I'm sitting on the patio at Sketch Food and Wine -- lounging on the patio, actually, which is surprising, because I'm just not built for lounging. Fellas tuned high like me don't lounge well. Twitchy men, men always on the make for something, men who -- whether by habit, unusually fast metabolisms permanently kinked by drug use, or mortal fear of boredom -- have come to see sitting still as surrender, tend to look at patios as gathering places for highly suspect slackers and idlers of the vainest stripe.
But Sketch's patio is different because it isn't really a patio, it's a trench. The restaurant behind me -- glittering beyond levered-open windows, like sequins on black velvet -- is a basement, one of those subterranean addresses that tend to swallow the best intentions of restaurateurs without showing any mercy. And the patio is just a cement pit in front of a basement -- open to the sky, but with a view only of wall. Wall and tables. Wall and tables and pretty girls and the slow parade of four- and eight- and ten-tops coming down the stairs at either end of the trench, headed for Sketch.
I can lounge here because on this patio, I can sit and smoke and not care about anything at all. I can watch the world not going by, since the rest of the world is something that exists only up and out and beyond my view of wall and girls and umbrellas over the tables. I'm happy here. Being a little drunk probably helps you appreciate such an uncommon patio, and to be honest, I am completely shitfaced. Sketch wasn't my first stop tonight, but it's going to be my last. I can't really walk anymore, and ascending a steep concrete staircase could do me in.
Above me, I can see stars. Conversation bubbles around me like cheap champagne, effervescing laughter, and there's something dirty and jazzy playing on the sound system that's got just the right beat to make everyone look like they're dancing. People stream in and out the doors, find tables, leave tables, borrow my ashtray and spill the dregs of my Miller High Life onto the cement. Smoke curls in errant breezes that all smell like french fries. I light another smoke, tip my head back and try hard not to pass out. It's a good night down in the trenches. I'm not ready for it to end.
I think to myself how, if Sketch were on an island, it would be a great beach restaurant -- except that there's no view, it's too dark inside and everything is painted black, which would be uncomfortable in the tropical sun.
I think how, if Sketch were in New York City, it would be right on the filthy edge of one of those recovering neighborhoods that first demand their own acronyms, then private tax supports, then twelve or fifteen wine bar/cafe/bistro/ lounges just like Sketch. It would be the kind of place where annoying yuppie foodistas claim to have been going for a year longer than it's been open, and where neighborhood folk fight over the closely packed tables in the back.
How, if Sketch were a girl, she'd be a booty call -- a late-night destination, a saving grace for the tanked and injudicious. Not a slut, just a guaranteed good time. She'd be on speed-dial, but way down there toward the end. A just-in-case holdout, but one that you find yourself calling more and more often.
And how if Sketch were in Cherry Creek (which it is), you might rightly expect it to be a Cherry Creek restaurant: overpriced, overwrought, over-pretty and designed as little more than a delicate machine meant for turning dumb money into crabcakes and goat-cheese salads. But instead, Sketch is aggressively anti-Creek -- or at least anti-Creek stereotype. Address aside, it belongs anywhere but in this neighborhood, because here the tables are too close together, the space is too loud, the music was produced sometime in the last decade and the servers don't try to hide their tattoos. Here the guy bringing your cheese plate has a big blond Mohawk and won't chase you out just to turn your table and up the night's count. And on the menu, there are no thirty-word descriptions of entrees, no complicated ravioli, no frisée.
But there is a plate of just crimini mushrooms, simply sautéed in butter; a plate of new potatoes sprinkled in parsley; a plate of marinated olives for two bucks. The beef carpaccio "Harry's Bar" is the best version of a dish that's become so ubiquitous in Denver that even the cliche has become stale: the big white plate laid with a sunflower of raw beef sliced thin as paper, scattered with capers, drizzled with aioli, juiced with lemon and served with grissini as a kind of edible utensil. The crab cocktail is nothing but split crab legs in the shell poked into a sundae dish full of crushed ice. And the oysters Rockefeller (served to me more than once with a skinned and clotted sauce) are a classical resuscitation of a presentation that hasn't been popular since men wore top hats out to dine.
Sketch is a simple restaurant that fakes complexity by acting as though the most stripped-down, elemental presentation of a dish takes more work than gunking that same plate up with a bunch of complex ingredientiary embroidery. This is an excellent trick. It has made many smart chefs and restaurateurs rich. And with Sketch's lovely, dark and spare dining room, service that's better than you expect and a vibe that banks on the one-off attraction of being the place where everyone goes after they've already been somewhere else, Sketch is perfectly positioned to pull off this neat sleight of hand.
That drunken evening spent on Sketch's patio was not the first time I'd been there. And because I eventually made it home again, it wasn't the last, either. It was just one of a half-dozen times I've found myself at Sketch when I really should have been somewhere else -- like working, or at home, sleeping it off.
I've been to Sketch for lunches (most of which I drank), and I've been there for huge dinners that went on for hours. I've been there when the place was totally empty but for off-duty kitchen crews and members of the press, and on nights when the floor and patio and next-door patio and sidewalk up above were all full; when the snaky, curving bar at one end of the room was an intolerable sea of ballcaps and skank and the dining room a riot of people I wouldn't let into my house on a bet without locking away my liquor and pets.
I've descended on Sketch with mobs and eaten over-market lobster tails and oysters mounted like rough jewels on trays of glittering ice. I've been there alone on Friday nights, watching customers falling for the gimmick over and over again: digging forks into their plates of simple roasted chicken with potatoes and having that moment -- that slightly confused, slightly transported instant of tasting a dish for the first time and thinking, oh, so this is what a chicken is supposed to taste like.
When Sketch opened back in February, I would eat only the carpaccio and drink only Del Maguey mezcal chased with bottles of Miller High Life, the "champagne of beers" that's perfect for a beer-drinker in a wine bar. If I wanted to eat more than that, I'd go somewhere else before ending up at Sketch when dinner was done, because I knew I'd run into owners Sean Yontz and Jesse Morreale when they landed at Sketch after their nightly rounds of the kingdom (together and separately, they own five bars and restaurants around town), and I knew they'd ask what I'd eaten. This way, I could honestly tell them just the carpaccio. And since they already knew I liked the carpaccio, we could move on to talking about something more interesting, like Star Wars or motorcycles or girls or music or tequila.
But with time, I started arriving earlier at Sketch so that I could eat more and avoid the two entirely (no small trick). That way, I didn't have to tell Jesse that the stuffed Morreale artichoke on the appetizer menu (named in honor of his mother, who came up with the recipe) sucks something awful. It's basic enough, a whole artichoke with a paste of garlic and parmesan and breadcrumbs and butter stuffed between the leaves. But it takes time to steam an artichoke into something edible, and no one at Sketch is willing to wait. So Yontz -- who wrote the menu and trained the kitchen and still oversees ops, though sometimes from a great distance -- hit on a compromise of par-steaming a bunch of artichokes in advance and finishing them to order. Only doing that turns the 'choke meat gray and makes it taste like wet bread and tin and old broccoli stems.
The desserts can be nasty, too. The cheesecake is grainy and served half-crumbled on the plate, though the Amarena cherry sauce is excellent. The crust of the apple pie is like eating paste.
The only problem with the hanger steak is that it's not hanger. It's a cut from the muscle that the hanger covers -- which is a great cut of meat, but one with a name unrecognizable to most people who aren't butchers: culotte. Still, Sketch's culotte steak with Maytag blue and grilled onions and pan sauce is always fantastic, cooked bloody-rare and juicy and full of beefy goodness. Same goes for the burger, a half-pound of ground sirloin on a good bun and served (like the steak) with a choice of five sauces. The peppercorn goes very nicely, and a good cheeseburger slathered in béarnaise is a rare treat.
Sketch offers a black-bass fillet that's handled with admirable restraint, perfectly cooked, touched with nothing but lemon and a little salt and pepper, then mounted over potatoes spiked with more lemon, almost like a skordalia, which is distracting for the first few bites until you realize how well the lemon in the potato cuts through the starch and the fat of the fish to keep everything from becoming too weighty. And the linguine with clam sauce comes close to the linguine and white clam I put to the rail 10,000 times during the years I spent cooking in New York -- just white wine and butter and lemon and garlic, lots of clams, a few tomatoes for color, a little parsley and nothing else.
Sketch has an oyster bar -- with eight varieties last time I was there, half of which I'd never heard of, served with cocktail sauce and a mignonette that tastes like malt vinegar. Sketch will do plateaus de fruits de mer on request and lobster cocktails and oyster shooters paired with the bar's choice of vodka. It offers caviar service on the floor: Caspian sturgeon eggs at market price, served with the traditional chopped egg, onion, sour cream, toast points and ice-cold potato juice.
And because it fancies itself a wine bar, Sketch has a wine list. I don't know if it's a good wine list or not, since I've never opened it -- and even if I had, I'm grossly unqualified to tell a good list from a bad one. Instead, I stick with the beer and mezcal, which are just fine.
But one of these days I'm going to have to tell Yontz and Morreale that a culotte steak ought to be called a culotte steak even if you can probably get an extra three bucks per plate these days by calling it hanger. I'm going to have to tell them that their artichokes suck. I'm going to have to tell them that I don't love everything about Sketch, but that I do like it a lot. And then I'm going to explain that sometimes "like" is enough when it's late at night and there's nowhere else to go.
I'm going to have to tell my friends that their restaurant is my culinary booty call.
And I'm not looking forward to that conversation. Something tells me they're just going to take it wrong.
