Audio By Carbonatix
If you’ve been reading the Cafe Society blog (and you have
been reading the blog, haven’t you?), you already know that
Primebar — the highly anticipated, 400-seat restaurant
that opened late last week at 1515 Arapahoe Street, in the former home
of Palomino — lost its executive chef, Max
Mackissock (ex of Vita and, more recently, Alinea in
Chicago). A week before the doors even opened, Mackissock revealed that
he’d be moving on to boss the line at the new Squeaky Bean,
which opened earlier this week at 3301 Tejon Street, right next to
Rosa Linda’s Mexican Cafe. And taking his place at Primebar?
Carl Klein. A veteran and a serious pro, accustomed to the
sometimes strange bounces that a chef’s career can take, Klein was
already on board at Primebar as exec sous when Mackissock started
getting cold feet.
“Basically, the day he got hired, he called me,” Klein said when I
got him on the phone last Thursday, hours before his last
friends-and-family dinner, a day before Primebar’s official opening. He
and Mackissock had known each other for a while. Back at the start of
the decade, the two had worked together at the Great Northern
Tavern in Keystone. Mackissock “was actually my sous there,” Klein
told me. “So we were kind of flip-flopped.” And when Klein left Great
Northern to come down from the mountains, Mackissock took the top gig
there, before coming down to Denver himself to take a job at Vita. So
in a way, the situation at Primebar was just returning the favor
— proof of the weird ways that things work in the small, insular
and incestuous world of cooks and kitchens.
A rundown of Klein’s gigs reads like an abbreviated who’s-who and
what’s-what of Colorado kitchens. For a time he worked at Corridor
44 in Larimer Square, redoing the entire menu, patching up a
sinking ship almost run aground by Eric Laslow. He did the
Dish Bistro with Leigh Jones (helping her to come up with
the “global comfort food” concept she’s now running with at Jonesy’s
EatBar — same space, different name). There was Samplings
Wine Bar in Frisco, the Alpenglow Stube, and not one, but
two turns through Vesta Dipping Grill under Matt
Selby while also opening Steuben’s as a sous. Klein even did
some jungle time in the catering department of Denver Museum of Nature
& Science: “There just weren’t a whole lot of restaurants opening
at the time,” he explained.
But even with all those addresses in the rearview, Primebar is still
different. Luck and good timing put Klein in line for the exec’s gig,
but it hasn’t exactly been easy. Even with Mackissock sticking around
as a freebooting “consultant” for about a week in hopes of smoothing
over the transition, the timing was tight. Changes (especially
big changes) breed chaos.
And then there’s Primebar itself. It’s the biggest restaurant Klein
has ever worked and employs the biggest crew he’s ever had to boss.
“Jesus, I got fifty kitchen employees right now,” he told me. “The
schedule is a nightmare.”
The menu is large, too, and required some last-minute tinkering,
including the additions of bar food and approachable dishes that Klein
ran down for me like he was reading a prep list: “Snacks, pork-belly
sliders, someone said they wanted calamari so I had to do something
with calamari…”
But still, Klein was feeling good. He’d promoted Gabe Goddell
(who’d left Boulder’s Arugula to take a straight sous gig under
Klein) into his former post as exec sous, and they’d been doing mock
services all week, exercising the crews. The friends-and-family meals
scheduled for Thursday night would bring in two or three hundred
people, in staggered seatings. And the public opening was still a day
away.
He had plenty of time.
Leftovers: In the May 7 Second Helping, I wrote about
Hospoda, an excellent little Colorado-Czech bar/restaurant in
the space at 3763 Wynkoop Street that had been the Wynkoop Grill. I
loved the joint — especially the potato pancakes and green chile
— so I was glad to learn that it’s going to expand this summer:
adding a patio, paving the dirt parking lot, taking the bars off the
windows and changing up the menu.
I called to get the details from manager Peni LaRocco. The
plans for the patio were being submitted to the city and work would
start just as soon as the owners, Vlad and Irene Lesner,
got the go-ahead, she told me. And as for the menu?
“Nothing is going to be taken off,” she assured me. Instead, Irene’s
beef stroganoff will be added. And starting this week, Hospoda will
offer a night-time menu of burritos, tamales and chips and salsa.
Previously, the kitchen stopped serving at 5 p.m. Now, with this new
board, it will continue feeding the rummies right up until 10 p.m.,
when the bar closes. LaRocco told me that the owners have been looking
for a cook for some time now — “Someone who can learn Irene’s way
of cooking,” she explained — but, as yet, haven’t had any
luck.
Keep your fingers crossed. As good as the potato pancakes, schnitzel
and Colorado verde are when the sun is up, I eagerly anticipate the day
when I can get the same stuff after dark.
