Last Man Standing

What about Denver? You've been hearing some interesting things about Denver recently. There was that place with the wine room that won all those awards a couple of years ago. A couple of friends just went through Denver after skiing in Aspen and found the restaurants much better than they'd expected. Zagat has always seemed strangely impressed by the place. And, hey, didn't that guy Sandoval use Denver to test a couple of his concepts?

But wait. This is Denver we're talking about. Meat and potatoes. Cowboys. Steakhouses. It's flyover country -- how do you set up supply chains smack in the middle of nowhere? It's frightening to think what kind of local help -- and local diners -- you'd be forced to contend with. And sure, it's cheap (comparatively), but Chicago is already way out on the edge of your Midwestern comfort zone. Denver might as well be Siberia. All of a sudden, Philadelphia is looking real good. You shake your head, light a cigarette. Denver...Jesus, what the hell were you thinking?

On a national scale, the sad reality is that Denver just doesn't make the cut of top-tier restaurant cities. And although this status may be based on false assumptions (i.e., we have no supply chain, everyone here eats steak seven nights a week, we're a bunch of rubes who wouldn't recognize fine cuisine if it crawled up and humped our legs), it's borne out in numbers.

"It's a population issue," says restaurant consultant and man-about-town John Imbergamo, and he's exactly right. Denver itself has a population of 550,000, with 2.6 million in the metro area. Each year, we push about ten million visitors through the city. But New York City's population alone is almost that large, and Miami and Orlando count tourists at a rate of about ten times what Denver does.

Rather famously, Mr. Super Big-Time Celebrity Chef Mario Batali has said that he will not open a restaurant in any location where he can't turn his dining room three times on any given night. And how does Mr. Super Big-Time Celebrity Chef Mario Batali decide whether he's going to be able to turn a dining room three times before a place gets open? By comparing the size of the potential dining room with the population and tourist count of the city.

"There are many cities you would go to first before you'd think of opening a restaurant here," Imbergamo says. New York, Los Angeles, Miami/Orlando, Las Vegas, maybe Chicago or San Francisco -- that's the first tier. Below are second-tier cities like Houston/Dallas, Philadelphia and Washington D.C. Denver falls somewhere between those cities and the third tier, above places like Minneapolis and Cleveland, probably on par with Austin and San Diego. And it's all about the numbers, about risk and reward.

A few name chefs have attempted restaurants here, and with the very notable exception of Sandoval, they've all failed. Wolfgang Puck opened three outlets in Denver -- a Wolfgang Puck Grand Cafe in the Denver Pavilions and two Wolfgang Puck Express outlets, one in Cherry Creek and another on Concourse B at DIA, which is the only location that remains. Roy Yamaguchi opened a Roy's in the Cherry Creek Shopping Center several years ago; today it's a Kona Grill.

None of this means that Denver is not a great restaurant city. It is. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, we have the stock and supply. We have the talent. And not for nothing, but we already have our own crowd of homegrown, multi-unit owners who are doing very well: Kevin Taylor, Frank Bonanno, Dave Query, etc. And we also have Sandoval, who was in town a couple of weeks ago checking up on things at his restaurants. And while I may not be crazy about La Sandía, I've got to give the man credit for coming here, for trusting in Denver despite our numbers, for using us to test concepts that will go into cities where the math is kinder and the risks less severe. I don't think he's ever done the kind of business in Denver that he does in New York, in San Francisco or in D.C., but he's held on. And there's something to be said for being the last man standing.

Open-and-shut cases: Two other multi-unit owners have just lost local outlets. Last week, the original Emogene Patisserie at 2415 East Second Avenue ("Sugar Rush," May 4, 2006) went dark, six months after the Belmar outpost closed. Depending on who you talk to, the space will soon be a lunch place, a breakfast place or a breakfast-and-lunch place named Penny Lane. The one thing that's certain is that the property will remain in the hands of the Sullivan Group: The real estate is just too good to give up. And Tin Star, at 5332 DTC Boulevard, the only Colorado location of the fast-casual Tex-Mex chain, has also shut its doors. Unlike Emogene, Tin Star had an absolutely awful location -- a blind strip-mall middle suite with zero visibility, buried in the heart of the Tech Center. And while I dug the place ("Heavy Metal," September 1, 2005), my love alone was not enough to keep things going.