Audio By Carbonatix
Loopy.
That’s the word New York Times food writer Bryan Miller used to describe the service he encountered at the handful of Denver restaurants he visited during a recent trip. Having visited hundreds of Denver restaurants over the past several years myself, I not only agree with that assessment, I would say that Miller was being kind.
Poor service has become an accepted part of the Denver dining experience–and the situation isn’t getting any better as the number of local restaurants steadily increases, accelerating already high waitstaff turnover. Many restaurants are reluctant to waste time training people who are just going to leave a month later (and those who stay often have that snooty attitude that stems from knowing they can easily find work elsewhere); as a result, the city has a large pool of ignorant, unskilled waiters. For the most part, Denver’s waitstaff population is composed of college students, people who are qualified to do other work but are between jobs, and people who aren’t qualified to do much of anything.
Denver diners only aggravate the problem: They seem compelled to leave the standard gratuity even when the service has been appalling–we’ve all heard about the waiter who chased the patron into the street to publicly humiliate him over a stingy tip–and they’re usually reluctant to complain to management.
In all fairness, there’s another reason the professional–and professional-behaving–waiter is an endangered species: No one wants to cast his lot with such an unstable industry, particularly one that involves groveling to the general public, some members of which treat waiters like old cheese. Even so, there are still some experienced, knowledgeable waiters out there–even if Miller didn’t run into any during his stopover.
But then, Miller didn’t visit Cliff Young’s. If he had, not only would he have emerged with a different–albeit skewed–perspective on Denver dining, he probably would have genuflected on his way out of the place. In a town where restaurants wither faster than field greens, service is what has kept this fourteen-year-old establishment alive–and able to survive a change of ownership after Stu Jackson (of the Denver Burglar Alarm empire) bought the namesake restaurant from Cliff Young five years ago.
In the months following the sale, scuttlebutt had Cliff’s going downhill, its food going downhill, its service going downhill. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Our recent meals there have been nearly flawless.
If anything has changed, it’s the clientele. Jackson entertains a lot of clients at the restaurant, and they make up “about 30 or 40 percent of Cliff’s business,” he says. In fact, those customers are the main reason Jackson bought the restaurant in the first place. “It made sense to me to have someplace to trade favors, to pamper my clients,” he says. “And when I bought it, high-end dining was still big, so we were packing them in.”
Since then, though, Denverites have followed a national trend: eating out more often than they did five years ago, but eating at less fancy places. Now the majority of Cliff’s customers are people who visit only once or twice a year, for special occasions. Last summer, hoping to entice a few of them into stopping by more often, Cliff’s lowered prices on about half the entrees to under $20; when that failed to bring in more business, the restaurant raised the prices back up. This past April it stopped serving lunch, too. “Thank God for the banquets,” says general manager Nunzio Marino.
Marino is responsible for Cliff’s impeccable service, that perfect blend of occasional kowtowing and invisible servitude that makes eating here such an indulgence. “Details,” Marino says. “That’s what it comes down to. We have a manual we give to all employees; they must know it by heart. It spells out the whole service sequence, how we do everything. That way, there are no mistakes. In my opinion, service is why many people come here.”
It’s a large portion of what you’re paying for, too–and you pay plenty at Cliff’s. But that big ticket also buys you excellent food, classy scenery and the dreamy piano playing of Stuart Simon, who’s been with the eatery ten years now and who, night after night, pops his cherubic face into each banquette to inquire, “Is there anything I can play for you?”
Simon’s was one of many faces that became familiar during our meals at Cliff’s. Marino, a very hands-on guy, flitted around the dining room like a hummingbird, hovering just long enough at each table to gauge the quality of each customer’s experience. And then there was the group of waiters who shared responsibility for our meal: the captain who took our order and saw to wines; a waiter who brought the dishes and bread and refilled water glasses; and a busboy, who did the usual busboy things (with some overlap as each member of the trio helped another). For the most part, we were unaware of the group’s work, which is the true hallmark of good service. Oh, we noticed a few things here and there–a napkin placed behind the water glass to prevent splashing, utensils mysteriously replenished–but it was only later that we realized how wonderful the service had been. During the meal, it was sort of like having Radar O’Reilly waiting on us: Not once did we have to ask for anything, and when we did look up for something, it was already there.
The superb service left us free to relax and enjoy the food–and enjoy we did. Chef Juan Castaneda, who came from a Boston restaurant in 1994, faced the difficult task of taking over someone else’s kitchen and making it his; although he’s succeeded in giving the food his own stamp, he still manages to turn out Cliff’s classics. Sometimes they’re a little too classic: If we had any complaints with our meals, it was that some presentations looked dated. For instance, an exquisite appetizer mushroom torte ($8.50) in a puff-pastry crust ringed by a sweet tomato reduction and basil oil came garnished with two large sprigs of thyme standing upright in the middle of the torte. By itself, this wouldn’t have seemed odd, but then my second course came with a sprig each of thyme and rosemary standing in the middle of it, and ditto with my entree. It seemed a shame to waste such fresh, expensive herbs; by the third round, it was also getting silly.
Fortunately, no garnish distracted us from the escargot starter ($9.50). The six snails came bathed in a lemony garlic butter spiked with Pernod and topped with a thick lid of puff pastry. Although more Pernod would have been fine with us, the combination was well-balanced. So was the buffalo mozzarella salad ($7.50), which featured two big hunks of the cheese wrapped in a thin skin of grilled eggplant and then radicchio leaves (the kitchen must have been out of the Swiss chard listed on the menu); arugula and a tart strawberry balsamic vinaigrette added a bittersweet bite.
The salad of choice at Cliff Young’s, however, is the Caesar ($7.50)–one of the last still done tableside. Thankfully, the production was entertainingly subtle, with the captain making small talk while expertly smashing the garlic into the wooden bowl with a spoon, then ceremoniously adding each ingredient up to the final, gentle tossing of the romaine before the formidable dish was placed on the table. We hailed this Caesar: No cheap creaminess, no skimping on the anchovy or the Parmigiano-Reggiano–it was as close a reading of the original recipe as I’ve found. And it was fabulous.
The entrees could have suffered in comparison, but instead they stood on their own merits. And one, the peppered tuna ($24.50), literally stood–the large tuna steak, cooked a perfect medium-rare, had been perched on its side in another presentation that needed an update. The tuna may be one of Cliff’s classics, but that vertical thing is passe, and with the fish standing in a pool of soy-lemon butter surrounded by horseradish sprouts, the dish resembled a hedgehog coming out of a pond to eat some grass. Still, it all was delicious, particularly the sauce: a sweet, syrupy concoction set off by candied ginger. The oven-roasted duck ($22.50), with its crisp skin and delicate Roquefort sauce, looked a little more conservative; there was supposed to be lavender somewhere on the plate, but I never found it. I did, however, come across some julienned vegetables hidden beneath the mashed potatoes and a luscious port-poached pear.
The pastry tray tempted us with a few other fruits–Cliff’s signature almond tuile ($7.25) with fresh kiwi and strawberries and cognac truffles was hard to pass up–but the only way to end such a pleasure-seeking meal was with sinful desserts. Pastry chef Maria Flores makes at least two: the moist, nutty white-chocolate cake ($6.75) and the tiramisu ($6.50). The former came with an unbelievably rich, decadent chip of dark-chocolate-flavored Saint Andre cheese; the latter was just plain rich, an ideal melding of ladyfingers and mascarpone so complete that the ingredients merged into one.
We savored our desserts with two glasses of port from the restaurant’s choice selection–like the service, Cliff’s wine list is close to the best in town–and relaxed in the comfortable banquettes as piano music wafted across the soothingly lit dining room. When the waiter asked, “Do you need anything else?” we could answer honestly, with a very satisfied “No, thank you.
