Strange Sauce: The week in national food news

We hope you’ve already eaten lunch, because you won’t be hungry after this: Seems that California’s Olivera Egg Farm is facing six violations for permit violations stemming from local complaints about their reported daily pumping of chicken excrement into a 16.5 acre pond near the facility. The waste of more…

Guess where I’m eating?

“The kitchen closes in five minutes,” warned the bartender, glancing anxiously at the clock. I quickly scanned the long menu before ordering a pair of fish tacos and the piquant shrimp cocktail paired with cold chips that had obviously been made long, long before they landed on my plate. But…

Real Mexican restaurant replacing Taco Bell

The traffic jam that resulted from Barack Obama’s visit to Denver yesterday proved a good time to check out developments along Santa Fe Boulevard — including the fact that the former Taco Bell at 14th Avenue is going to become a real Mexican restaurant. Although it looks like the “coming…

Dim sum survives Alameda Square renovation

For many, many months, things have looked dim for the two dim sum institutions at Alameda Square. Endless construction has made it difficult to even see that Super Star Asian and King’s Land Seafood Restaurant are still open, and if you could manage the turn off Alameda, you still needed…

Dave Query and Jason Sheehan, so Happy together

Monday was a happy day at Happy, the noodle house at 835 Walnut Street in Boulder that Dave Query’s Big Red F group opened a year ago as Happy Noodle House. Over the months, Query and company have made a number of adjustments at the restaurant — starting but not…

Crimson and Gold goes for a liquor license tomorrow

Aroma Cafe lasted less than a year at 2017 South University Boulevard — but the brothers who’ve taken over the space have a restaurant record that stretches back more than twenty years. Kevin and Craig Caldwell, the partners behind Brooklyn’s (both the original and the one by the Pepsi Center),…

Guess where I’m eating?

No, these aren’t strips of cactus from Rosa Linda’s vegetarian menu for Lent. They’re slices of green chile, flash-fried and served hot. Very, very hot. Can you guess where I’m eating?…

The five worst things found in a fast-food order

Ordering a fish sammich from a place that specializes in fresh-pressed, flame-broiled moo meat might not be the smartest choice, but you still shouldn’t need a painkiller to make your meal go down easy. But that’s what a customer discovered in his fish sandwich at a Burger King in Jacksonville,…

Panzano reveals its delicious new digs

The woman whooshed through the doors and out into the snow, the words tumbling out of her mouth faster than a Ferrari flying down a stretch of straight asphalt. She was from San Francisco, a tourist, the perfect display of a catwalk model — faultless makeup, Pilates calves and a…

Guess where I’m drinking?

Though I grew up south of Hampden (or, as we now refer to it, SoHam), I rarely go to SoHam other than for work or to see my mother at the Landmark. But this new restaurant may change that, because while I liked my pear mojito (pictured above), I’d also…

What’s Cooking: Rosé-poached pears with Pete

Pete Marczyk and Barbara Macfarlane do not leave their work behind when they leave Marczyk Fine Foods and head for their great old Denver house with the big, new kitchen. They often bring some of their market’s choicest ingredients home with them, and cook up a feast. The trick, says…

Apres Dessert Bar should help satisfy Denver’s cravings

The Highland area is about to get its own sweet spot: Apres Dessert Bar, an adjunct of Generous Servings, the café/cooking school located at 3801 West 32nd Avenue, is on target to open at 2 p.m. today. The (very) grand opening is slated for Saturday, February 20, when Apres Dessert…

Chef and Tell with Sergio Romero from Argyll Gastropub

“My goal,” says Sergio Romero, “is to be on a wait as often as possible, to have people love our food and eat it up, and to provide an experience that’s a little different from everything else in Denver.” And the exec chef of Argyll Gastropub fiercely believes that the…

Moe’s Original Bar B Que expands in Colorado

Even though its lineage is pure Southern barbecue, the origins of Moe’s Original Bar B Cue lie in the mountains of Colorado, where three friends from the University of Alabama who were fans of barbecue set up a carry-out shop at Lionshead, at the base of Vail Mountain, in 2002…