Dealing with the press isn’t part of the curriculum at the Culinary Institute of America, where leeks take precedence over leaks. So CIA grad Daniel Block had to learn his lesson the hard way. Block, now the executive chef for The Swan at the Inverness Hotel, was nineteen when he…
The raspberry sauce was the icing on the rice cake. For two decades, Mori Japanese Restaurant held down the fort on the very edge of the urban frontier, in an actual veterans’ outpost at 20th and Market streets. And until just a few months ago, to step into Nisei Post…
The first time I reviewed Brook’s Steak House (“Prime and Punishment,” September 9, 1996), I was with Barry Fey, who spent much of the meal cursing, mainly because the meal was not very good — with one notable exception: his porterhouse, which was so heavenly, so richly flavored and textured,…
It was the third time the woman had asked the server to give her a few more minutes. “I just can’t decide,” said the thirty-something gal, who was obviously getting no help from her equally perplexed date. “Could you just come back one more time?” The server graciously agreed, returning…
Sometimes it pays to be a regular guy. At Señor Pepe’s, the regulars are treated like royalty. As for the rest of the riffraff, let them eat cake. If they can ever catch a server’s attention, that is. Because unless you’re known by one of the staffers at this Denver…
Welcome to the Hotel California, restaurant-style: You can order anytime you like, but you can never eat. It wasn’t always this way at Denver’s former Hotel Paris, brought back from the dead a decade ago as the trendsetting La Coupole. But that restaurant closed mysteriously one day this past spring,…
Service with a smile. Not harried help with a grimace. Not a smile paired with the total cluelessness that you might actually need a fork to get that food into your mouth and that you might want your meal before it is the temperature of that guy’s body they found…
Since it opened several years ago, eating at Japon has been a little like fishing in the Pacific — although we often reeled in keepers, the going could get rough. On my first visit to this whimsically decorated Japanese restaurant, the cooked items were far superior to the raw (“A…
Meet the king of the middle road. Plunked down next to I-25 in an asphalt jungle of hotels and motels that have no restaurants, much less room service, Vasil’s EuroGrille enjoys a captive audience. Too bad those captives won’t find anything particularly enjoyable at Vasil’s. If this is a EuroGrille,…
The cute college-age guy is wearing nothing but a pair of denim shorts, and he’s obviously freezing his butt off. He sticks his hand into the waterfall, shivers, then turns to his diving partner, another cute college-age guy, and asks, “Man, can’t they turn the heat up?” as he runs…
Ready or not, here they come. When husband-and-wife team Tim Elenteny and Janice Henning decided to open a restaurant in the space formerly occupied by Diced Onions, the San Francisco transplants didn’t know a lot about Denver’s dining scene. “We thought we’d come in and get all set up, have…
Remember tapas? The Spanish tradition, which calls for serving up little tidbits of food meant to be snacked on with drinks, enjoyed another wave of popularity in Denver during the last year or two, then receded back into restaurant-trend oblivion. But one survivor remains: Ilios. Owned by Dee Diamond, who’s…
After over twenty years in business, the Zang Brewing Co. just won the location, location, location lottery. The original Zang Brewing Co. belonged to Bavarian immigrant and would-be miner Philip Zang, who bought the failing Rocky Mountain Brewery after he failed to strike it rich in the gold fields. He…
There aren’t very many chefs who can take the night off and leave their restaurant in the hands of their employees — at least, not without worrying that the next morning, the kitchen will look like a food warehouse exploded and the answering machine will be filled with forty messages…
Like father, like sons. Although the Armatas boys tried career paths other than the one pursued by their dad and his dad, they knew it was futile. “We figured that sooner or later, we’d be in the restaurant business,” says Alex Armatas, the middle brother. “We all tried to do…
Turns out you can teach an old dog new tricks. But first you need to tame the beast with a new chef, a new location and even a new, improved name, like that of Basil Ristorante, now occupying the former home of the Parlour, at 846 Broadway. I first visited…
If I’d had a video camera, I could have filmed The Kitchen Bitch Project, and believe me, it would have been much scarier than that other movie. But there’s no footage to document the horror of my three meals at Lamonica’s Steak and Chop House. No, just several friends who…
The mystery of Asian food is that it looks so easy to make. What’s so tough about throwing cut-up vegetables, bits of meat and a few spices into a big, overheated vessel and cooking everything until it’s edible? But appearances can be deceiving, as recent meals at two newer Asian…
It was broke, so they fixed it. If more restaurants were willing to change what doesn’t work, fewer would find themselves throwing in the kitchen towel. Case in point: Busara, the upscale Thai eatery at 1435 Market Street, has gone from barely making it to standing room only in the…
It was like an episode of This Old House: The Restaurant Version. When brothers Bill and Steve Rohs decided to open an eatery in a building across from Benedict Fountain Park on 20th Avenue, they first had to undo the damage done by the space’s previous restaurant tenant. “We knew…
Bad guys can be rehabilitated. When I first visited Alcatraz Brewing Co. in what was then known as the Park Meadows “retail resort” (“Behind Bars,” September 9, 1997), the food and service screwups were almost criminal. The prison-themed eatery, which is owned by the same company as the California Cafe…
The waiter stood there expectantly, his pen hovering over the order pad as he waited for the woman to tell him what she wanted for dinner. All of a sudden, a noise that sounded like victory music from a kids’ video game rang through the dining room, and the woman…
