Best After-Dinner Coffee 2011 | Flagstaff House | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best After-Dinner Coffee

Flagstaff House

Mark Antonation

A dinner at Flagstaff House is exemplary, and service doesn't flag after the meal is done. Even the most basic form of the restaurant's after-dinner coffee program is advanced: The eatery brews a proprietary house blend, made from six different African and Asian beans. More serious caffeine hounds can order from the French-press menu, which includes single-origin roasts from Ethiopia and Kona. The same focus is applied to espresso: every shot pulled, whether for consumption straight or as a foam-topped latte or cappuccino, comes from a blend of seven kinds of espresso beans. No matter what you order, your coffee hits the table accompanied by a massive, artfully arranged tray of accoutrements, which include pastel-hued chocolate mints, various sugars in multiple colors and house-made whipped cream. With such a mélange of sweets, dessert begins to look entirely optional.

Best Afternoon Tea

Denver Tea Room

The Denver Tea Room is tucked into a front room of a nineteenth-century Colfax mansion that now houses a bed-and-breakfast, and it's the perfect setting for lazy, weekend English-style tea service as well as book clubs, which meet in the room at night for heady intellectual discussion over hot drinks and cookies. During the holidays, the tea room (no relation to the legendary downtown spot of the same name) also serves an elaborate high tea on linen-clothed tables — or in a cozy, private parlor. Never-empty teacups supplement a multi-course affair that includes shepherd's pie, a tea tray of scones and finger sandwiches, and sweet spice cakes. You can while away several hours with this ritual, sinking back into a velvety couch in the sunroom for a long conversation.

Best American Restaurant

Jonesy's EatBar

In just a few short years, Jonesy's EatBar has become one of Denver's favorite haunts for American grub, seducing diners all over the city with its sassy board of classics: incredible fries, duck-confit posole, shrimp and crawfish grits, sliders lobbed with lamb. And in true, easy American fashion, these dishes are best consumed at the bar, where you'll enjoy the quick (and quick-witted) drink-slingers who are generous with straight-up shots and equally adept at pouring cleverly fashioned cocktails that are all too easy to absorb.

Best Arepa

Empanada Express

Mark Manger

Empanada Express is faithful to the cooking traditions of Venezuela, the owners' home country, and the arepas are excellent examples of this. Round cornmeal cakes about the diameter of a soda can are studded with kernels of corn and pressed flat, then pan-fried until crispy. They might be coated with melted cheese or used to sandwich filling: piquant shredded chicken, savory black beans, sweet fried plantains that explode out the sides as you wrestle the arepa into your mouth. Empanada Express serves all versions with both a spicy, creamy tomato sauce and a garlicky chimichurri; a squirt of either brings the whole delicious snack together.

Best Bakery

Wooden Spoon Cafe & Bakery

Mark Manger

Saunter into Jason and Jeanette Burgett's stylish meet-and-greet bakery, and you'll be immediately bombarded with sensory overload — the kind that makes your double chin drop in disbelief. If the scents of exquisite fresh-baked cookies, pastel-hued French macaroons, ooey-gooey sticky buns that rise like the sun, perfect fruit tortes, pies, cakes and scones don't give you a sugar high, biting into any one of their sublime creations will. Wooden Spoon is a fantasy world of flirtatious sweets, of breads that crest above the rest, of heavenly breakfast glories mounted on soft brioche, and of comforting, stomach-swelling sandwiches. The half-dozen tables are nearly always clogged with regulars who probably have to race-walk to snatch a coveted seat; they must not eat too many of the goodies sold here.

Best Banh Mi

Ba Le Sandwiches

Mark Antonation

Part market, part sandwich shop, this bare-bones spot in a dilapidated strip mall boasts nothing more than a counter, a couple of refrigerators and a wall of self-serve frozen-yogurt machines. But that's enough, because those refrigerators hold everything needed to make authentic banh mi. Ba Le offers almost twenty varieties of the Vietnamese sandwich, illustrated in backlit pictures on the wall above the counter and all prepared to order. A crunchy, house-baked baguette is warmed up and then stuffed with silky pâtés, shaved meats made of various parts of pig, a smattering of vinegary pickled vegetables, jalapeño slices, a smear of mayo and, in the true spirit of banh mi's homeland, enough fresh cilantro (stems and all) and crisp cucumbers to make a salad. Once completed, the sandwich is wrapped in butcher paper and secured with a rubber band. And if you simply need more of one of the ingredients, Ba Le sells the pâté, the pickles and the baguettes in bulk.

Best Bar for Fine Dining

twelve

Mark Manger

When Jeff Osaka left Los Angeles and moved to Colorado, he started looking for a turnkey spot where he could open a restaurant, a place that just needed a little elbow grease and no extensive renovations, so that he could focus on what he really cared about: the food. He found such a space on Larimer Street, a former BBQ joint with a great oak bar on one side of the room. That massive bar remains the focal point of the dining room, and it's also the best place to experience Osaka's food. Grab a seat there and eat your way through the seasonal menu (it changes every month, or twelve times a year), marveling at Osaka's work with foie gras and scallops, tasting the humble simplicity of the dishes from your humble seat. At the bar at twelve, dinner becomes all about the food, without any distractions.

Best Bar in the Suburbs

Virgilio's Pizzeria & Wine Bar

Courtesy Virgilio's Pizzeria & Wine Bar Facebook

By 5 p.m. on most nights, the bar and lounge at Virgilio's Pizza & Wine Bar is a sea of bodies, butts bumping into one another like bumper cars at an amusement park, but no one seems to mind the jostle, possibly because they're all having too much fun getting tipsy — which is easy to do when the wine catalogue features more than fifty globe-trotting selections by the glass, in three- and six-ounce pours. The back-lit bar, complete with a 32-bottle Enomatic wine system imported from Italy, is also stocked with nearly thirty beers on draft and by the bottle, many of which are Italian. It's a convivial scene, bolstered by two daily happy hours, live music on Friday and Saturday nights, and some of the best New York-style pizza, garlic knots and burrata in the area.

Best Bartender

Kevin Burke

Kevin Burke's knowledge of everything behind the bar runs deep, and when he pours a patron a drink, it often comes with a side of vineyard history, a nugget of information about why he used one type of tequila over another, or a taste of something rare on tap that the drinker might otherwise have missed. His understanding of alcoholic beverages is broad, extending to beer, wine and spirits alike. But while his ability to educate about any of those is humbling, his strongest skill may be the precision with which he crafts cocktails, executing flawless classics, mixing up his signature drinks or, most impressive, actually listening to what really floats a drinker's boat and making something new and exciting based on that information. A strong believer in the role of the barman as a service provider, Burke does it all with elegance, style and genuine concern that he sling a perfect drink for the drinker, every single time.

Best BBQ

Jabo's Bar-Be-Q

Mark Manger

When Jabo Lawson abandoned his mobile barbecue pit and moved indoors, he traded up for a custom-built, in-house smoker, where he can now cook 700 pounds of meat at once. He uses that smoker to make tender brisket, piquant Louisiana-style hot links, pulled pork shoulder and, best of all, pork ribs, which are two inches thick, layered with opaque fat, deeply infused with throat-stinging smoke and so tender the meat practically melts into a puddle in your mouth. Everything that comes out of that smoker gets coated in a sauce based on a recipe from Shreveport, Louisiana, and made at varying levels of spiciness, every version delicious. By the time you've smothered your barbecue craving with meat, meat and more meat (and maybe a few sides), you'll think you can't eat another bite. But then Jabo's serves up a Utah scone, an airy puff of dough whose deep-fried, golden-brown crust is painted with a smear of sticky homemade honey butter, the perfect sweet kiss at the end of your meal.

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