Five Chick-Fil-A protest moves guaranteed to ruffle feathers

Unless you’ve been living in a basement without electricity, you’ve heard about the socio-political chicken soup boiling up around Chick-Fil-A, complete with boycotts and “buycotts” inspired by the company president’s anti-gay-sex marriage stance. And you’ve heard about it from one side, then the other, then both again. Gay people are…

Patsy’s Italian Restaurant has a rich, colorful, unbeatable history

Patsy’s Italian Restaurant has been around since 1921, which means this neighborhood joint has survived the Great Depression, World War II, the Red Scare, the Vietnam War, disco, the Reagan era and the emergence of the Olive Garden. Decades of history have unfolded around its linen tablecloths, and as other…

Le Peep: The proof is in the powder

I hadn’t been to Le Peep in well over a decade — since I discovered eggs Bennie made from scratch are better — but I noticed that the recent chain-restaurant survey in Consumer Reports put Le Peep among the most popular restaurants in the U.S., ranked on taste, value, service…

Patsy’s Italian Inn — timing is everything

Anyone can make a plate of spaghetti — but in this town, only Patsy’s Italian Inn has been serving plates of homemade Italian spaghetti for more than nine decades. That was back in the days when celebrities had to sing, dance and have talent to be famous, back before The…

Five good things about the Chick-Fil-A controversy

Of all the cultural battlefields that could have been chosen for gay- rights whack-a-mole, it had to be Chick-Fil-A: a fast-food chain with marginally good chicken sandwiches, badass waffle fries, and a company president with an avowed aversion to same-sex couples getting legally hitched. The fowl play has gotten ugly…

Coloradans are partial to Santiago’s mean green

There are certain things Coloradans know that others don’t — like how Lookout Mountain turns a sixer of Fat Tire into enough beer for six people, how to walk in heels in downtown Denver in three feet of snow and not break your effin’ ankle, and, most important, which restaurants…

Santiago’s Mexican Restaurant — green light on the chile sauce

Santiago’s Mexican Restaurants, a homegrown chain, got its start in 1990 at a single store in Brighton, with a very special ingredient — owner Carmen Morales used her mother Rachel’s recipe for Santiago’s now-famous “Authentic Green Chile Sauce with Pork.” From one store grew many, and today there are twenty…

Taco Bell’s Cantina Bell menu needs Lorena Garcia in the kitchen

I was as surprised as everyone else when Taco Bell announced that it was going fast-cazh with the new Cantina Bell menu — a blatant rip-off of Chipotle’s signature healthy, fresh Mexican-inspired burritos and bowls, albeit at slightly slower prices. I even attended a Taco Bell rollout dinner, hosted by…

Cinebarre: Turn up, tune in, drop cash

For me, going to the suburbs for anything is like taking a spaceship to a distant planet populated by strange aliens and strip malls. Still, on occasion I’ll haul my shorts out to an outlying town. In this case, it was Thornton, because I’d heard that Cinebarre has movies, booze…

Five discontinued fast-food items I want back

It never fails: Just when I become emotionally — and occasionally physically — attached to a certain fast-food item, the corporate overlords snatch it away like fiendish villains in a Joss Whedon movie (or one of his TV shows that hasn’t been cancelled prematurely). Okay, so some items don’t sell…

Willie G’s caters to the classes and the masses

Happy hour can absolutely be the happiest time of the day for three reasons: cheap booze, cheap food and free people-watching. Which makes the patio at Willie G’s Seafood & Steaks a place of unmitigated joy from 3 to 7 p.m. on weekdays, when happy-hour specials keep flowing out of…

Top five chain-restaurant burgers — completely naked!

A great burger needs to stand on its own, a Westword reader noted last week in response to my review of Red Robin’s Burger Works, a new concept that the Colorado-based chain tried out at the Shops at Northfield Stapleton before rolling it outside Colorado state lines. That means the…