Change is good. Very good, judging from a few recent meals at Solera. That’s the restaurant now occupying the East Colfax Avenue space that housed the Firefly Cafe for many years and in 1999 became the much more sophisticated Ambrosia Bistro. Mark Gordon, Ambrosia’s chef and co-owner, honed his grill…
After four meals at Decisions, I still can’t decide if this restaurant knows what it’s doing. The basics are there: Decisions serves breakfast, lunch and dinner in an area that’s lacking in good options for all three meals, it’s in a good location for downtown business crowds, and it offers…
Exceptional eateries spring up in the most unlikely places. Most visitors to Golden stick to the main drag of Washington Street, the Boettcher Mansion and anything within walking distance of the Coors Brewery. But it’s time for the town to mark more landmarks in its tourist guide, including the small…
Concentrating on Mateo’s classic food while sitting in Mateo’s trendy dining room was like trying to read The Grapes of Wrath in a strip club: Both the food and the setting were worthy of attention, but the combination drove me to distraction. You can’t blame chef Seamus Feeley for trying…
Denver diners have been waiting for the right twist on Mexican food, and Lime just might be it. Over the last year, a number of eateries have opened that feature either upscale Latin-derived cuisines (Cuban, Peruvian) or upscale Mexican fare, with prices to match (ten bucks for tacos). Although such…
Recently I’ve had to face the fact that I’m never going to climb Everest. First, there’s the problem of my day job, which doesn’t exactly allow for the time commitment — or, for that matter, the tens of thousands of dollars needed to have a guide carry me up there…
Lentils may be good for you, but they taste like the dried paste from a kindergartner’s Popsicle-stick project. They sort of taste like the Popsicle sticks, too. Since lentils are a staple of Indian food, resourceful Indian cooks long ago figured out how to spice up the legumes. Enough cloves,…
Lynn Smith’s to-do list is a little longer than most. She’s a mom; she runs a restaurant; she also goes to graduate school. “Some days I wonder, ‘What was I thinking?'” Smith says. “But most days I love it. I’m always being challenged, and so far, everything’s working out.” It…
Between its answering-machine message, its local advertising and the way staff members drop the news every chance they get, Sacre Bleu wants to make it clear that the place is under new ownership and new management. And — mon Dieu! — that seems to have made all the difference. When…
The word chautauqua is Iroquois for either “two moccasins tied together” or “jumping fish,” depending on which historical linguist you believe — and its first use by non-Native Americans was to name a lake in western New York. Later the word referred to an institute for Sunday-school teachers, one that…
When I was a growing up in a very white-bread section of Pittsburgh, our choices for an ethnic dining experience consisted of a pizzeria, a Chinese restaurant that nobody went to because, well, who knew what they were doing in that kitchen, and Isley’s, which poured a red sauce that…
Kevin Taylor has a challenge on his hands: filling one of the most gorgeous, but difficult, restaurant spaces in town. When Taylor first took on the elegant old 17th Street bank lobby back in 1997, he turned it into Brasserie Z, an upscale French bistro that served Mediterranean-inspired New American…
Thank heavens we’ve almost shed the Year of the Snake. As in most cultures, Chinese lore rarely regards snakes as a good sign. In China, the snake represents cunning and evil, which pretty much sums up our 2001 (or the Chinese year 4698). On February 12, the year 4699 begins,…
What do a salesman from Texas, John Elway and a pot of New Mexican green chile have in common? They were all instrumental in convincing Jack Martinez to turn a little chile shop on Federal Boulevard into his own New Mexican eatery, Jack-n-Grill. “I was supplementing my income by selling…
Eat a bloody steak or couple with a cowboy: Those are the two things that suddenly seem eminently appealing every January when the National Western Stock Show rides into town. I’m otherwise involved in a relationship, though, so a bloody steak it was, and I started looking around for where…
Thai cooking celebrates freshness, flavors, textures and colors, and nowhere is this more evident than in the street food of Thailand. Eating on the street is so popular in that country — for natives and tourists alike — that entire guidebooks are devoted to the possibilities (Thai Hawker Food, It…
What’s in a name? Plenty, as the owners of the Havana Diner quickly discovered. “People who came here regularly were getting to know us well enough that they’d just tell other people, ‘Hey, we’re going over to Kathy and Bill’s,'” says Kathy Frangiskakis. “The problem was, we weren’t listed as…
The term “tirami su” is Italian for “pick-me-up,” an apt label for a confection filled with enough sugar, chocolate, espresso and liqueur to elevate the blood sugar of a dead person. A relatively recent creation, tiramisu (sometimes seen as one word, sometimes as two, and sometimes with an accent over…
When Napoleon said, “An army marches on its stomach,” he was referring to the soldiers who did the actual fighting — not the sympathetic sublimations of folks sitting on their sofas watching it all unfold via videotape. This nation is at war, all right, and if we keep eating the…
When a fine-dining establishment is 34 years old, sits in a 128-year-old historic landmark and has an owner who refers to himself as “the third,” you might imagine that a meal within its stodgy confines would prove palate-numbingly boring. Prime rib and Yorkshire pudding. Beef Wellington and duck a l’orange…
In the Bonnie Brae neighborhood, the more some things change, the more others stay the same. When Carl and Sue Dire opened the Bonnie Brae Tavern in 1934, South University Boulevard was a dirt road running through the sticks. That year, tens of thousands of people left the Dust Bowl…
The Leonid meteor shower shows itself every year in mid-November, and while the display is spectacular only every 33 years or so, even on an off night, the Leonids provide an eye-opening experience. They give us a glimmer of what’s beyond our limited understanding, some insight into life’s eternal glories…
