We’re just two steps inside the front door, and immediately the host and a couple of employees lounging around the foyer start working it hard, trying to turn “Hi, there. How many this evening? Smoking or non?” into an Abbott and Costello routine. Then our seater takes over, and he’s…
In the early to mid-’90s, Carmine’s on Penn was the first restaurant to bring an updated take on family-style dining to Denver (“Love, Italian Style,” August 17, 1994). The concept was all about big flavors and big portions and, in Carmine’s case, some big egos. But now, six years later,…
As anyone who’s seen Demolition Man knows, the only eatery with the ability to survive the Apocalypse — a kind of culinary cockroach, you might say — is Taco Bell. And the way things are headed right now, it’s quite possible that, even though we’ve survived Y2K (so far), at…
The Denver dining scene in 1999 continued to be as confused as a salmon filet swimming in blueberry sauce. Exactly what are we going for here — and where do we think we’re going? Ingredients from around the world are arriving faster than chefs can look them up in a…
It’s been a long year for Kevin Taylor — and he has only himself to blame. The chef who earned his national reputation with just one Denver restaurant is now juggling five establishments in the metro area. And while Dandelion in Boulder and Palettes at the Denver Art Museum are…
Romantic lighting, live jazz, cozy seats, adult food: This is my kind of club Med, an eatertainment concept I can live with…maybe even grow to love. The four-month-old Sambuca Jazz Café features Mediterranean-themed fare and jazz, jazz, jazz. This is the fifth such supper club, all named for the Italian…
For good Indian food, the nose knows. The right spices are critical to Indian cuisine; in fact, the meats, vegetables and breads coming out of the kitchen primarily serve as delivery vehicles for all those heady flavors and aromas. So if you don’t get a whiff of something wonderful the…
Business was going swimmingly at Starfish in the months after busy restaurateurs Mel and Jane Master opened their second Cherry Creek place (Mel’s was the first) back in 1996 (“Fishing for Compliments,” May 30, 1996). But in the wake of Starfish’s sale to John Richard two years ago, rumors kept…
When autumn is unseasonably warm, ski areas can at least make enough snow to satisfy hardcore skiers, and retailers counting on Christmas sales know that the holiday spirit has to hit sooner or later. But how do you get people to eat a steaming-hot bowl of chicken noodle soup in…
Dealing with the press isn’t part of the curriculum at the Culinary Institute of America, where leeks take precedence over leaks. So CIA grad Daniel Block had to learn his lesson the hard way. Block, now the executive chef for The Swan at the Inverness Hotel, was nineteen when he…
The raspberry sauce was the icing on the rice cake. For two decades, Mori Japanese Restaurant held down the fort on the very edge of the urban frontier, in an actual veterans’ outpost at 20th and Market streets. And until just a few months ago, to step into Nisei Post…
The first time I reviewed Brook’s Steak House (“Prime and Punishment,” September 9, 1996), I was with Barry Fey, who spent much of the meal cursing, mainly because the meal was not very good — with one notable exception: his porterhouse, which was so heavenly, so richly flavored and textured,…
It was the third time the woman had asked the server to give her a few more minutes. “I just can’t decide,” said the thirty-something gal, who was obviously getting no help from her equally perplexed date. “Could you just come back one more time?” The server graciously agreed, returning…
Sometimes it pays to be a regular guy. At Señor Pepe’s, the regulars are treated like royalty. As for the rest of the riffraff, let them eat cake. If they can ever catch a server’s attention, that is. Because unless you’re known by one of the staffers at this Denver…
Welcome to the Hotel California, restaurant-style: You can order anytime you like, but you can never eat. It wasn’t always this way at Denver’s former Hotel Paris, brought back from the dead a decade ago as the trendsetting La Coupole. But that restaurant closed mysteriously one day this past spring,…
Service with a smile. Not harried help with a grimace. Not a smile paired with the total cluelessness that you might actually need a fork to get that food into your mouth and that you might want your meal before it is the temperature of that guy’s body they found…
Since it opened several years ago, eating at Japon has been a little like fishing in the Pacific — although we often reeled in keepers, the going could get rough. On my first visit to this whimsically decorated Japanese restaurant, the cooked items were far superior to the raw (“A…
Meet the king of the middle road. Plunked down next to I-25 in an asphalt jungle of hotels and motels that have no restaurants, much less room service, Vasil’s EuroGrille enjoys a captive audience. Too bad those captives won’t find anything particularly enjoyable at Vasil’s. If this is a EuroGrille,…
The cute college-age guy is wearing nothing but a pair of denim shorts, and he’s obviously freezing his butt off. He sticks his hand into the waterfall, shivers, then turns to his diving partner, another cute college-age guy, and asks, “Man, can’t they turn the heat up?” as he runs…
Ready or not, here they come. When husband-and-wife team Tim Elenteny and Janice Henning decided to open a restaurant in the space formerly occupied by Diced Onions, the San Francisco transplants didn’t know a lot about Denver’s dining scene. “We thought we’d come in and get all set up, have…
Remember tapas? The Spanish tradition, which calls for serving up little tidbits of food meant to be snacked on with drinks, enjoyed another wave of popularity in Denver during the last year or two, then receded back into restaurant-trend oblivion. But one survivor remains: Ilios. Owned by Dee Diamond, who’s…
After over twenty years in business, the Zang Brewing Co. just won the location, location, location lottery. The original Zang Brewing Co. belonged to Bavarian immigrant and would-be miner Philip Zang, who bought the failing Rocky Mountain Brewery after he failed to strike it rich in the gold fields. He…
