What can I tell you? Clair de Lune is definitely not going to make it through the summer.” I’ve been waiting for this call for weeks. Not sitting by the phone, exactly, but knowing it’s coming. And when it does, it’s like hearing that the relationship is finally over. Like…
Cheeseburgers are the single most recognizable American contribution to the world culinary scene (and, according to a monument on Speer Boulevard, an actual Denver invention). They’re also the ideal thing to eat on a blazing-hot afternoon. So last week when the temperature hit 97 degrees, I hit the road for…
Okay, so I was up on the roof the other night with my friend Glen, and we’re just laying there — sharing a case of tallboys, talkin’ about tractor pulls and tacos and whatnot — when all of a sudden, we see this light. Brighter than the headlights on my…
Just another bistro. You have no idea how much those three words piss me off. Just another bistro. How did the restaurant industry get so jaded that those three words would ever seem thinkable, much less appropriate? While eating at The Kitchen (see review), I somehow stumbled blindly across one…
There are a few things that I like about Boulder and many that I don’t. For example, it bothers me that Boulder exists where it does, snugged up tight against the base of the Flatirons, frantically humping the leg of a mountain range that would be that much more splendid…
Shrimp and chicken shao mai; steamed duck spring rolls dipped in warm soy; short ribs with red onions in a scallop sauce; a whole striped bass, split, head and tail mounted on opposite ends of the plate and served with the tender filets soaking in a gingered soy broth. While…
I believe that life, in all its brutish, stupid grandeur, is the ultimate extreme sport. Forget mountain biking, snowboarding and base jumping. You just haven’t lived until you’ve Indian leg-wrestled a hungry Russian grandmother over the last fistful of peel-and-eat shrimp bobbing in the melted ice at a Chinese buffet,…
THURS, 7/1 Some things were made to complement each other: peanut butter and jelly, Hope and Bo on Days of Our Lives, St. Augustine and the Marx Brothers. “But what does St. Augustine have in common with the Marx Brothers?” That is exactly the kind of question that Adam Lerner,…
Some weird geopolitical analogies about the shifting influences of power and turf can be applied to Denver’s ever-changing restaurant scene. Not so much by the big openings and closings and the movements of recognizable chefs and restaurateurs, but by the constant shift and wiggle of the little guys. Ethnic eateries…
Saturday night should be busy. Cute place like this, good food, service that’s old-American doting without being old-French smothering — Dario’s Restaurant should be running the edge of a full house, playing the curve of table turns so that every party leaving brushes shoulders with the next one coming through…
Movies and food, food and movies. Would I have enjoyed Julia Blackbird’s New Mexican Cafe (see review, page 61) had it not been for the unfortunate mention of Like Water for Chocolate on the menu? Not likely. Still, there should be a rule in the restaurant business about not setting…
Of Earth and Spirit is how I describe my style of cooking. The foods chosen are pure and of the Earth; they are intended to be food for the spirit as well as sustenance. They have been prepared for generations by the distinctive combination of Native, Mexican and Spanish flavors…
The in-laws were in town again recently. It was just a quick visit, a few very busy days of catching up and shooting the breeze, punctuated (of course) by meals. Lots and lots of meals. That’s the thing about visiting me and Mrs. Critic — no matter who you are…
Back when I was hungry and vicious and always questing after dumb-luck fortune in the galleys and basement kitchens of this country, I could smell doom in a restaurant a mile away. It was a survival mechanism then, learned rather than instinctive, though no less hardwired into my autonomic switchboard…
Forty-six years. That’s a good run — a historic run, even — for any restaurant. And that’s what Emil-Lene’s Sirloin House (see review,) has rung up since 1958, weathering every storm, every up-and-down surge of the economy, by following one credo: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. “You don’t…
Here’s what Emil-Lene’s Sirloin House is missing: a really big steak. Not just a big steak — big steaks it’s got. There’s a 16-ounce sirloin on the board, a 10-ounce prime rib that’s cut so generously it takes up half a plate, even a 24- ounce T-bone that certainly far…
I have often made the smartass claim that brunch exists only as a convenient excuse for those who want to get drunk in public before noon. This conceit comes both from my own experience as that drunk in question, and from my time spent on the other side of the…
Outside the front doors of the Fresh Fish Company was a valet — a big fella, slouched in his chair at the curb, hands in the pockets of his windbreaker. He was staring out at a lot with room for about 10,000 cars, enough parking for the hundreds of people…
A moment of silence, please, for Vega, the innovative (and really good) Nuevo Latino eatery run by Michael Payne and chef/partner Sean Yontz. After eighteen months, Vega served its final meal on Saturday, May 15, adding one more name to the long list of restaurants that have lived and died…
The phone rings once, three times, five, and then Charlie Master answers. “Brix. Happy Monday.” This would be an incredibly annoying way for anyone to answer the phone — shades of that “case of the Mondays” scene from Office Space — if Charlie didn’t sound so sincere. He really means…
Having Racines close by was the best sort of convenience. And I mean the old Racines, the one at Ninth Avenue and Bannock Street on whose grave a retail/condo complex is being built. It was a neighborhood bar that always seemed to be part of the neighborhood no matter where…
At the diners I frequent on deadline day, the waitresses know what I do for a living and don’t hold it against me. They see me hunched up in the corner going longhand through these discursions on food and love and triumph and disappointment, dog-earing menus, smoking too much and…
