Invasion!

Leftovers: Meanwhile, far away in New York City, Nine75 chef Troy Guard (a former associate of that dread Hawaiian mastermind Roy Yamaguchi) did not burn down the brand-new kitchen recently installed at the James Beard House. On February 22, Guard cooked a dinner there that was well attended by the Manhattan foodie elite -- so very well attended, in fact, that on the 21st, the waiting list for last-minute cancellations was forty deep and many members of the traveling food press were turned away, forced to slum it at Per Se, Babo and Morimoto.

But CNN, Travel & Leisure, the Wall Street Journal, Nation's Restaurant News, the Associated Press and Epicurious all made it through the door, along with a hundred-odd pros and civilians who were well fed and entertained by Guard (with Blake Edmunds from Nine75 standing sous). Leigh Sullivan -- chief spin-mistress for the Sullivan Restaurant Group, which owns Nine75, Emogene and the building that used to be Mao but is now scheduled to reopen as Ocean sometime in April -- had promised to steal me one of the Beard House's new Vera Wang sconces so I could mount it like a trophy above my desk, but she has yet to come through.

The Beard dinner itself -- while very cool and certainly a mark of honor for Guard -- isn't big news, since so many of Denver's best and brightest have cooked there recently. But a real scoop was buried in one of the names on the guest list: Geoff Smith of Dining Out magazine and one of the partners -- along with Josh Dinar, Jeff Sufkin and Geoff McFarlane -- who just effected the takeover of the disastrous Luna Hotel at 1612 Wazee Street and are in the process of turning Flow Lounge into Jet. Come to find out, Smith (if that is his real name...) made the trip because the boys are in the market for a proven comer to work with them on their new project. They're after someone who can write menus, get a kitchen up and running, wrangle a crew and take on a space that has already swallowed at least three different restaurants. So, is Guard their guy?

"No checks have been exchanged, there are no signatures, only talking," says Sullivan (who should know, seeing as she's married to Guard). But how much talking?

"Some talking," she replies.

I have it from a good source that one of the Jet partners working the bar floor two weekends ago was doing a whole lot of talking, saying the deal was already as good as done...