Second Helping

For more than twenty years, Rosa Linda Aguirre and her family have been dishing up some of Denver's best Mexican food in the town's most family-friendly eatery. The kids pictured on the original menu are all grown -- although most continue to work in the restaurant -- and grandchildren now play by the kitchen. The place has always been warm, inviting and eclectic, decorated in the style of a true Mexican street-corner cafe, with gut-sprung booths and worn wooden chairs, colorful art on the walls and the normal clutter and mess of any day's business stacked in every corner. The food is just as warm and inviting: comforting red posole, a simple desebrado of shredded beef, homemade tamales and delicious nopalito tacos stuffed with sliced cactus petals that taste like a cross between a green bean and an asparagus stalk.

And now, to go along with its growing family, Rosa Linda's may soon have expanded alcoholic offerings. While there have always been buckets of Coronas for those with a powerful thirst, Rosa Linda's has never had a more comprehensive license that would allow the place to serve, well, margaritas -- that most popular of all quasi-Mexican beverages. A hearing before the city's liquor authorities on June 6 could change all that. In the meantime, there's room in the dining room for one more at Rosa Linda's, where the chile is always hot and the beers are always cold.