Oshima Ramen is like a clock set to run very, very slowly. But rather than having minute and second hands tick off its story, it has walls covered with graffiti. Over the years, people have added signatures, declarations of love, crudely reproduced anime characters, pictures of stick figures doing unmentionable…
“I’ve been thrown out of some of these bars. Chased out. Ignored. I don’t do karaoke, but I know a place where one might indulge their proclivities for singing half-drunk versions of Mandy or Forever in Blue Jeans until late in the night or early in the morning. I know…
On my first night at Fruition, I splashed an entire glass of water onto my date before I’d even said hello. I was late to table and had stuck out my hand to shake hers just as the steward (for lack of a better term) was trying to set a…
Fruition, reviewed in this week’s paper, was the restaurant I picked as the Best New Restaurant in this year’s Best of Denver edition. When I made that choice, I knew that Fruition wasn’t yet the best restaurant it could be, just the best there was at the time. And it’s…
“On my second night at Fruition, I lit my menu on fire. It wasn’t a big fire—just the sort one gets from an unfortunate proximity of a heavy-bond paper menu to a small candle on the dinner table. I put the fire out with the palm of my hand—thankful, in…
Never heard of a Violet Crumble? Don’t worry, because neither has most of the rest of the world outside of Australia, Hawaii and parts of the U.K. But personally, I’m somewhat obsessed with the stranger extremes of the confectionery arts and have spent many an evening wandering around the dry-stock…
Okay, so after the totally less-than-smashing success of my last attempt at getting all you grubniks more involved in the day-to-day business of this blog thingamajig (my ill-fated “What’s your favorite taste of Colorado” question, posed just ahead of this year’s Best of Denver issue in a thinly-veiled and desperate…
Laura was downstairs watching TV. “There’s that Indian place by the thing — that place with the fish,” she yelled. I was upstairs in front of the computer. “No.” “What about the Japanese restaurant?” “No.” “Seriously?” “Yeah, no. Not this time.” Quiet for a moment. “I don’t want Italian.” “Neither…
I sometimes wonder how long pleasant memories are good for. What’s the shelf life on one really good night? On one brief afternoon, three strong margaritas and a smile across a crowded table? In my sweeter moments, I want to think that memories last forever — that they never sour,…
It was the first seriously hot day of the year, maybe the second. Outside, the whole world smelled like cherry blossoms and living earth. I had the speakers on the computer turned down low and Tom Waits was singing You Can Never Hold Back Spring. It was that kind of…
I was having dinner with two friends — one who was attempting a wise quasi-diet by never cleaning a plate, the other who, like me, ate every scrap of everything she liked and burned the excess calories by viciously mocking anything she didn’t. Together, the three of us had worked…
There are many voices at the restaurant-reviewing table these days, not all of them professional. And Tula, perhaps more than any other place in town, has both profited and suffered from this new blog/message board/MySpace world, where everyone believes they get a say. Right now, the three top reviews for…
As promised in this week’s Bite Me, here’s the full text of Lili Bjorklund’s review of La Sandia from the student newspaper at Graland. Bear in mind that though she may come from a restaurant family (her parents are Adde Bjorklund and Halleh Hessami, who used to own Bistro Adde…
Not everyone is comforted by mashed potatoes and big bowls of pasta. Some people like pad thai. Some people like sushi. Some people (though not me) are comforted by piles of truffle-scented shoestring fries. This board is comfort food for the well-traveled, the very well-fed, the occasionally heartbroken. It’s a…
La Sandía is an absolutely beautiful restaurant. It hits that magic balance between light and dark, design and open space, and it seems to glow. In the middle of Stapleton, where everything is new and aloof and distant — all hard surfaces, right angles, mercilessly focus-grouped corporate logos, and clean…
Zengo has always been the weird cousin in the Richard Sandoval restaurant family, the guy with his shirt unbuttoned a little too low, his breath smelling of sweet wine and peppermints, the relative who — if you had to pick someone — would be the relative most likely to have…
Because Richard Sandoval has so many restaurants to keep track of, because he is one of those multi-unit chefs who seems driven to collect addresses the way some kids collect baseball cards, he has no day-to-day control over his properties. He sets a concept, writes a menu, staffs up with…
There are seventeen items on the menu at Montecito. Today there are seventeen items. That might change tomorrow, next week. And those seventeen items involve about ninety ingredients (a rough guess, because I’m making a lot of assumptions on prep and construction) that are stashed in the restaurant’s pantry, in…
My buddy Gracie and I were sitting at the end of the bar, drinking whiskey and talking about Kurt Vonnegut. Gracie is a beer snob, a Rust Belt kid like me in town for some computer conference; he’s also incredibly well-read and a Vonnegut fan. I’d made some passing mention…
Chef Adam Mali’s also a floorwalker, which bothered me a little. When I see a chef working the room, shaking hands, making nice with the customers, all I can think is that with him on the floor loving up the crowd, who’s in the galley watching my agnolotti or expo-ing…
Where I grew up, in upstate New York, there was no Mexican food. No tacos. No burritos. Just a Taco Bell down on Ridge Road (which did not count at all) and a few square feet of shelf space at Wegman’s dedicated to Latino foods: a couple bags of stale…
Rosie’s Diner 14061 East Iliff Avenue, Aurora 303-752-3663 www.rosies-diner.com I have never been a morning person. Most days, it would take a major crisis to get me out of bed before 10 a.m. And if I’ve had a late night, a rough night or been forced to self-medicate with black-cherry…
