Some of you are getting pretty cocky about this “Guess where I’m eating” game. And so I present to you this simple photo. Just looks like a bowl of pho, right? Same bowl of pho you could get at a hundred different shops around town. But in the picture, there’s…

I “discovered” (read: accidentally stumbled across) Thai Lotus a couple of years back when, hungry for something that wasn’t necessarily Italian food, I wandered into the strip mall at Belleview and Yosemite probably most famous for being the place where Venice Ristorante got its start and found myself standing in…

They were giving away irises at Taste of Thailand the other day — free to a good home, free to anyone who wanted to take away a little beauty. I was too late to get one; the cardboard box that had held the plants was empty. But the restaurant was…

Yeah, it did taste good. And thanks for asking. Matter of fact, it tasted so good, it inspired me to post this double-strength challenge. I don’t just want to know where I was eating (because that might be too easy), but I’d also like you to guess exactly what I…

They were giving away irises at Taste of Thailand the other day — free to a good home, free to anyone who wanted to take away a little beauty. I was too late to get one; the cardboard box that had held the plants was empty. But the restaurant was…

My last Ask the Critic was all about changing seasons and foods we were looking forward to either A) making at home or B) having Denver’s chefs add to their menus once the cold weather settled in permanently. There were a lot of very interesting comments, a lot of wonderful…

For the past week, I’ve been collecting answers to an impromptu poll dealing with the current state of Denver’s restaurant scene. It tracked the way that people are feeling right now about their city’s food and restaurants, and played a little with their expectations for the future. It discussed what…

For those of you who can’t get through a weekend without a full-bore sugar IV, may I humbly present Living the Sweet Life, a new cake, pie and cupcake shop celebrating its grand opening this weekend at 1535 Central Street, right next to Masterpiece Deli. What’s that you say? Denver…

Look, I love wings as much as the next guy. Matter of fact, I probably love wings as much as the next three guys. I lived for some time in the chicken wing capital of America, after all–a city where doctors have to warn people that chicken wings should not…

Lori already wrote the official wrap of the Whatever-the Annual Westword Menu Affair earlier this morning, but I had a few thoughts of my own that I wanted to share. First, kudos to the two competitors — Jay Spickelmier and Sergio Romero. It ain’t easy being up there under those…

Because I am never one to let a good idea die, here I am, back again with another installment of the best of our 1st Annual Cafe Society Poll about Food and Chefs and Stuff. What do you mean you’ve never heard of the 1st Annual CSPAFCS? What, do you…

“So, I don’t know what the protocol is here. Am I supposed to pretend like I don’t recognize you?” I looked up from my beer at the waitress standing beside my table at the Irish Hound. “No,” I said. “You don’t have to pretend. It doesn’t much matter anymore these…

I’d been on and off planes for six hours, not always heading west. The first, a little commuter, had let us off on the tarmac. I’d spent time in a smoking lounge trying to negotiate a cigarette-and-lighter transaction with a Russian man who looked, in profile, exactly like John Hamm…

Sean Kelly, chef/partner at LoHi SteakBar, at 3200 Tejon Street, calls the board at his new place “plain American bar food,” even though that’s far from an apt description. It’s not like he’s just sitting in the back, drinking the cooking wine while a bunch of nose-picking fuckups dump frozen…

Across the street from Swedish Medical Center, Roast, once a coffee and paninni shop, is going through a face lift and concept change. And how do I know this? Because I happened to see this sign hanging in the front door of the space at 500 East Hampden Avenue. Now,…

June 25 –that was opening day for LoHi SteakBar. But prior to that? Owners Joe Vostrejs, Jeff Hermanson and Rod Wagner had spent months talking and plotting — and after they hired Sean Kelly, who’d already parted ways with Mark Berzins and the Little Pub Company, they all talked some…

Yesterday, I started culling the best answers I’d gotten from my deliberate rip-off of Grub Street’s 2009 Grub Report foodie poll. Today, I am continuing to pimp for my own 1st Annual Cafe Society Poll about Food and Chefs and Stuff by picking another fantastic response that has come in…

Over the weekend, I posted a half-grumpy power-to-the-people blog in response to a poll of famous food writers done recently by grubstreet.com. It was, I’ll admit, a barely concealed ploy to get the people of Denver talking about how they see their food scene right now and what they would…

I may be a little premature with this, but because it’s all rainy and (at least in my neighborhood) snowy this morning, I couldn’t help but start thinking about fall and winter menus.  This, of course, led immediately to my daydreaming about eating fall and winter menus, and the first…

Breakfast, my mother used to say, is the most important meal of the day.  And while she was probably right about that, one of the details not precisely fixed by that nugget of motherly wisdom was when, precisely, breakfast had to fall.Me?  I like a nice middle-of-the-night breakfast.  I like…

A couple of weeks ago, the esteemed folks over at grubstreet.com (the daily internet food organ of New York Magazine) published their 2009 Grub Report — a survey of the state of our food union (their words, not mine). And while I generally enjoy the work done by those web-crazy…