Best Restaurant for Eating Your Vegetables 2008 | Masalaa | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Restaurant for Eating Your Vegetables

Masalaa

Masalaa is a great vegetarian restaurant because it's really not a vegetarian restaurant. Rather, it's a restaurant that just happens to not have meat on the menu — a fact that can easily go overlooked while you're gorging yourself on idly, aloo paratha, kofta curry with vegetable fritters, the most delicious aloo mutter anywhere, channa saag with chickpeas and a dozen kinds of dosa stuffed with anything from fried onions and potatoes to butter, fried vegetables or masala sauce. There's a big difference between working within a canon made up entirely of grains and vegetables and trying to work within a cuisine where all the meat has simply been removed — and that difference is delicious at Masalaa.

Best Roasted Green Chiles

Nick's Garden Center & Farm Market

There are a lot of places around where you can pick up roasted green chiles; hell, some Wal-Marts roast 'em right in front of the store. But we like to get our bags full of Hatch chiles at Nick's. For one thing, Nick's is a garden center, which means the roasters are set up among the trees, vegetable stands and bedding plants — a setting much closer to nature than, say, a truck-stop sidewalk or highway off-ramp. For another, the smell of the chiles mingling with the smell of the fresh flowers and peaty potting soil is one of our favorite smells on earth. And finally, Nick's roasts a lot of chiles, which means that, on a good day, you can smell the place working from a mile away and just follow your nose.

Best Salsa

Los Carboncitos

Courtesy Los Carboncitos Highlands Facebook
At Los Carboncitos, salsa is an elemental part of the meal, and every table is supplied with a caddy full of different varieties. No chips, though: That chips-and-salsa thing is an American invention, and Los Carboncitos is about as far as you can get from an American restaurant without updating your passport. This bright spot operates like a cool, urban Mexico City diner, offering comfort foods, tacos, huaraches and messy breakfast plates — all begging to be slathered with any one of the house's four custom salsas, ranging in heat and flavor from smoothly savory to napalm death.

Best Sandwiches in a Pancake House

Toast

Mark Antonation
Toast is a real eye-opener. Not only does it serve great breakfasts — including the town's best pancakes — but it offers a terrific lineup of sandwiches. From the simplest apple-and-brie sandwich (made with tart Fujis and a smear of cranberry pecan aioli) to a smartly fusion-y peppered chicken wrap with queso añejo, smoked chile cream and fresh salsa to a stunning curried chicken salad with chèvre, they're all masterful. Now, if only Toast would stay open for dinner...

Best Seafood Restaurant

Oceanaire Seafood Room

Although Oceanaire is beloved for the chicken-fried oysters and delightful bacon steaks with which it's slowly murdering a certain restaurant critic, this restaurant is really a classic fish house that looks like a gilt ocean liner from the early twentieth century. Each day, the menu lists the fish that have been delivered fresh from distributors around the world: Loup de mer, mako shark, Arctic char and blowfish have all had their moment on this menu alongside the traditional cods and salmon, and chef Matt Mine's kitchen knows how to handle every single one of them. Whether you order the simplest grilled salmon or sole meunière or the stuffed sole with brie or whole Arctic char glazed in soy, a meal at Oceanaire is sure to go swimmingly.

Best Second-Date Dinner

Fruition

Fruition
What? You actually got a second date? Well, good for you. Now the trick is to make the new love of your life think that you're a person of sophistication and taste — the sort who knows not to comb his hair with the salad fork or challenge the hostess to a drinking contest in the middle of the dining room. And where better to prove (or pretend) that you know your stuff than at Fruition — Denver's ultimate melding of casual and upscale sensibilities, of comfort food and classical technique. Chefs Alex Seidel and Drew Inman and partner/FOH man Paul Attardi have used their years of experience to a create a restaurant that serves the kind of food your mom might've made if your mom was Betty Crocker, Julia Child and Alain Ducasse all rolled into one, in an atmosphere that's charming, accessible — and intimate.

Best Strip-Mall Burger

Smashburger

Meat candy. That's the only way to describe the thin, crispy, lacy rind of caramelized beef juice that fries up around the edges of a perfectly smashed smashburger at Smashburger — the new, homegrown chain that actually came up with a different way to do burgers, smashing them down on a very hot grill, then letting customers pick from a DIY list of add-ons. In retrospect, it's no surprise that this innovative mix of a Chipotle-style fast-casual operation and gourmet burger-making sensibilities came together in Denver. We are a cowtown, after all, and arguably the birthplace of the cheeseburger, so it's only fitting that the next evolution of the hamburger should occur right here in the Mile High.

Best Sushi

Sushi Den

Sushi Den
Sushi is simplicity personified in a culinary tradition that already values the most basic, the most unadorned, the most spare presentation of ingredients imaginable. Yet any meal at Sushi Den is complicated by the fact that owner Toshi Kizaki has worked for the past twenty years to institute a system whereby the sushi we get in Denver is almost as fresh and pure (and occasionally, expensive) as what's being eaten at the same moment thousands of miles away. With a buyer in Japan, an account with FedEx, a team of expert sushi chefs and a commitment to freshness that broaches the bounds of common sense, Sushi Den serves the very best sushi in Denver — a fact that becomes plainly obvious from the first bite of meltingly soft uni, gleaming o-toro or any one of the house's daily specials.

Best Sushi in the Last Place You'd Expect It

Mori Sushi Bar

There are people who have been going to Mori for decades, since long before Coors Field and LoDo existed, people who somehow happened on this sushi bar in the back of an old VFW hall and got hooked. Although Mori has gone more upscale in recent years — even adding a sake bar — it's still a comfortable spot, with booths patched with duct tape and an extensive, inexpensive roster of sushi.

Best Sushi Restaurant

Sushi Sasa

Sushi Sasa/Instagram
Sushi Sasa seemed perfect the minute it opened. Odd, then, that it seems to only get better. Or maybe not, because chef/owner Wayne Conwell is the sort of person who strives to best even himself. From the gorgeous white-on-white dining room (which is usually packed) to the sushi bar at the back and the product of the cooks working behind it, nothing here is less than coolly and confidently excellent. Though not entirely traditional, the menu is firmly grounded in the years of classical training that Conwell went through before striking out on his own. To experience Denver's best sushi restaurant at its best, surrender to the chef, the kitchen and the season, order the omakase tasting menu, then sit back and let the night unfold as it will.

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