Best Champagne List 2008 | French 250 | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Champagne List

French 250

When you're celebrating in style and price is (almost) no object, French 250 is the place to pop the cork. All of the major labels are well represented on this constantly changing champagne list, and there are some lesser-known rarities that give it character. And while you'll pay top dollar by the glass (and three times top dollar for a bottle), sometimes that's what required for a truly transcendent experience — which is the only way to describe putting down a bottle of the Moët & Chandon Imperial Nectar offered on the dessert board.

Best Cheap Breakfast

Rosie's Diner

The dollars-to-grub ratio at Rosie's is always skewed hugely in favor of the archetypal Big Hungry Boy, but it's during breakfast that this diner really shines. Bacon and eggs for five bucks? That may not sound like a bargain, but consider that this meal consists of two eggs, four strips of bacon, a mountain of hashbrowns and a full stack of pancakes, and it starts looking like a real deal. And you can add to this a side of corned beef hash or a chicken-fried steak, a bottomless cuppa joe and a couple of tunes on the tableside jukebox and still walk out the door for less than ten bucks. Also, the food here is far from what you'd find at a run-of-the-mill greasy spoon, and quality plus value equals a winner in our book any day.

Best Cheap Dinner

Club 404

Is Club 404 a dive? Absolutely. But we mean that in only the sweetest, most endearing way. If you're looking for wasabi mashed potatoes and tenderloins with mango chutney, this is not the place for you. But if your idea of atmosphere is cheap beers at 10 a.m., 365-days-a-year Christmas lights and a seasoned waitress who could tell you firsthand what Methuselah was like in the sack, Club 404 is where it's at. There isn't a single item on the wide-ranging, greasy spoon/steakhouse menu that'll run you north of fifteen bucks, and if you plan your meals around the specials, you can easily enjoy a big dinner for less than a ten-spot. No charge for the ambience.

Best Cheap Lunch

Johnny's Diner

A $2.89 blue-plate special at lunch? You can't beat that — not even if you go through a McDonald's drive-thru for a Happy Meal. And while a Mickey D's lunch will do nothing but make you feel bad for eating such junk, at Johnny's you're not only getting real lunch from an honest-to-Jesus local business, but you're getting a little kick of history with your meal. Both the style and concept of this place — a counter-service, plastic-tray car-cult joint with a freaky kick of Golden Age Americana oozing from every inch — pre-date our country's obsession with fast food, making Johnny's a window back onto a simpler time. A time when the phrase "Nothin' could be finer than dinner [or lunch] at the diner" really meant something. At Johnny's, it means good food for a very good price.

Best Chef

Frank Bonanno

This has been Frank Bonanno's year. While cutting his losses on a couple of ventures, he continued to ensure that the French/Mediterranean-inspired Mizuna and the solidly Italian Luca remained two of the city's most consistently excellent restaurants. And then last December, he opened Osteria Marco in Larimer Square, a neighborhood already full to bursting with great restaurants — and it immediately rose to the top of the heap, putting all of Denver's charcuterie freaks in seventh heaven, while also serving wood-fired pizzas, panini sandwiches and a weekly pig roast. Never mind his great recipes, superb technique, solid work ethic and Today show appearances: Bonanno's comeback-kid routine alone secures his place as this year's best chef manning three of the town's best restaurants.

Best Chicken and Waffles

The Corner Office

There are essentially two kinds of restaurants in the world: those run for the benefit of customers and those run as playgrounds for chefs. The Corner Office is unabashedly one of the former, and that "unabashedly" is why it's so successful. With no shame, no tongue-in-cheek, smirking irony, the bar will pour you a double whiskey while the kitchen lovingly plates up your requested bowl of Cap'n Crunch (with Crunch Berries). Lemon edamame and fish tacos? No problem. And then there's the Southern-style fried chicken and waffles, a dream plate with three pieces of perfectly golden and crisp-skinned fried chicken done to order, crowded on top of an excellent Belgian waffle (like a sugary buttermilk cloud, crunchy at the edges, soft in the middle), the whole thing dusted with a drift of powdered sugar and served with a warm jug of syrup on the side.

Best Chicken Rice

Isle of Singapore

Chicken rice, the unofficial comfort food of Singapore, is exactly what it sounds like: chicken and rice and nothing else. But at Isle of Singapore, these two ingredients add up to big flavor. Officially billed as Hainanese chicken rice, it comes as a plate of white rice piled with chunks of rudely hacked, bone-in and double-boiled chicken. You're supposed to doctor your chicken rice with a variety of sauces and toppings, but all that's really required is a touch of hot sauce and a big appetite.

Best Chicken-Fried Steak

Davies Chuck Wagon Diner

Davies Chuck Wagon was built in 1957, maybe one of the best years for diners, definitely one of the last. It's a Mountain View, constructed in Singac, New Jersey, and the name is appropriate, because from the street out front, you can see the foothills rising over a hump in the land. It's doubly appropriate, in fact, because of all the diners bolted together on those grimy East Coast assembly lines, Mountain View #516 traveled the farthest — to Lakewood, Colorado. The classic exterior makes a fitting setting for another classic: Davies' chicken-fried steak, the best version in town. The steak may be nearly an inch thick, but inside its jacket of crisp breading, it's tender enough (after having been soaked in milk and beaten into pudding with a mallet) to be cut with a cheap tin fork. The steak comes with a scratch-made white gravy (just flour, butter, cream, pepper and sausage grease) that's pure white death — and deliciously decadent. We brake for Davies.

Best Chinese Barbecue

Pacific Ocean International Supermarket

While we're firmly of the opinion that, like jazz or summer blockbusters, barbecue is an American art form, plenty of international practitioners come up with some pretty good versions all on their own. The Chinese, for example. They have one of the oldest food cultures on the planet, and at the center of the canon is Chinese pork barbecue — that slick, super-sweet red stuff offered on just about every Chinese takeout menu in the world. For a taste of the real thing, head to Pacific Ocean International Market, where you can order it by the pound or by the length (usually measured by the space between two fingers — or two spread hands if you're hungry) straight from the butcher's counter.

Best Chinese Restaurant

Chopsticks China Bistro

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Chopsticks is a strange restaurant: It's one of the city's most authentic Chinese spots, yet it also serves some completely inauthentic dishes. At Chopsticks, you can eat Chinese pocket sandwiches full of delicious, saucy, shredded meat or completely non-threatening chicken lo mein — and then, halfway through your meal, decide that what you really want is a little cold jellyfish salad or a plate of flaming pig intestines, and then get that, too, without having to change restaurants or neighborhoods or do anything more than ask. Here the competing impulses toward satisfying the local populace and satisfying those far from home are brought into perfect balance on a huge menu filled with dumplings, porridge, hot pots and barbecue, a document that sees no contradiction in offering both beef in garlic sauce and haggis-like shredded lamb stomach.
  • 5117 S. Yosemite St., Englewood, 80111 Map

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