From the outside, there’s not much to distinguish Namaste from the antique shops, sports-memorabilia stores and physical therapists’ offices that share this Lakewood strip mall. And inside, it’s just a room: tables, chairs, double-thick tablecloths, a grinning Buddha by the door, and waiters who seem surprisingly overdressed for the suburbs…
Thirty-two steps is all it takes to get from Vietnam to Italy, Saigon to Rome, New Orient to Viaggio Italian Trattoria. Thirty-two steps if you’ve got legs like mine, probably fewer if you’re in a hurry. And if it’s raining, you won’t even get wet. Strip-mall dining is one of…
Caribbean Cuisine is the quintessential strip-mall restaurant. It’s small, cheap, slightly alien, clean, well-run and — since its recent relocation from an invisible flank position at a big strip mall at 15445 East Iliff Avenue to a much more obvious (and larger) spot down the street at 17200 East Iliff…
No matter how good a server is, it’s tough to move the chef’s yak special. “I have two specials to tell you about tonight,” our waitress said, smiling, struggling to make eye contact as Barry — my go-to steakhouse guy — and I pored over the newsprint menu, looking for…
Every time I go to New York, I find myself liking it less and less. It’s not the people, the noise, the size — all that stuff used to bug me, but not so much anymore. Now, after six years and change spent west of the Mississippi, what bothers me…
The first time I went to Domo, I parked on the wrong side of the building, and I remember the annoying sound of my boots crunching on the gravel parking lot. Gravel anything — parking lots, roads, driveways — speaks to me of poverty, of not being able to afford…
Mori is an unusual place. For starters, it’s housed in an old VFW post that’s done double-duty as a Japanese restaurant since 1948. But the building dates further back than that, to the 1890s, when it was a brothel (and a fairly popular one, from what I understand). Today, depending…
At Emogene Patisserie et Cafe, it was the bakery cases that hooked me — a glossy, sluttish, sugar-coated come-on speaking straight to my baser instincts and addictive personality. Biscotti and miniature cheesecakes, chocolate muffins glazed in shiny black icing, airy cream puffs, dense meringues and thick slices of almond cake…
My sugar-fueled romps through Emogene Patisserie et Cafe (see review) put me in mind of another place in the neighborhood, a longtime bastion of the patissier’s and chocolatier’s art. Andre’s Confiserie Suisse crouches on a corner outside of the standard Creeker territory, so it has a bit of that “hidden…
The first time I went to Istanbul Grill was about a week after John Lehndorff reviewed the place for the Rocky Mountain News. There were big photocopies of his review on the counter, a whole stack, and the servers were handing them to anyone who asked and almost anyone who…
For twenty years, House of Kabob has been jammed into this strip mall on Colorado Boulevard, tangled up with other Middle Eastern markets and restaurants. That’s twenty years of Persian cuisine, twenty years of kabobs and lamb tongue and herbed yogurt and pita. And while the room — done in…
I have now been to 250 Josephine Street more times than I can count. The address was predestined to fascinate me. As Papillon, it was ground zero (one of the ground zeros, at least) for Denver at its height of pre-millennium excess: a jumping-and-jiving bastion of high-tone, big-money weirdness with…
Gene Tang has always had a beautiful place at 1515. The Victorian storefront wears its age well, handling crowds with a kind of shotgun feng shui — moving people back and forth through the long room, around the well-spaced tables and banquettes. The upstairs dining room is elegant, the dimly…
I like Greek food, but it’s never seemed like much of a cuisine to me. Greek food isn’t a cuisine because it has no rules. Ask a hundred Greeks how to make tzatziki — the ubiquitous yogurt and cucumber sauce — and even though tzatziki contains only about four ingredients,…
There are two ends to every spectrum, including the spectrum of Greek restaurants, although in this case, neither end is necessarily better than the other. On one, there’s Yanni’s (see review) and places like Yanni’s that attempt to present the best of Greek food culture in a comfortable environment; usually,…
“Yes, please.” “Yes, please.” “Yes, please.” For two solid hours at Super Star Asian, from one until three on a Sunday afternoon, the food never stopped coming. Brought on carts and plates, on unbreakable orange plastic cafeteria trays carried by smiling, indomitable women packing scissors and wearing rubber surgical gloves,…
The dim-sum experience varies from restaurant to restaurant, but I know I can usually count on the tea. Always green, almost always served in squat white pots with loose leaves steeping in hot water, inevitably accompanied by small, plain-white cups nicked and tinted the color of bone by long use…
Sean Yontz is a survivor, a success story in an industry that does not take kindly to failure. He worked in the shadow of Richard Sandoval at Tamayo when modern Mexican and Nuevo Latino were all the rage, then set off on his own and wound up taking some serious…
Five years ago, chef/owner Richard Sandoval’s Tamayo was on the cutting edge of the Nuevo Latino culinary movement, with critics in Denver and beyond raving about the pipian de puerco (tamarind-marinated pork tenderloin in a pumpkin-seed sauce), the ceviche (mahi mahi in a spicy tomato broth) and the crepas de…
Empty restaurants make me nervous, skittish, worried that everyone knows something I don’t. I always get the feeling that I missed the ambulances or the SWAT team by a few minutes — that some weird action cleared the place out just prior to my arrival. Empty movie theaters affect me…
Saturday nights at Duo are loud and boisterous, a cacophony of sensualism that washes like crazy rogue waves back and forth across the floor and bar. The front door never stops swinging, releasing a blast of piano jazz out into the evening every time it opens, and the bar is…
I was so close to walking out of the new Udi’s in Stapleton last week. Seriously, like thirty seconds away. I’d strolled into the casual, dimly lit bistro on a half-full night intending to order some takeout, had been handed a couple of fairly impressive menus at the counter, and…
