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Plots and Pans

There’s something fishy about this lukewarm salmon story.

Eat, drink and be wary.

Very wary. 'Tis the season for holiday scams, and one of the first is putting the Scrooge to local restaurateurs. On Monday morning, Racines received the following e-mail:

"I visited your location on Friday evening (11/23/07) with several friends that I was taking out and a friend for her birthday. We went around 7:00 and have to say that the experience was very poor. Our food was brought out lukewarm and the staff was rude and unaccomodating. One of the items was made wrong (allergy) and when we brought it up with the staff, they seemed annoyed that we would. We never did get a chance to speak with management. I just wanted to let someone know and see if it couldn't be addressed."

But that woman and her friends must have been very, very hungry, because also on Monday morning, Dixons received an almost identical e-mail — right down to the birthday-dinner detail and the misspelled "unaccomodating." So did Rioja and Sushi Den — where the diners had allegedly suffered through lukewarm salmon.

There's something fishy here, all right, but it's not the salmon at Sushi Den.

Lee Goodfriend, an owner of Racines, was e-mailing the author of the first complaint — one Leah Macaulay — to get more details and determine if it was appropriate to send a gift certificate to atone for the restaurant's supposed sins, when she noticed that Dixons, which she also owns, had received the same e-mail, only this one from a Harley Lewis. So rather than send Macaulay anything, she sent off a warning to members of the Denver Independent Network of Restaurants, a group of eateries that banded together last year to gain strength in numbers and also share knowledge. "That's what we have this DINR list for," says Goodfriend.

And her e-mail drew a quick response. First Sushi Den checked in, then Rioja — neither of them establishments owned by Goodfriend and her partner, David Racine. (They do own Goodfriends, which so far has not been the site of a disappointing, if fictitious, birthday dinner.) And there's no telling how many more restaurants may have gotten the complaining e-mails.

The scam — concocting a non-existent problem in order to wrest a free meal or more from the supposedly offending establishment — is an old trick. What's new here is the DINR, and a restaurant community that can communicate quickly about such con games. "It was irritating," says Goodfriend. "They just shouldn't get away with it."

And thanks to her fast fingers and good sense of spell, they may not.

Snow job: The fancy fliers showed up this weekend in mailboxes across town — 270,543, to be exact, the number of individual addresses in Denver County. "We got your drift," the Denver Department of Public Works informed occupants of those addresses, then proceeded to shovel out facts and figures on the city's snow-removal plans. In case of a "major snow event," for example, the Public Works Manager can suspend the rule that homeowners must clear their sidewalks within 24 hours — giving them up to another 48.

Of course, during last year's "major snow event," it took the city itself not hours, not weeks, but months to get some streets clear, which is why Denver not only took a long, hard look at its policies, but spent almost $75,000 on a brochure and mailing to share the revised policies with residents.

And so far, the city's approach is working: Scientists are predicting the driest winter in years.