Best Sausages 2011 | Il Mondo Vecchio | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Sausages

Il Mondo Vecchio

Mark DeNittis, Denver's high priest of salumi, is a sausage-slinging genius, his pristine laboratory of pig — and the state's only USDA-inspected salumeria — a shrine to dry-cured sausages and fresh sausage links made with amore from a hot-blooded Italian who's devoted his career to pimping meaty, salty, pudgy ropes and rings of porky goodness. Sausage-making is his passion, and after biting off more than we can chew — hot Italian sausage flecked with crushed red pepper, breakfast sausage injected with Stranahan's whiskey, British-style beer bangers, German beer brats, Greek loukanika, Polish sausages and Mexican chorizo — we still want more.

Best Seafood Restaurant

TAG

Troy Guard, chef/owner of TAG and the just-opened TAG|RAW BAR, grew up in Hawaii, which may explain why his board at TAG is a fish-lover's deep-sea dream, floating such dishes as Maine diver scallops puddled in a parsnip-vanilla purée and sushi rolls tucked with yellowfin or lobster. Guard's infatuation with aquatics spans the world, and he embraces a universe of sea creatures that you rarely find on Denver restaurant menus. To wit: South African black ruff, a blunt-snouted species that's been known to wander a long way from home, even surfacing in the waters off the southern coast of Massachusetts. But even if it featured a bottom-feeder from the floor of a muddy swamp, we'd still fall hook, line and sinker for any dish created by Guard. In Denver's pond, he's a very big fish.

Best Spaghetti and Meatballs

Lou's Food Bar

Frank Bonanno oversees a burgeoning group of local restaurants, the newest of which is Lou's Food Bar, a down-to-earth American comfort-food den with an affinity for market-driven French influences and, on occasion, Italian-American dalliances. This is a neighborhood joint, pulsating with lively crowds, where you can sample a plate of portly housemade sausages followed by Frenchy escargot bobbing in butter and end with spaghetti and meatballs. Bonanno could pull flavor out of a newspaper, but his spaghetti and meatballs, thick-walled blades of bucatini swathed in a straight-up tomato sauce whomped with garlic and overlaid with pudgy meatballs stuffed with housemade mozzarella, is a wistful tribute to what life was like before pasta was relegated to purgatory.

Best Specialty Hot Dog

Biker Jim's Gourmet Hot Dogs

Danielle Lirette

Biker Jim Pittenger used to repo cars for a living, but several years ago he ditched the lucrative life of dumping Dodge trucks to wrangle wieners — fat, juicy, flame-licked dogs that he dispatches from his downtown Denver carts, as well as his just-opened brick-and-mortar restaurant. The un-ordinary sausages — reindeer, elk, venison, yak and pheasant among them — are taut and thick-skinned, and when you sink your fangs into the plump flesh, smothered with grilled onions caramelized in Coca-Cola and squiggled with ropes of cream cheese, they combust in a culinary explosion that makes you wonder why you'd ever wrap your lips around anyone else's wiener.

Best Specialty Pizza

Brava!

Mikhaila Costa

Weeks, months or years from now, when someone decides it's time to compile a compendium of Denver's high priests of pizza, dough-slinging genius David Bravdica should occupy the centerfold. A former airport manager-turned-pie peddler, Bravdica now operates a wood-fired pizza wagon that squats on the 16th Street Mall, an 850-degree powerhouse of smoldering Missouri oak wood. When Bravdica yanks the thin-crusted, misshapen pies, smeared with unadulterated San Marzano fruit and blotted with orbs of creamy mozzarella, from the embers, they're charred, bubbly and insanely delicious. His crusts need no improvement, nor do his ingredients, many of which originate in Colorado: The pepperoni and sausage are procured from Il Mondo Vecchio, the goat cheese is made at Jumpin' Good Goat Dairy in Buena Vista, the herbs are grown by Grower's Organic, and even the flour is sourced locally. In Bravdica's crust we trust.

Best Steakhouse

Elway's Cherry Creek

Elway's Cherry Creek is a lot of things, including a meat market — meeting a potential mate, meeting up for a drink, meeting a moneyed sugar daddy or meeting a pair of enhanced breasts that make you slap-happy. But that's just foreplay, because at the meat of the matter is the real beef: majestic slabs of seasoned steer weeping with bloody juices; ruddy prime rib seeping with the same; classic beef tartare; a steak chili that deserves its own monument. Although the cow is king here, even the usual-suspect steakhouse side dishes of au gratin potatoes, creamed spinach and creamed corn — and creatively tweaked sidekicks of Brussels sprouts hash, roasted cauliflower and sweet-potato risotto — separate Elway's from the rest of the herd.

Best Street Taco

Carniceria y Taqueria La Flor de Michoacán

At promptly 4 p.m. every Friday, Saturday and Sunday, the graveled parking lot of Carniceria y Taqueria La Flor de Michoacán begins to fill up with a brotherhood of taco warriors: burly men drawn by the mingled scents of char and sizzle permeating the air from a makeshift, smoke-filled canvas tent. They occasionally glance toward the TV or give a cursory nod toward the kid trying to sell bootlegged CDs, but they mostly huddle around the affable taco chief who's tending to a pineapple-crowned spit, slicing off marinated nubs of pork that he slides into griddled, grease-glossed corn tortillas, dusts with chopped onions, cilantro and radishes and splashes with salsa. All of the street tacos here are the best versions imaginable, flavored with undeniable street cred.

Best Street-Food Gathering

Justice League of Street Food

Last summer, a SWAT team of Denver street-food slingers gathered in a graveled parking lot just beyond the ballpark to play curbside hosts to hundreds upon hundreds of foodophiles, all of whom showed up to get a taste of the city's best pavement cuisine. The fleet of trucks and carts — Biker Jim, Steuben's, Pinche Tacos, Deluxe Burger and the Biscuit Bus among them — called themselves the Justice League of Street Food. We call them muscle-flexing superheroes and can't wait to see what new powers they display this summer, as they turn out everything from bánh mì and biscuits with buttermilk fried chicken to pork-belly tacos and pulled-pork sandwiches, one mobile meal at a time.

Best Sushi in a Non-Sushi Restaurant

Elway's Downtown

The staff at Elway's Downtown clearly saw what a bloody steak could do for a carnivore's libido, so last spring, they unshucked a sushi bar: proof that the junction of toro and tenderloin is just as natural as that of beer and pretzels. The display — exquisitely fresh, glistening fish that glows like silk — rivals the quality of what you'll encounter at restaurants where sushi headlines the menu. You can order sushi from the dining room, or just kick back at the bar with some sake and watch as the stark white plates surface with artfully arranged, translucently thin slices of sea bass carpaccio dotted with tobiko and chives, or new-wave hamachi, ringed with jalapeños and glittering with cilantro microgreens.

Best Sushi Restaurant

Sushi Sasa

Sushi Sasa/Instagram

It's been six years since Wayne Conwell opened Sushi Sasa, bringing to Denver the new-style Japanese cuisine he'd learned under Iron Chef Morimoto. Six years of dishes punched up with the influences of Italy and France, six years of stellar fish, six years of imaginative omakase menus exploring the best Japanese cuisine the city has to offer. Six years of Conwell staying spot-on in his execution of everything from tenderloin to toro. But last year, Sushi Sasa gave us even more reason to love it: Conwell expanded the sleek, intimate dining room, more than doubling the number it could seat. And though reservations are still required, making them months in advance is not.

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