Unlike certain high-profile bakers in Colorado and Oregon, Sam Slade, owner of the recently opened Valhalla Cakes, is clear about one thing: She wouldn’t shy away from making a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. In fact, she doesn’t shy away from much: A veteran of Le Bakery Sensual, Slade…

Good help is hard to find, and that’s especially true in a booming restaurant scene like Denver’s. But the partners at There, which expanded from Telluride to Denver this spring, are up for the challenge. As head chef Ben Knaus explains, their plan involves “incentivizing seasons of good, steady work…

The restaurant business is a notoriously hard one. The job is physically demanding, hours are long, and shifts fall on nights and weekends, when everyone else is off. Most people wouldn’t call this fun. But Hosea Rosenberg isn’t most people — and not just because he’s one of the rare…

The year was 2006, and Kristofor Lofgren liked what he was hearing about sustainability and the farm-to-table movement. But why, he wondered, was the conversation always centered on terra firma? What about applying similar principles to the sea? Naysayers said it couldn’t be done, so Lofgren set out to prove…

Mary Nguyen is no stranger to tough decisions. After pursuing a career in finance, she woke up one day and realized it wasn’t for her. “I found myself spending more time reading books about food and downloading recipes off the Internet than learning about the financial markets,” she says, “so…

Lonni Byrd, chef and co-owner of Love, Peace & Sol Cafe, could use a little love right now. Byrd – the subject of last week’s Chef and Tell interview — just received notice from her landlord that her lease at 3435 Albion Street in Park Hill is being terminated. And so…

Vegan soul food? Isn’t that concept a little odd, like baseball without a seventh-inning stretch, or a backyard barbecue without beer? Not to Lonni Byrd, chef and co-owner of Love, Peace & Sol Cafe, a vegan soul-food restaurant that opened in Park Hill this winter. “We knew the anomaly of…

Denver isn’t the one-horse steakhouse town it used to be. But excitement over this city’s culinary coming of age didn’t make it any easier for Dan Kane to handle the closure of Sullivan’s Steakhouse a year ago. “It was emotional, standing in an empty kitchen — no equipment, no nothing,”…

Some of the best dishes I ate as a critic were at sibling restaurants Oak at Fourteenth and Acorn, owned by partners Steve Redzikowski and Bryan Dayton, from the class-defining kale-apple salad to the lamb shawarma. But as I noted in my reviews, desserts always seemed underwhelming. So last summer,…

Opening a restaurant is like running a sprint that lasts 26.2 miles, not 200 meters. So we weren’t sure if Paul Reilly, the chef/co-owner of Beast + Bottle, who’s opening Coperta this summer, would have a moment to breathe, let alone talk to us — but he did. Graciously stepping…

Brian Wilson has heard a Beach Boys joke or two in his life — but music isn’t a laughing matter for this executive chef, who hails from a line of professional musicians and even studied jazz performance and composition in college. For the past eight years, however, Wilson has fine-tuned…

Few chefs have done as much for a cuisine as Julia Child, who convinced a generation of Americans to put down their can openers and make coq au vin. But Nobu Matsuhisa is in the same category: The charming chef and restaurateur revolutionized Japanese food thirty years ago and continues…

The Preservery, which opened in RiNo’s Backyard on Blake development this spring, is a product of its time: part market, part live-music venue, part restaurant and more. The relaxed, community-minded operation is a far cry from the intense, Michelin two-star restaurant in London where chef de cuisine Brendan Russell spent…

Bob Sargent’s first obsession was Chinese cuisine, but when he decided to open his own restaurant last year, the Boulder-based caterer chose a concept that had nothing to do with General Tso’s chicken. Instead, the Ghost BBQ & Spirits specializes in smoky plates of ribs, pulled pork and brisket. Find…

In this era of celebrity chefs and bigger-is-better restaurants, food has become synonymous with entertainment. But to Bradford Heap, food is serious business, and not just because his livelihood is wrapped up in Colterra, Salt and Wild Standard, his three Boulder-area restaurants. The classically trained chef believes that what we…

As a certain aging rocker likes to sing, every picture tells a story. But restaurants do, too, and the one told by Stowaway Coffee + Kitchen is largely autobiographical. Launched this winter by Amy Cohen and her husband, Hayden Barnie, Stowaway draws together strands of Cohen’s life. There are influences…

Restaurants have been popping up in non-traditional spaces for years now, housed in everything from shipping containers to repurposed industrial buildings. But a restaurant inside a library? That’s a head-turner. When Seeds Library Cafe opened last year inside the Boulder Public Library, it served a much-needed purpose: giving patrons a…

Like many kids, Jesse Vega dreamed of being an astronaut when he grew up. Now the thought makes him shudder. “Space scares the hell out of me,” says Vega, who joined Central Bistro & Bar as a line cook in 2013 and took over as executive chef in November. “I…

You never know when your luck’s going to change. But with the benefit of hindsight, Nicholas Ames, executive chef at Abejas, which opened last year in Golden, can pinpoint the moment when his life took a turn for the better. It wasn’t when he succeeded John Broening as executive chef…

When he was young, Todd Somma was diagnosed with a severe peanut allergy. Someone else might have taken that as a sign to avoid the food industry, but not Somma. While he studiously avoids restaurants where his allergy might be a problem — for example, he’s only eaten at two…

For a guy who’s made his living in professional kitchens, Max MacKissock recognizes that his early forays into cooking weren’t the stuff that dreams — much less careers — are made of. He remembers burning his tongue on fried smelts as a young child at a fish house back east…

To run a successful restaurant, you need to serve good food. Behind the scenes, you also need a good numbers guy, and Mark Reggiannini of Cafe Marmotte happens to be both. Reggiannini, who owns the casual French bistro with his wife, Mairen Reagan, got his start as a math major,…