But even alone, you're never really alone at Table 6. The room is too close, the service too practiced and casual and welcoming. When I came through the door at 5:30, there were only three other tables on the floor, but already it was loud with the hum of voices, jazz on the radio, sharp, high laughter. I sat against the bricks with my back to the door so I could watch the action in my favorite kitchen in the city — built up behind what used to be the Beehive bar, a half-dozen cooks (on a Monday night!) and all their gear, their knives, their pots and pans and ovens and fryers and mise and stock crammed into a space once occupied by two bartenders and some bottles.
I drank wine. Don't know what kind, just that it was red and big and good and chosen by my server for being weird and fun. Bread arrived: half a boule with a mold of softened butter topped with a sprinkle of fleur de sel. I asked for the confit of fresh bacon (meaning homemade bacon, fast-cured with the confit recipe written on one of the large chalkboards hung above the line, beside the pictures of the butcher's diagrammed cow and pig — meaning, really, just pork belly) in Parker's parmesan broth with bitter greens. I'd had it before, but I'm always stunned by how awesome something so simple can be and how simple something so truly complex can appear: a thick piece of pork belly covered with a snowy drift of shredded parm, in a deep and rich broth built up from stock and mirepoix, its depth and savor ideally set off by the steeping greenery. My server brought me a spoon for the broth. I used torn bits of bread instead, dredging up shards of pig I might've otherwise missed.
Location Info
Details
Table 6
Confit bacon: $11
Tater tots: $8
Sweetbreads: $11
Fish and chips: $18
Ham steak: $19
Lamb meatballs: $20
609 Corona Street
303-831-8800
Hours: Dinner nightly, Sunday brunch
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The chicken-fried sweetbreads were like God's own Chicken McNuggets, incredibly tender, wrapped in individual jackets of hard-fried batter that cracked almost like a wonton skin under my teeth. They were topped with a salad of Honeycrisp apple batonnets and parsley, dressed in an apple gastrique sharpened with chile, with doodles of sweet-and-sour sauce sketched on the plate. I would've licked it clean had my server not removed it from my reach.
While I ate, I watched the rush come on like a wave: three tables when I arrived, then six, then ten, then a back-up at the door. There were a half-dozen or more servers on the floor. Forman showed up, went to the basement to dress, then swung into action — walking plates, pouring wine, greeting friends who must really be friends if they were filling his restaurant on a Monday night when the weather had come in like a vengeance.
I moved on to lamb meatballs and ricotta dumplings with rapini and pine nuts in another broth: a jamón brodo — ham stock, more or less, lamb in ham soup. It was not my favorite Table 6 dish (that would be the confit bacon, or maybe the duck confit or the ham steak when I'm in the mood), but it was one I'd never had before, and it still warmed me, comforted me, showed me once again what Parker could do with some bones, some water, some salt. The pine nuts were what put me off, I think. Every chef tries to use them; rarely does one do so successfully.
My server cleared the bowl. I looked outside — it was still cold, still ugly and now dark, too. I asked for a dessert menu. On the night I followed Mariani into the dining room, I'd skipped the cross-dressers' secret pie list in favor of the beignets, shelled in a thick dust of confectioner's sugar and filled with hot, bitter chocolate, with a baby's dish of vanilla crème fraîche on the side.
They were just as delicious this time. And as I licked chocolate and powdered sugar from my burned fingers, they bought me another fifteen minutes in the warmth and clamor of one of Denver's most unlikely dining rooms — a reprieve from the cold, a bonus round in an almost perfect restaurant.
