A Final Farewell

He headed for the kitchen at a fast walk, dragging me in his wake. I hesitated, not sure that going into a busy galley full of big-name chefs was the best idea.

"Just for a minute, please. This is important." He took me by the shoulder, steered me through the swinging doors, into the scrum of expo at the pass, through the tangles of servers and runners, and into a small nook at the far end of the line.

"Look at that," he said. "Just look."

Chad Clevenger (Mel's current chef, who will soon be off on his way to act as personal chef to some friends of the Masters living in France) was rumbling down the tiny, cramped line transporting tossing bowls, moving with the veteran grace of a big man accustomed to small spaces. Tyler Wiard and Cory Treadway were laughing, bent over a board double-set with plates being assembled for service. Goose Sorensen was doing something unseemly to the stoves (or at least it appeared that way) with Mark Teffenhart almost climbing his back, while Frank Bonanno moved like one of those water-drinking toy birds -- his gleaming head bobbing up and down as he plated careful dollops of huitlacoche-seasoned duck-egg salad onto a hundred plates of Wiard and Treadway's duck enchiladas, smiling from ear to ear. Among them, sous chefs and station chefs and pastry chefs and line cooks did their own dances, shuffling plates, hauling up supplies.

It was so rare a scene, so defining a scene (all that talent in one place, all those guys who'd come up through Mel's kitchen), so happy a scene -- even though it will probably never happen again. And for a moment, all I could do was stand there, watching, seeing Denver's modern food history and its hopeful future colliding over a hundred plates of roasted duck and red-chile sauce, silenced by the understanding of what I stood in the presence of.

Beside me, Mel stood tall and proud with his arms crossed, beaming out at his boys, his cooks, the brigade of all brigades. I heard him speak over the top of my head. "You see?" he said. "I told you it would be worth it. Isn't that something to see?"

A critical democracy: Lili Bjorklund, daughter of restaurateur Addie Bjorklund and Halleh Hessami, is in eighth grade. She's the restaurant critic for her middle-school newspaper. And she kicks ass.

Not too long ago, she took on La Sandía, which I reviewed last week ("Pretty Ain't Enough," April 26). She'd already given good reviews to Chedd's, Andre's and Crepes 'n' Crepes, but at La Sandía, she got her first taste of the other side of this critic's gig: the bad meal, the careless service, the annoying little everythings. And she let the joint have it.

The entire review is posted on From the Gut, on the Westword blog, but here are a couple of samples: "The chicken was cooked so far past tough that I can hardly cut through it with my knife, much less chew it." And when the drunks spill salsa all over her? "The manager does not come...and I begin to doubt his overall existence."

And, okay, maybe that's a wee bit existential for a middle-school restaurant review, but I know just where she's coming from. Sometimes a retreat into the bleak philosophies of Kierkegaard is the only route left to take.

"After my review came out in the paper, it was the most talked-about article for weeks," Lili reports. "I was constantly asked why was I so angry; what made me so mean all of a sudden? See, all my other reviews had been of really great places. La Sandía was just...well, bad."

Welcome to the club, kid.

Leftovers: The Best of Denver curse has struck again. Two Saturdays ago, Tonti's on South Chambers Road (which won an award this year for Best Sometime Italian) closed. The other two locations in Parker and Elizabeth are still up and running, though. And in Aurora, Afghan Village is gone. Its space at 11002 East Yale Avenue had been the home of Kabul Kabob, which essentially shared the Best New Restaurant award in 2004 with Brasserie Rouge and succumbed to the curse shortly after.