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…
Is this your first time here?” our server asked as he stood over our table — the last one available early on a Saturday night in the small dining room at Parallel Seventeen. And we nodded, meekly, acknowledging that yes, in fact, this was our first time. I hate doing…
There’s one thing that Mary Nguyen and her crew at Parallel Seventeen (see review) don’t do too well, and that’s make a decent cup of Vietnamese coffee. They have all the correct materials — Café du Monde coffee, sweetened condensed milk, a tin-drip filter, tall glasses filled with ice –…
Andouille gumbo and tortilla soup, fried mushrooms with truffled dipping sauce, enchiladas con queso and steak frites, crabcakes with chipotle coulis, pierogi, Asian pot stickers with ginger sauce, chicken piccata, cheeseburgers served with a bottle of Chimay Red, miso soup and Hawaiian tuna salad. And sushi (on request) from the…
Lafayette has only one sushi bar. Fortunately, it’s a good one. Not just good, but creative. And not just creative, but intelligently so — which, when you’re dealing with a cuisine as rigidly structured yet infinitely adaptable as sushi, is even more necessary than good rice. Sushi Mara’s sushi bar…
I hated Black Pearl. I hated it before the place even opened. I hated the hype, the website, the menu. Even the building — the old Oodles space getting an expensive makeover to house the new restaurant — bothered me on some level I couldn’t quite grasp: the building just…
All this talk about New American food got me thinking about Matt Selby and his crew at Vesta Dipping Grill. Since it opened almost nine years ago — if you can believe that — Vesta’s concept has been simple: Take something and dip it in something else. But the restaurant…
Drinking, smoking and screwing. That’s what hotel restaurants are really for — for doing the first two as prelude to the third. Waiting, too. Hotel restaurants are good for waiting. And for drinking and smoking while you wait — for a friend, a business associate, your mule or that bartender…
The Rialto Cafe is one of those rare exceptions to the rule (see page 53) that hotel restaurants are good for nothing but drinking, smoking and screwing. Sure, you can drink here, and smoke (if it’s to your taste), and even take a room next door at the Marriott Courtyard…
The wait at the Cherry Cricket was twenty minutes, shading into thirty, late that Saturday afternoon. “That’s a long time to wait for a burger,” Laura said. “How’s it look in there?” “Busy,” I told her. “It’s always busy.” And we sat down on the low wall in front of…
As the Chipotle IPO took off last week at a near-record pace, I visited another Colorado born-and-bred chain. Good Times — which was founded in 1987, six years before the first Chipotle went up — is a drive-thru burger joint in a world crowded with competition. To date, there are…
This place reminds me of someplace else,” my friend says, leaning his chair back against the wall and tracing a finger along one of the cracks in the broken plaster. That wall — multi-colored painted plaster over crumbling brick, the brick exposed where the plaster has fallen away — looks…
There was a time when Java Moon was hailed as the conquering hero of the Golden Triangle. It was a coffeehouse in a neighborhood that desperately needed one (you know, to balance out all the dive hotels and new lofts and pawnshops and galleries and whatnot), a coffeehouse that also…
Once upon a time, in a land not so very far away, there was a restaurant ruled by a king named Larry. Now, King Larry wasn’t an evil king. He wasn’t cruel or ruthless, as kings so often are. He didn’t abuse the peasantry of Hotcakesland, didn’t cut off peoples’…
