Gift of Gabby: Nothing I’ve written in over a year at Westword has garnered more response than my December 21 Mouthing Off column about Pat “Gabby Gourmet” Miller. Not surprisingly, no one called to defend her practice of eating free at local restaurants. What did surprise me, though, was that…
It’s a brilliant concept: Let diners cook their own food. Not only does the restaurant save the cost of a grill man, but it also erases any annoying misconceptions about how long it takes food to cook–and how fast a kitchen should work. The idea is not exactly new, though…
My family was always known for its progressive thinking, but never more so than on New Year’s Eve. Every year, instead of driving downtown and getting drunk, we stayed close to home and got drunk. This happened during the annual progressive dinner, a tradition that originated in Britain but took…
Read all about it: Pat “Gabby Gourmet” Miller’s new dining guide is out–but it’s mostly leftovers. With the exception of profiles of restaurants that have opened in the last two years, it’s a rehash of the same reviews she and her husband, Mark, printed in the 1992 and 1993 editions…
It’s that time of year when your company, which is filled with employees who normally can’t stand each other, hosts a festive luncheon outside the office where those same employees can overindulge and exchange such enchanting, thoughtful gifts as coffee mugs shaped like breasts or cows. It’s also that time…
Mug shot: “I would be very interested in doing a review of hot chocolate from best to worst,” the letter began, and its writer, Hannah Temple, went on to explain just why she would be the right woman for the job. “I drink it a lot,” she said. Since the…
This is the way many of my conversations with owners of small Asian restaurants start out: “Hi, this is Kyle Wagner from Westword newspaper. I have visited your restaurant and would like to ask a few questions for the review.” “Newspaper? We don’t have advertisement.” “No, I’m not selling advertising…
Hot to trot, Part I: Chile peppers are hot, all right, and a new store that sells nothing but products containing chile peppers in some form or other may have just the recipe for success. Richard Reed, a Denver musician (formerly of the Hot Pickles and other bands), opened The…
Only the rigors of founding a new nation could have kept infamous foodie Thomas Jefferson from doing what one out of every four restaurateurs in this country (and what seems like one out of every two in this city) feels compelled to do: open an Italian restaurant. In fact, Jefferson…
Cafe society: Every traveling foodie dreams of discovering some out-of-the-way, small-town cafe that serves incredible homemade bread or meat loaf or pie or marinara sauce made lovingly from an Old Country recipe by a ninety-year-old woman who’s been doing this since she was ten. The reality, however, is that you…
Living out in the boonies has its advantages: There’s no pollution (we see Denver’s brown cloud from a healthy distance), people shoot each other only after they’ve listened to too much country/ western music, and you can run around the house naked, because the neighbors are too far away to…
Mag, mag, mag: My predecessor, John Kessler, is now at the Denver Post, which recently ran his assessment of cooking magazines under the headline “Post’s Food Writer Critiques Publishers’ Servings.” Maybe the grind of daily journalism has worn Kessler down, but I think he was far too charitable to a…
For fifty years Dolcamino’s held forth in a South University storefront, cooking up big batches of pasta and red sauce for hungry students and other locals. Then the Coos Bay Bistro moved in–and suddenly the street is flooded with folks from all over town hungry for the restaurant’s excellent Italian-based,…
Our mission was clear: to try as many beers as possible without throwing up or forgetting that one of us had to drive home. It sounded easy–until we were faced with the 1,200 beers available for tasting at the Great American Beer Festival put on a few weeks ago at…
If the first rule of creating a successful restaurant is location, location, location, the second is to come up with a marketable menu. Ogden Cafe owners Jin and Mercy Lee had the location thing locked when they settled into the old home of Footers, located in the heart of Capitol…
A tip of the hat: A recent letter from two local waitpersons–Michael Rhodes and Heidi Hilliker–on the issue of tipping got me all wound up over that barbaric institution. As a former waitress, one who has worked at both Chinese joints where the average check was $25 and high-class French…
If the dinosaurs had known ahead of time that all they needed to stave off extinction was a fresh, up-and-coming chef and a revamped menu, they would have put an ad in the Cretaceous Times posthaste. The Normandy didn’t have to go that far, however. Pierre Wolfe, owner of the…
Sometimes you feel like a Nut: The product Wheat Nuts (“the crunchy-good, nutty-tasting snack”) crossed my desk last week, and, as always, I shared a jar with hungry co-workers. The response was unanimous: They taste like dry dog food. Further confirmation of this came from one five-and-a-half-year-old whose mother, a…
Without Chinese takeout, the falling-in-love scenes in movies just wouldn’t be the same. First, there’s the montage of the couple walking around the city, her in an oversized shirt, him in high-top sneakers; they’re just getting to know each other. Then they stand by whatever body of water is near…
Strike while the irony is hot: Maybe it was only coincidence that the biggest freebie bash of the year, last Thursday’s opening party for the new Rattlesnake Grill, was held on the same night as an open house at the Tivoli, where the original Rattlesnake Club once reigned supreme. When…
Barbecue was once the province of the poor, an inexpensive way to entertain. Three days before the big party, the host would drop the pig into a smoldering pit. By the time guests started arriving for the festivities, the meat was dripping off the bone. As the smell of barbecue…
Warming trends: It’s that time of year when restaurants start implementing their seasonal menus. Exhibit A: the Creekside Grill. I’d love to tell you all about two recent meals I ate there, but most of the things I tried aren’t on the revised menu. This time, the dishes land deep…
