An image from the Rocky Mountain News' online version of its Denver@150 section.
Today, the Rocky Mountain News and the Denver Post feature special sections honoring Denver's 150th birthday -- and they're not merely clones of each other. Indeed, both have qualities that recommend them, with the Rocky's concept proving livelier and more substantial and the Post's pages turning out better from a visual standpoint.
I dropped by Gaetano's last night for a Tasty Treat (a sausage and green chili strips baked in a pizza crust) and a taste of history. Wynkoop Holdings bought this classic joint back in 2005, taking over a restaurant that started as Ralph and Mamie Smaldone's Tejon Street Cafe back in 1934, then moved to 3760 Tejon Street and became Gaetano's.
The Smaldones soon became known for more than their marinara sauce, of course; the Gaetano's menu notes that the family's "history is rife with tales of g
For more photos from the contest, go to www.westword.com\slideshow
It's good to be the judge, and I should know since I spent Saturday afternoon dressed in a black robe and a wig, drinking beer and making history -- beer-drinking history.
The event was the thirteenth annual Beerdrinker of the Year contest at the Wynkoop Brewing Company, and I'd been asked by Colorado beer writer and PR man Marty Jones to be one of seven people choosing would become the next Beerdrinker of the Year.
A stout t
Dick Kreck.
Dick Kreck is no longer a staffer at the Denver Post, as he makes clear in a voicemail introduction still lingering in the Post system: In the message, he explains that he accepted a buyout offer circa June 2007 and won't be in the office again -- "ever." Nonetheless, he continues to write an occasional beer column for the paper under the banner "Mr. Beer" -- and he plans to continue doing so despite a complaint he received from an Arizona-based homebrewing-supply company named, yes
The fight is on at Colorado Public Radio, where one high-powered boardmember has resigned, and at the Denver Post, where the bloodletting has begun in earnest.
An historic event: Dick Kreck signing books at Phil's Place.Phil's Place, a watering hole at 3463 Larimer Street, was the unlikely setting Sunday for a book-signing event by Dick Kreck, the former Denver Post scribe who's the author of Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family. After all, for close to sixty years the Smaldones ran Gaetano's, an Italian restaurant that was the most respectable of their business ventures.
But then, Kreck eats at Phil's Place pretty often -- the kitch
Dick Kreck will be reading from his book Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family tonight at the Tattered Cover in LoDo, with Chuck and Gene, the sons of Clyde Smaldone, on hand to answer questions about their infamous relatives.
But for a real taste of what the Smaldone family meant to Denver, you have to head to Gaetano's, the Italian restaurant at 3760 Tejon Street that the Smaldones ran from 1947 (it replaced the Tejon Cafe that Ralph and Mamie Smaldone had started down the bl
