It’s been a smashing week for Smashburger. The Denver-based chain of fast-casual burger restaurants has suddenly exploded, with plenty of ink documenting how it’s gone big-time. First, Nation’s Restaurant News tapped the operation as one of its “Hot Concepts” for 2009 — a very big deal in the highly competitive…
Charlie Master — well-known floorman-about-town and scion of the former Mel’s restaurant empire — is packing it in at Sketch, leaving his gig with Jesse Morreale and Sean Yontz to become the new FOH guy for Goose Sorensen at Solera. “I’m excited about going to work for Goose,” Charlie told…
This, ladies and gentleman, is why Denver is awesome. One burger (with a little bacon), one order of fries, from a place that no one even thinks of when they’re listing the best restaurants in Denver — and yet this has quickly become one of my favorite fallbacks. Name it…
I have no use for fusion cuisine, for the deliberate fuckery that comes of trying to jam two or three or five culinary traditions together on one plate, for the dumb manhandling of food- — torturing it and forcing it into unnatural configurations of time or flavor or place. Of…
These days, it seems like every city has a Taste of Whatever-Ville. Taste of Dayton, Taste of Barstow, Taste of Weehawken, and so forth. What’s more, it seems that, in the larger cities, every neighborhood wants to get in on the action with its own mini-festival celebrating whatever it was…
Because I live and work in Colorado, and because my livelihood revolves almost entirely around food, I get asked quite a lot about that one food item for which Colorado will always be known: the Rocky Mountain oyster.Yes, we’re talking about balls. I’ve eaten them a couple of times, and…
I’ve been writing a lot about burgers lately, so this week’s list reflects nothing more than my personal obsession du jour. Below are my top five burgers in Denver (and beyond).If I miss your favorite, be sure to add it in the comments. With any luck, together we can come…
I’ve got good news from Happy Noodle House, at 835 Walnut Street in Boulder. Not only did this joint that I reviewed two months ago start offering lunch-delivery service to its fans, but it has a new menu. This one, it seems, has bent even further in the international direction,…
Yesterday I was called out of a very important Cafe strategy meeting at the Fainting Goat to take a call from a fellow scribbler, up against a deadline at the Chicago Tribune and looking for a few words about local chain Smashburger. “Tell me,” he said, “on a scale of one…
Park Burger, which I review this week, has almost a Sideways feel — what with its wine list and stocked bar, its air of excess and guilty luxury. The toppings even include brie, one of those old-school, upscale benchmarks. But there ain’t no brie on the menu at Old School…
Sitting in the bar, I knew I needed a burger. A couple of them, maybe. Big, fat burgers, mid-rare and bleeding juice over the sides of the buns. I needed the kind of burgers they show in commercials — straight-up porn-star burgers, all greasy and fat and bad for me…
Denver lost another restaurant when Nine75 went dark on Sunday, following a weekend full of parties to mark the imminent demise of a place that had already cheated death once before. When Nine75 opened four years ago under the umbrella of the then-burgeoning Sullivan Restaurant Group, it quickly made a…
Right this minute, the future of ten of America’s great food cities is being decided. By readers of the Huffington Post. No, seriously. This isn’t a joke. As you are reading this, the highest-rated, single-most popular story at HuffPo is a poll for the ten best food cities. Denver is on…
Sitting in the bar, I knew I needed a burger. A couple of them, maybe. Big, fat burgers, mid-rare and bleeding juice over the sides of the buns. I needed the kind of burgers they show in commercials — straight-up porn-star burgers, all greasy and fat and bad for me…
The space at 975 Lincoln Street is dark now. The doors are locked, the lights are out. Yesterday, George Eder and some of his guys from Jet Entertainment Group gutted the place, taking out everything they could — food and dry-stock, the art from the walls. All that’s left are…
It looks as though Seven Eurobar (which had, at some point in its brief history, become just “Seven” or, occasionally, “Seven on Pearl”) has gone dark at 1035 Pearl Street in Boulder. No one is picking up the phone (even though the voicemail still encourages callers to leave reservation requests)…
I did a reading last week at the Tattered Cover and it was nice — drew a good crowd, met some nice people, signed a lot of copies of Cooking Dirty. During the event, I paused briefly in my witty, stream-of-consciousness banter about kitchens and cooks and all the dirty…
Friday, July 31st at 9 a.m.–that’s the opening that Snooze owner Jon Schlegel is promising for the second location of his two-unit breakfast empire. “I don’t know if you’ve peeked inside,” Schlegel said to me this morning (I have), “but it’s so close.” And man, it better be. Because while the public…
As mentioned briefly in this week’s review of Mel’s in Greenwood Village, the original Mel’s (the one in Cherry Creek that closed last year) was one of Denver’s premier training houses — a place where it sometimes seems an entire generation of local chefs did their time before moving on…
This just kills me… Got an email this morning from Sage Restaurant Group’s Denver-based COO, Peter Karpinski, and now I feel as though I must immediately pack up all my stuff and move to Portland just to be closer to the new Urban Farmer restaurant open inside the Nines hotel there…
I’ve been eating a lot of pizza lately. Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve made two trips to Brooklyn M.C.’s for both pizzas and calzones, stopped by Famous for a slice, and one night, too lazy to think it through any further, Laura even called in an order to…
We’d timed our exit as skillfully as possible, Laura and I. The bill was paid, the plates cleared, and we were sitting at our table at Mel’s Bar and Grill almost silently, our heads down, making just enough uncomfortable small talk to dissuade anyone from coming over and starting a…
