irish farmhouse restaurant in central…
For two decades, Racines was the meeting spot of first and last resort in Denver. Neighbors and power brokers, college kids and yuppies — it didn’t matter who you were or where you were coming from (or even what time you wanted to meet), there was always room for you…
When Jeremiah Tower (Mr. California Cuisine, chef at Stars and Chez Panisse, and author of the foodie confessional California Dish) was a young man, he ate everywhere. He traveled around the world — usually in style — and consumed. James Villas, food editor at Town and Country for something like…
“Nothing could be finer than dinner at the diner.” So goes the jingle at the Rocky Mountain Diner where, for the last fifteen years, the staff and crew have been working hard to take customers back to the golden age of diners. And you know what? For the most part,…
It’s one o’clock in the morning and I’m still eating crab. I’ve been eating crab since my wife went to bed more than an hour ago, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the TV, watching cartoons with the drifty stare of an acid casualty, surrounded by the wreckage…
Make no mistake: Devil’s Food Bakery is a dangerous place, a place firmly dedicated to helping those with a weakness for the venal wrongs of gluttony to pave their way to hell with pastry. With real lemon curd, with Devonshire cream, fondant, butter cream and mousse. With profiteroles with handmade…
Two, please. For dinner. If it’s okay, we’ll just sit at the bar.” Twice before, I’ve eaten at Frasca, drunk at Frasca, allowed myself to be folded into the perfect ballet of service at Frasca, dining once alone, once with my wife. Neither time have I made it to a…
Even with a couple of years now behind it, Cuba Cuba still has the frantic buzz of a restaurant in its opening weeks. The crowds are big, the bar is packed, the vibe is Saturday-night-in-Havana electric. So how does Cuba Cuba do it? Simple: Owner Kristy Socarras-Bigelow has brought a…
Under my Grand Unified Theory of Steakhouses, the operation of any steakhouse can be diagrammed the way a particle physicist diagrams an atom. The customers come and go through the dining room like electrons jigging through the outer valences, entering with full wallets measured as an excess of positrons, then…
There’s one thing I never do at a restaurant — send back a plate — but I did at Sparrow. Another thing I never do is come straight to the point, and I’m breaking that rule now, too: This bird needs to have its wings clipped, immediately. Some history: The…
The kitchen at Luciano’s Pizza and Wings is a pizza-maker’s paradise. It’s huge, with acres of scrubbed tile and steely bright stainless, banks of pizza ovens warping the air around them with their heat, and half a dozen double-basket fryers lined up against the wall looking no more than five…
I love Deluxe in spite of myself. Despite reason, despite my better judgment, despite being committed body and soul to the war against California Cuisine — that limping, wrongheaded, disastrous blight on the soul of American cookery — and throwing myself into the breach every time a California-style restaurant pops…
It was the smell of the place that got me. That warm, salty, enveloping, fried-pork-and-soy-sauce smell that spun through the small, squared-off dining room like a fog, like smells do in the old Bugs Bunny cartoons — turning into fingers and tickling the duck or bear or whatever right under…
Swimclub 32 reminds me of this girl, Meghan, who was everything a (much) younger me could hope for in a girlfriend. She was gorgeous in an uncomplicated way, a bit ethnic, well-traveled, pretty in the face, with that face attached to a killer body and that body held up by…
Life so rarely lives up to your expectations. The Big Three — prom night, losing your virginity and your wedding day (which, in this ever-accelerating culture, can all happen in one 24-hour period if you really try hard) — have become so built up in the modern mind, so fraught…
I tacked the thayir sadam onto my order at the last second, no doubt hopelessly bungling the pronunciation as I tend to when I’m trying to be cool about something on a menu I’ve never seen before and don’t know whether I’m asking for rice pudding or the cook’s underpants…
