A dinner with Glen (see review) always unfolds with the same potential for highly public disaster as a live TV broadcast without the comfort of a five-second delay. He is an awful, vile creature, a man born without that essential internal volume control that allows civilized people to interact politely…
I’d been eating out with Glen again, which is almost never a good idea, and I think I felt the building housing Sonoda’s shudder with relief when the two of us finally showed the front door our backs. Although the servers had never rushed us, had never been anything other…
Forget race. Forget color, creed and sexual preference. Never mind religion or politics or any of that other socio-fascist demographic nonsense that some people use to put others into little boxes. In my world, there’s only one division: diner people and coffeehouse people. Personally, I am a diner person. So…
When Jim Ilg and his crew were renovating the space that would become Java Moon, they found a safe sealed up inside one of the walls. It’s big — all black iron and tarnished silver with a swollen head mounted over a heavy, footed pedestal that makes it look like…
Valentine’s Day is almost here, guys, so what are you gonna do? If you’re smart, you’ll heed these tips on how to treat your girl like a lady. To start, retail entrepreneur Robin Lohre says she’s going all out for the holiday this year at her two eclectic shops. At…
Everyone on the bandwagon! We’re headin’ down to Atkinstown and don’t wanna leave nobody behind… Atkins is everywhere these days. The eponymous diet that Dr. Robert Atkins stumped for pretty much non-stop from the moment his first book on the subject was published (Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution, 1972) until his…
New York-style pizza is a tricky thing. In the places where it’s done properly — on the island of Manhattan, in one of the boroughs or, with rapidly declining rightness, in any of the cities that make up the outer estates of the Pizza Kingdom — it’s not even called…
A rumor without a leg to stand on will get around some other way.” John Tudor said that, and he was right — which is why I’m not going to repeat everything I’ve heard over the last few weeks about the Hilltop Cafe out in Golden. Instead, I’m going to…
We stood in front of Sherpa’s Adventurers Restaurant, Laura and I, like Hansel and Gretel before the gingerbread house, peering through the dusty windows, looking for some sign of life in the dim interior. What tables we could see were set with wineglasses, white cloths and crimson napkins stiffly folded…
Wow: I knew burgers were important, but I never knew quite how important until I opened the can of worms that is the Tommy’s/In-N-Out/Fatburger debate in the January 1 Bite Me. Since then, the Bite Me HQ mailroom has been flooded with letters, e-mails, screeds and missives on a variety…
No, no…Jason, you gotta listen. This place, it’s going to be great! We’ve got a chef coming in from Suriname. I don’t even know where that is, and the guy doesn’t speak a word of English, but he makes this yak-butter soup you won’t believe!” I get calls like that…
Amid the nourishing chaos of city life, we urban dwellers find ourselves brain-deep in startling juxtapositions. Mid-morning one Tuesday, a formation of squawking geese sweeps its shadow across a used-bookstore window, dimming the dog-eared covers of The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen, and Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol. An instant later,…
As an American, your odds of dying from Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease — a variation of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or mad-cow — are roughly one in a million. Odds of dying in a car accident? One in 242, according to the National Safety Council. Odds of dying by falling “out of or…
No doubt about it: I have the best job in the world. Make that one of the best jobs in the world, because there are other good careers out there, and I don’t want to step on any toes. International playboy, for a start. Professional coffee taster. Sole heir to…
Had Charlie Huang opened Little Ollie’s Asian Cafe, his all-American noodle shack, among the nail salons and after-market car shops along South Federal Boulevard, deep in one of the area’s several versions of Chinatown (or Koreatown, or Vietnamtown, or whatever), he would have been laughed off the block. That’s the…
He’s just a kid, maybe ten years old, with very new white sneakers that don’t quite reach the floor and martinet parents like something out of Dickens or the grayer volumes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Society types with ramrod postures and delicate, picky little hands. They’re older, but definitely not…
All energy flows according to the whims of the Great Magnet. What a fool I was to defy Him.” Hunter Thompson said that, and while the good doctor has said a great many things in his time — a large portion of which have only the most glancing association with…
Max Burgerworks should have been a great restaurant. Like a privileged kid saddled with a goofy name (and not even a truly awful one like Hubertus, Melvin or Agamemnon, but one only slightly unfortunate) or a Montessori rugrat born with every advantage, it had the potential for doing wonderful things,…
Hey, big guy, I know it’s been a long time since I’ve written, and for that, I apologize. You were pretty good to me back in the day — easy on the coal, no matter how bad a boy I’d been. You overlooked that unfortunate incident with the lawnmower and…
If I had an unlimited budget, enough pull to get the best guys in town away from their kitchens (or their families) for one night, and room enough at home for all of you good readers, I’d treat you to one great holiday meal. A classy cocktail soiree, dimly lit…
Chili Cheese Fries Onion Rings Praise Jesus with thanksgiving Isaiah 12:2 That’s what the sign hanging on the door of the A&W in Frisco said last month. Today, it’s “Happy Birthday Jesus” and “Jesus is the reason for this season, Isaiah 7:14,” along with more exhortations for the faithful to…
I walk into the Cherry Creek Grill, and it just feels right. From the outside, from the inside, from the heavy front doors to the exhibition line in the back, everything about this restaurant oozes comfort. The smell of smoke from the wood-fired rotisserie oven catches me in the chest,…
