Crepes 'n Crepes

Flash forward roughly 2,000 years to me, standing with eyes closed in the narrow, cleared space between the door and the bar, smelling the sweet-sour stink of Grand Marnier in the pan, of grill oil and warm breath and savory spices. And suddenly I am remembering eating crepes — at breakfasts out with my family when I'd order crepes (actually blintzes) simply because they were different from the eggs, bacon, pancakes and waffles (offspring of the galette) that my parents and my little brother were having; at a creperie in New York City, where I first had poireaux grilles (the roasted-leek crepe that's probably the closest thing still served to the ancient crepes of Northern France); celebrating, again, the end of a family camping trip at a nowhere bar up near the Canadian border, my parents drinking banana daiquiris, me eating crepes with bloody-red cherries and the stinging bite of armagnac (so wrong — it should've been prunes — and yet just so right).

"Two," I said, when the harried waitress approached and asked how many. She looked around, bit her lip, called us into the back. There was one table left, jammed into a corner, with a chair that stuck out into the flow of traffic between the main bar/dining room and the overflow dining room in the back. We sat down gratefully, ordered big mugs of hot chocolate and started poring over the triple-fold laminated menu — written in French with English subtitles, large but admirably focused, with forty or fifty varieties of crepe, two soups, three salads and nothing else — while the staff surged around us and the tables just kept turning.

Crepes 'n Crepes has been open for two years and has been busy since day one, hour one, minute one. There are other creperies in Denver now, as well as restaurants that do crepes as part of a larger French gestalt. But none have ever done this kind of business, and none have deserved to. That's because Crepes 'n Crepes is uncompromisingly, unabashedly and unstintingly French. The cooks are French. Owners Kathy Knight and Alain Veratti have imported all their iron crepe griddles from France. The ingredients and preparations — the camembert and Chambord, ratatouille and sauce aux champignons — are French. And the space itself — the ramshackle, patched, plastered and sunny dining rooms, cramped back bar, sundry collection of plates and flatware — gives off the honest and earned vibe of café-along-the-Seine frugality and disorder. The place is lovely in only the way that something so necessarily unlovely can possibly be, and after retiring briefly to use the facilities, Laura, who has been everywhere, came back and settled the matter. "Unisex bathroom," she said. "How very European. Substandard plumbing and all."

It took three waitresses coming through the door, bumping my chair and delivering unmatched plates to unmatched tables before someone took our order: banane & fraises avec crème fouettée aux Nutella, myrtilles sauvages avec du sucre, and the classic Suzette — because it was Saturday and this was breakfast for us and the woman one table over had hardly eaten a bite of her crepe poulet au gratin. (I discovered that she was an idiot when I returned a couple days later for the savory crepes — for ham and cheese that was good, if a bit pedestrian; for my own poulet au gratin with diced, roasted chicken and wild mushrooms in a white wine and cream sauce thickened with emmenthaler that was fantastic, soft and milky-sweet; and for a long-overdue hit of the immortal poireaux grilles that I found less reminiscent than I'd hoped, but certainly hearty and peasant-ish and kind of like eating a collapsed onion pie.)

Crepes, when done well and classically, are simple, the buckwheat or wheat-flour crepe serving just as a wrapper that holds all the good stuff in one place. But while they're simple, they can also be good. And Crepes 'n Crepes makes the best crepes I can remember trying. The French crepe griddles help, as does the practice that comes from banging out hundreds of crepes fresh and to-order every day. So do the quality ingredients. Our order of myrtilles sauvages — essentially wild blueberries dusted with sugar — was beautiful and absolutely delicious. I was sad to see that the strawberry and banana crepe with cream cheese and Nutella used huge American strawberries rather than the bittersweet, almost rosy-tasting French fraises du bois that are virtually impossible to get here, but they were still good strawberries, mixed with homemade cream cheese (thin and almost liquidy), sliced banana and Nutella.

But then there was the crepe Suzette.

"This is not crepe Suzette," Laura announced after having one bite, making a face and tossing down her fork in disgust. "Another bite of that and I won't be able to drive home."