Mikuni was not the first place in Denver to go low and easy with its sushi. It was not the first place to cater directly to the sushi neophyte by making raw fish fun. No, Hapa Sushi was there first. I reviewed Cherry Creek’s Hapa Sushi (the original is in…
For completely selfish reasons, I have spent years pushing for the fast-food-ification of sushi, firmly of the belief that the way people (non-foodie people, the droves who nightly flock to the Olive Gardens and Burger Kings of our bloated republic) discover and become comfortable with new foods is by first…
It’s been one helluva week for the Denver dining scene, with a rash of surprise closings. The saddest loss was Alto, the restaurant that Greg Goldfogel opened at 1320 15th Street (in the old Sambuca space) after he closed his beloved Cherry Creek institution, Ristorante Amore, which went down to…
Now I am not one that would ever lament the loss of a chain restaurant to the vicious machinations of the bankruptcy court. Matter of fact, I’ve been known to dance (just a little…) whenever I hear of another Olive Garden going dark and certainly didn’t lose any sleep over…
Not surprisingly, just as there were no authentic Mexican restaurants in Rochester when I was young, there were no sushi bars, either. And definitely no sushi drive-thrus, even though sushi started out as fast food. Long before Ray Kroc came squalling into this world, preserved fish and balls of rice…
According to Clemente Martinez, the owner of Brandon’s Pub (the strange Mexican sports bar at 955 Lincoln Street that went dark last week), his place wasn’t closing so much as taking a brief vacation. He insisted that the plan was to take a short hiatus, cool himself off a little…
This past week I reviewed Sketch–a restaurant that serves almost nothing but meat. And a little cheese. And a few scattered, random plates of olives, cherries, bits of this, pieces of that. I liked the place for its simplicity, for the plain way that it offers some of the best…
This is me jumping up and down in excitement. This is me rubbing my hands with glee. Yeah, sure, 250 Steele Street has a serious curse on it. Like a Curse of the Mummy-style curse. Abandon hope all ye who open a restaurant here. This space has swallowed more restaurants…
On the one hand, you have Sketch, which is trying to make a restaurant out of nothing more than a salumi bar and the best intentions. On the other, you have D Bar — Keegan Gerhard’s attempt to take some people’s favorite part of dinner (dessert) and build a restaurant…
Almost everyone at Sketch Food and Wine knows me. The above-the-line guys for certain, some of the bartenders. I have acted well and poorly in their establishment, used it for celebrations and decompressions numerous times since it opened in March. And I have experienced the all-too-classic result of blown critical…
I did my first few turns through Sketch while working as an anonymous restaurant critic. Not anonymous to Jesse Morreale or Sean Yontz, necessarily. Not to Charlie Master who works their bar, or to some of the staff to whom I’d been introduced. But generally speaking, I was still a…
Pete Karpinski is a good guy. He’s a smart guy and a talented guy and a smirkingly, playfully evil guy when it comes to designing and launching certain types of restaurants. From his post on the restaurant side of the Sage Hospitality Group’s corporate structure, he has brought to Denver both…
I was several whiskeys to the good on a recent school night when I found myself propped up against Sketch’s salumi bar, canting sharply like a ship taking on water. I asked for the menu, gave it a cursory glance, then pushed it back across the dark, polished wood, slapped…
We’ve already posted the news about the ESPN Zone at 1187 16th Street going dark, but within moments of that announcement, something else popped up. Namely, that a nice big chunk of that space has already been snapped up and will shortly be turned into another outlet of an Arizona-based…
This week’s question is for all you office drones out there, from one of your own: When time is tight and money even more so, what downtown cart serves the best grub in the city?Easy, right? Biker Jim’s Gourmet Dogs. He has two locations now, one in Skyline Park at…
We live, as the Chinese might say, in interesting times. And one of the consequences of living in interesting times is the interesting ways in which the world’s police forces, armies and weaponsmiths devise new ways for hurting each other. Thus, do we have this, fresh from the laboratories of the…
This week? Total Heart-of-Darkness trip with my voyage through the chintz end of the American cultural spectrum. White Fence Farm blew my mind and, in the process, served me one damn fine plate of fried chicken. Thinking about that got me considering some of those other only-in-Colorado places where one…
After experiencing the tacky shlock and awe that is White Fence Farm, I headed for the one place that could stand toe to toe with its down-home country-cooking style and pure Americana weirdness. The one place where, I am not ashamed to admit, I have eaten more than once on…
Fried chicken isn’t the only thing worth eating at White Fence Farm. The place also makes some really mean fudge. I’m not a fan of fudge. I like my chocolate mostly in bar form, mostly plain and un-fucked with. Hershey’s is fine. I’ve got a weakness for Toblerone (though I…
Everyone who lives along the Front Range must visit Casa Bonita once. Really, you’re not a resident if you haven’t seen the cliff divers and suffered the mariachis, climbed through Black Bart’s cave, muscled your way through the knots of sticky, rapidly greening children and eaten the sopaipillas. I’ve been…
While I have spilled gallons of virtual ink over the shameless self-promotion of my new book, Cooking Dirty, one thing I haven’t yet managed to tell anyone? What the damnable beast is actually about. What, in fact, someone willing to lay down a little dough might get for their hard-earned…
Okay, so this one, I did not expect. For quite a while after Kevin Taylor shut down the Boulder outlet of his Prima brand — the one in the big, lovely space at 1801 13th Street, in the One Boulder Plaza development just spitting distance from the site of the…
