Food & Drink

When an American christens a place Brasserie Anything, the temptation is always to crank up the Continental ostentation, but Brasserie Rouge — opened last August in a long-vacant space in the Ice House by not one, but two Americans, Robert and Leigh Thompson, with a kitchen overseen by a third, John Broening — avoided this pitfall. Wisely, these three skipped over the glitz, the luxe, the fifty-dollar dinner plates, and instead created a place that has the vibe of a comfortable neighborhood spot, of a bistro along the Seine where everyone happens to speak English and you can pay for your coq au vin with American money. It’s crowded with bustling servers in short-sleeved white dishwasher’s jackets and filled with steam from the line, smoke from the bar, and the good smells of everyone else’s dinner. The food, while simple and straightforward, has been as carefully researched and re-created as the copycat grand chandeliers that hang over the dining room. Brasserie Rouge seems to get everything right without even trying — as if it just happens, every night, like magic. And that’s why this restaurant is the best thing to hit the Denver dining scene this year. It’s not just the food, not just the space, not just service or the looks or the hype, but everything combined. What matters most about a great meal is what we take with us after the bill is paid, all the little details we’ll never forget. And Brasserie Rouge is simply unforgettable.

Every city has Greek food. Every city has Italian. And there aren’t many cities where you can’t find at least one French restaurant, one sushi place (however frightening it might be to be eating sushi in Fargo, Billings or Texarkana), and a handful of Mexican restaurants fighting it out on the edge of town. But you know you’re becoming a real food city when some of the odder ethnic cuisines start sneaking in. Ethiopian, Moroccan, Brazilian — Denver has all these, and now we even have an Afghan restaurant to call our own: Kabul Kabob. For a basic understanding of Afghan cuisine, you have only to look at a map. It exists on the culinary spectrum precisely where Afghanistan lives geographically. But to understand why this particular restaurant is so deserving of a prize, you must sit down in the beautiful, richly appointed dining room, close your eyes and taste. Everything on this menu is delicious. Nothing is overdone, overthought or overworked. There is lightness and weight, sweet and savory, Indian naan bread, dough like a yogurt lassi, mantou dumplings, Turkish coffee and heat and cold and flavors by the dozen all vying for attention, but never struggling against one another. At Kabul Kabob, everything, absolutely everything, is beautiful.

Nineteen steps. That’s what it takes Frank Bonanno to get from his first restaurant, Mizuna, to his second, Luca d’Italia. He can do it in the blink of an eye — and does, several times a night, moving from the classy, comfortable fare of Mizuna to the complicated, unbelievably delicious Italian menu at Luca. From lobster-spiked mac-and-cheese to gnocchi in a crabmeat-and-lobster gravy and back again, over and over, all night. Fitzgerald once said that American lives have no second acts, but Bonanno has proven this old saw false with the continued popularity of Mizuna and the success he’s seen bloom at Luca. That he’s done so despite the loss of his partner, Doug Fleischmann, in a tragic car accident last summer makes the success of both restaurants even more remarkable, if bittersweet. So here’s to you, Frank. We don’t know how you do it, and we don’t envy you the miles you run every day overseeing these two fabulous houses. But we’re glad you’re up to the task — because we’d never want to see either place without you.

Sean Kelly’s restaurant, Clair de Lune, is almost beyond categorizing. Although it’s very small — Kelly can seat a maximum of twenty people in the dining room and three at the bar — it’s huge in terms of its importance in the interlocking mesh of Denver’s food scene. It’s not known for a particular dish, because they’re all so good and because they change week to week and often day to day. Although technically it’s a Mediterranean restaurant, because that’s the broad area of the world from which Kelly draws his inspiration, that label doesn’t do Clair de Lune justice, either. The menu, though compact, is impossible to pigeonhole into some imposed classification. But whatever his restaurant may be, one thing’s indisputable: Sean Kelly is the best chef in Denver. Which also means the best owner, best cook and best manager. He has the best kitchen at the warm and frantic center of the best house in Denver; the best tables, attended to by the best staff, with the best food in the city. Kelly’s our man, our chef. He’s simply Denver’s best.

A year ago, Radek Cerny — formerly of Papillon (now Indigo), formerly of Radex (now Opal), formerly of Le Chantecler (still Le Chantecler, only better) — looked like he might be down for the count. One by one, he’d closed the crown jewels of his restaurant empire. Among local foodies, the opinion was that it was about time: Cerny’s cooking had become increasingly derivative and copycat, his name synonymous with certain (mostly potato-related) excesses that were more recognizable on the plate than his touch was in the kitchen. But then came L’Atelier — The Artistry of Radek Cerny — and all that speculation went straight out the window. This was Radek re-energized. Radek times ten. Like an aging prizefighter getting his second wind, he came out swinging with a new restaurant that wasn’t just great for Denver, but great on a national scale. Every smart, innovative, bizarre thing Cerny had ever done in his entire career was crammed into this single expression of his unique vision, then doodled with sauce, stood on its ear and lit on fire. This workshop became a brilliant showcase for the skills that Cerny had always had, but that had gotten buried beneath the name and the reputation. L’Atelier is a fabulous house — a chef’s kitchen operating in constant tribute to the man whose name it bears. Welcome back, Radek. We didn’t know how much we missed you till you were gone.

Every kitchen guy we’ve ever known has been a movie-obsessed, pop-culture-spouting cinema geekus extremis. Their language comes straight out of a dozen Hollywood classics; their style and affectations are based half on the job, half on the image of the job as espoused by the media. But Mike Long, the chef at Littleton’s wonderful Opus Restaurant, has taken things a step further by twisting his love of food and movies (and of food in movies) together into one event: Opus Night at the Cinema. For this prix fixe dinner, Long pulled out all the stops with six courses, each keyed to a different Tinseltown classic and line-dog fave. There were fava beans and a nice chianti from Silence of the Lambs, peppers and sausage from The Godfather, a Timpano from Big Night and, for dessert, gold leaf-wrapped chocolate tickets à la Willy Wonka. It was truly a proud night for line cooks everywhere and a meal to remember for all fortunate enough to attend.

The measure of a great menu is the way it makes you consider the future. How long can I sit here eating before I’m kicked out? How much of this can I try before I burst? And how long before I can afford to come back? At L’Atelier, the answers to those questions are, in order: not long, not enough, and not soon enough. Everything on chef Radek Cerny’s wonderland board of fare is an amazing and singular creation — sometimes derivative, often strange, always delicious. The appetizer list alone, with its sweetbreads, tartares and artistic small bites, is enough to keep you coming back for months. From there, the menu expands outward, covering dozens of dishes from the land and sea, each arriving decked out in myriad sauces, demis, reductions and oils that should make even the most indiscriminate gluttons happy. In all, the menu is a piece of poetry, Cerny’s ode to his years spent serving the public, to the friends he’s made and the friends he’s lost. And at L’Atelier, this poem is being performed nightly for your benefit.

The food created by Ian Kleinman at Indigo has been called a lot of things: post-modern, new American, fused, confused, and just plain strange, to name a few. And true, the young chef has done some unusual things here. But what’s come out of all the crossover spring rolls, high-end popcorn, Mexi-French and Franco-Asian mixing fusion is a restaurant that straddles the sometimes very wide gap between houses run by chefs for foodies and those that actually want to make some money. There’s an element of puckish, FTW arrogance still lingering around the fringes of this menu, but Kleinman and crew have managed to bring a whole lot of the fun back into fusion cuisine — and that’s been sadly lacking of late. And whether you’re just dropping by the bar for a martini and some sesame buttered popcorn with wasabe peas and pumpkin seeds, or sitting down for a duck confit cracker-crust pizza with candied apples followed by an ancho-rubbed hanger steak with tomatillo purée, you can be sure that Indigo will deliver two things: a great meal in a great space and a peek in the direction where American cuisine may be heading.

This has been a weird year for the French-restaurant community. It began with all that Freedom Fries nonsense, followed by a wildly unsuccessful attempted boycott of all things French by a bunch of jingoistic ideologues. And then, in the midst of that, Denver and Boulder saw a sudden, inexplicable resurgence in French dining with several bistros, cafes and brasseries opening one right after another. Best among them — best among both old and new — is Brasserie Rouge, whose owners went to obsessive lengths to create a spot that, in their dedication to an atom-by-atom reconstruction of an honest French brasserie, is more real than the real thing. This restaurant faithfully mimics the best aspects of the brasserie in both its kitchen and dining room. From the butcher’s paper tablecloths to the servers with French-as-a-second-language accents to the real duck confit, excellent bouillabaisse and true charcuterie coming from the galley, Rouge deserves a prize not just for being the best French restaurant in town, but for bringing a little bit of the City of Lights to our own Queen City of the Plains.

With Luca d’Italia, chef/owner Frank Bonanno has done what most transplanted East Coasters would have thought impossible: He’s brought good Italian food to the Rocky Mountain region. No, not just good. Great Italian food. Wonderful, vital, superlative Italian food that’s absolutely without equal on the Denver scene. Luca’s menu is designed for gluttonous abandon, arranged for wild flights of pairing and sharing, set up in an attempt to make people eat the way the Italians do — with several courses of small plates leading up to the entrees. The portions are small, the plating simple, the combinations divine. And on plate after plate — from warm artichoke hearts to gnocchi in a crab-and-lobster gravy to the truffled rabbit parts that nearly killed us — the unparalleled skill of this kitchen and the dedication of its chef shows through with startling, wonderful clarity.

Here in America, our national drink of choice is cheap beer. But in Russia, the winner — hands down — is vodka, served clear and cold. To get the good stuff straight from the source, exile yourself to Red Square Euro Bistro, a restaurant that serves up hearty portions of stroganoff and goulash, and also pours Russian, German and Lithuanian beer. But the real star here is the Russian vodka menu, featuring over eighty options, including more than a dozen tasty fruit- and spice-infused Siberian vodkas. Grab a spot at the bar, start downing your selections, and you’ll soon find plenty of fellow travelers. Comrade!

When most Americans think of Russian food — if they do at all — they picture one of two things. They envision frozen gray latitudes, turnips and beet roots, with giant cauldrons of borscht — that most recognizable of old Soviet cuisine — steaming and bright, bloody purple in the pot. Or, going in the other direction, they imagine silver bowls brimming with iced caviar served with tiny gold spoons, roasting game and fresh fish, water crackers crusted with rock salt and absolute czarist luxury. Both perceptions are partially right, but both are also totally wrong. Russian food at its best and most basic — the way it’s served at Astoria — is like the American food we ate in the ’50s, full of fatty meat and potatoes swimming in butter; thick, hot soups; pickles; fried chicken and sour cream. In Astoria, a bunker-like restaurant tucked into the Russian Plaza, they’re cooking pure comfort food: solyanka, potato salad, caviar and blini, stroganoff, roast chicken and lamb chops. And, as with most comfort food, while it might be very, very bad for you, it makes you feel very good inside.

Sherpa’s owner, Pemba Sherpa, comes with heavy-duty street cred: The guy actually is a Sherpa, with more than twenty ascents over 20,000 feet to his credit. He grew up in Nepal, in the shadow of Everest, eating the kind of food he now serves in a restaurant that’s decorated with artifacts of his previous life — the snowshoes, gunny bags and ice axes of his former career — and photos of him today, still climbing. In addition to unique interpretations of standard Indian fare, Sherpa’s kitchen cooks up fantastic mountain-man cuisine: heavy, thick stews, spicy momo and fried paneer pokara. The service is friendly, with staffers (many of whom are Sherpas, too) intimately acquainted with the food they serve. And in keeping with the restaurant’s motto, the Adventurers Bar in the front of this two-story converted Victorian is the perfect place “to relive the glories of past adventures and plan new ones.”

Although there’s no such thing as bad Indian food in Denver, India’s clearly serves the best. Try a few benchmark dishes, and you’ll agree. First, the saag paneer: If an Indian kitchen can’t cook good saag paneer, then you must run, not walk, away, because this dish is the standard by which all others are measured. India’s is a divine blend of creamy spinach and stiff, almost squeaky house-made paneer cheese layered with a complex but subtle mix of spices. Next, there’s curry. At India’s, it’s like a dream — soft-edged and smooth, alternately bright with exotic taste or barely a whisper of flavor carried on the back of butter and cream. Finally, there’s India’s boti masala, in which perfectly tender chunks of lamb bathe in a smoky, earthy tomato cream sauce touched with a dozen subtle, grounded spices. India’s version is so good, it’s like falling in love. And you will, with India’s.

Looking for jackfruit juice? Ko-Mart’s got it. Whole dried pink shrimp? Smoked anchovy? Pork neck? Octopus tentacles? No problem. The front of this all-in-one market is dominated by a series of concessions selling everything from ready-made sushi and boba “bubble” tea (fruit teas filled with tiny tapioca balls) to bone-marrow soup, housewares and videos. Lining the market shelves are a hundred kinds of rice, a zillion types of mushrooms, and more brands of soy sauce than you can shake a smoked squid at. Ko-Mart also has one of the freshest, most diverse and most beautiful displays of fresh produce in the city, with what seems like an army of employees constantly stacking and restacking the melons, Korean peaches, lemongrass, ginger root, Chinese cabbage and mountain potatoes. Ko-mart stocks stacks of ramen, cans of white soda that taste like the stuff left at the bottom of a bowl of Fruity Pebbles, freaky bags of rice candy decorated with cartoon giraffes and big-headed children, boxes of Pocky and Ting-Ting Jahe ginger candies. The only thing it’s missing are durian fruit and candy cigarettes. Other than that, Ko-Mart is a non-stop ride on the Orient express.

Han Kang sits in a strip mall next to a piano lounge. It’s cool, quiet and, if not exactly dignified, then certainly muffled with smiling, soft-footed servers working the room and a giant TV kept to a murmur. The noisiest thing about the place is the food — everything bubbling and sloshing — and the splashy mural of an impressionistic Denver skyline that runs the length of one wall. The other three are usually papered with dozens of sheets of colored construction paper carefully filled with blocky Korean writing describing the daily specials and those menu items not available to outsiders. But every dish here is completely Korean. There’s non-threatening bulgogi, soy-sweet and sugary beef piled on top of caramelized onions with a strong dose of sesame oil. Bi bim bop — as much fun to eat as it is to say — and bi bim nengmyun, vermicelli noodles with sliced rib-eye, slivered radish and green squash. For the more daring eaters, there’s fried squid, deadly-hot chile dishes and, of course, kimchi — the ultimate test of any foodie’s will.

When we need to retune our tastebuds, when we crave bright, dominant flavors unmuddied by excess, we go to Thai Basil II. Here we can sample the simple pleasures of Asian cuisines — hot curries, sweet lime, peppery-sweet basil, vegetables cooked fast and served fresh without all the taste leached out of them. Thai is a cuisine best tasted in the juxtaposition between one flavor and its neighbor, and the best trick in Thai Basil’s repertoire is the cooks’ ability to keep flavors distinct while still making each plate taste like a full, wedded whole. The curries are the best example of this skill, with sweet and heat and sour and bitter ingredients all coming together into seamless aggregates of their parts.

Just because a Chinese restaurant isn’t authentic doesn’t mean it can’t be authentically good. Little Olive does Chinese food American style, but it does it right. Shrimp and crab dumplings, Mongolian beef, orange chicken, Peking duck, Thai curries and Vietnamese soft-shell crab come together on an Asian menu that has something to please every palate. Yes, it still serves the basics — the sweet-and-sour this and kung pao that we all remember from our childhoods — but with a commitment to making this mutt cuisine better, fresher and healthier than any other place in town. Little Olive shows us that even as our tastes mature, so do the best restaurants.

Eating in China is not like eating in the United States, and eating Chinese food in the United States is not like eating at Ocean City. As a matter of fact, it’s nothing like eating at Ocean City — as evidenced by the fact that on any given night, there are few round-eyed customers included in the throngs of regulars who crowd this slightly dingy but wholly authentic Chinese restaurant. The menu is packed with solid, everyday Chinese fare freshly made by a kitchen that’s kept honest by crowds who would know the difference if it wasn’t, and it’s dotted here and there with the exotic and the special. The food is usually served family style, with many small plates of many different things making the rounds of all the crowded tables in the big, neon-lit dining room. Sauces thickened with pig’s blood, seafood porridge, abalone and sea-turtle soup — these are not flavors made for everyone, but if you have an adventurous palate, Ocean City is a must-stop on your culinary journey.

At Indigo, chef Ian Kleinman has put together a globe-trotting, multiple-fusion board of fare, but his most outstanding creation — the one thing we can’t help but order anytime we find ourselves seated in Indigo’s blue-on-blue dining room — is the lobster spring rolls. This Asian-inspired appetizer combines fat chunks of perfectly cooked lobster and juicy shrimp with a rough green-onion brunoise and nutty candied garlic, then wraps the mix in crisp, maple-glazed phyllo tubes the size and length of a good Macanudo and tops them with a melting scoop of risotto gently flavored with citrus. It’s a dish that shouldn’t work — that doesn’t work on paper — and it’s a credit to the skill of Kleinman and his crew that something so odd, so derivative and with so many divergent influences works so brilliantly on the plate and on the palate.

Pho is the ultimate do-it-yourself Asian cuisine. It’s peasant food, lacking any pretension, based on frugality and the whole-food ethos that demands the use of any possibly edible bit of everything. Pho broth is slow-cooked, simmered and reduced simple stock kicked up with onions boiled until translucent, green onion stalks and spices. There’s always salt but never pepper; sometimes star anise and cinnamon, often lemongrass and soy. Every minute the broth sits on the stove changes its character in small ways. Every minute it sits before you, cooling as you eat, changes it. But there’s one thing you can be sure of at Pho 2000: No matter when you arrive, you’ll find the best pho in town.

The only bad Vietnamese food is no Vietnamese food, but the best Vietnamese food being done in Denver is coming out of the kitchen at New Saigon. With hundreds of choices on the menu, dozens of sauces, a friendly and accommodating staff, and plenty of talent in the galley, anyone with a taste for the cuisine of the mysterious East is sure to find something to like at this perennial favorite. And while you’re enjoying your spring rolls, nuoc cham and blazing hot curries, you’re also getting a lesson in authentic Vietnamese cuisine, because New Saigon cooks Vietnamese food the same way it’s been cooked in old Saigon for the past hundred years.

Sometimes we forget how lucky we are to have restaurants in Denver that foodies will travel hundreds of miles to visit. Domo is one of those restaurants. It serves “country food,” Japanese farmhouse cuisine, which translates as simple, elegant sushi presentations in hand bowls, yellowtail steaks, salted salmon donburi and a flight of exotic side dishes made fresh every day. Chef and owner Gaku Homma also has a traditional Japanese garden on site that’s one of the most peaceful places we’ve seen, as well as an aikido dojo, and a museum and cultural center. Domo arigato.

Any way you slice it, Sushi Den is a top sushi spot. It’s been a trendy destination for nearly twenty years, always loud, always crowded. Why? Because the house believes in importing everything it can straight from the warm, bloody center of the sushi universe: the fish markets of Japan. Oddly enough, this does not mean that you, the customer, will be getting the freshest of products, but you will be getting the best. Deeply purple tuna, iridescent toro banded with fat, excellent eel and beautiful shake pump up the menu here. Sure, the more exotic offerings are pricey, but like the man says: You get what you pay for.

Say you’re new to all this raw-fish nonsense. You’re curious about the fuss, but you don’t know your ebi from your uni. For you nigiri neophytes, we suggest making a lunch date at Hapa Sushi. While fish aficionados may scoff at Hapa’s jumped-up, fusiony, oh-so-flashy fare, this hip Cherry Creek hot spot has two very important things going for it. First, the menu is comprehensively descriptive; no matter what you order, you’ll know exactly what you’re getting, and you won’t accidentally find yourself with a plate full of sea urchin genitalia when what you wanted was shrimp and rice balls. Second, Hapa has a plethora of offerings that come baked, seared, fried and disguised with great names like the Spider Roll and the Multiple Orgasm, so no one will suspect you’re scared to eat it raw.

Classic edomae sushi has no better avatars than the guys behind the bar at Sushi Tazu. Sitting in this beautiful, understated space in Cherry Creek, you can indulge your purist’s cravings with everything from perfectly simple tuna nigiri to the bizarrely addictive sea urchin sashimi, from lovely tuna belly o-toro to more modern interpretations like giant crab-tempura rolls that look like big, leggy deep-fried spiders on the plate. Tazu also does less daring plates — simple tempuras and bento box lunches — and rounds out its offerings with cold Japanese beer and a good selection of sake. Sit at the bar, get to know the cooks, be brave, save room for unusual palate-cleansing desserts like frozen orange quarters, but always remember: Adding wasabe to your soy sauce before tasting the hand rolls is an insult. And at Sushi Tazu, you’ll never need the extra spice, anyway.

Chuck and Martha Koch, owners of the Bear Creek Tavern, have family living on the Alabama shore, and while visiting there in 1991, they discovered Royal Reds. These beauties have been on the menu ever since, shipped in fresh every week straight from the Gulf Coast shrimpers to Kittredge. As far as the Koches know (and as far as we’ve been able to determine), Bear Creek Tavern is the only restaurant in the Rocky Mountain West that serves them. These are deep-sea shrimp, huge, with pale red shells, a meaty texture softer than that of most Asian varieties, and a flavor like very good crab dressed up as lobster. They come to the table in a massive, salty pile, with heads, legs, antennae and shells intact, attended by real drawn butter and lemon (no cocktail sauce unless you ask, and you shouldn’t), Handi Wipes, a roll of paper towels and directions for coaxing the big monsters out. What they should come with is a pistol or something, so that you can defend yourself in case one of the bigger ones is only playing dead.

There are few foods in the world as perfect as the mussel, few foods so filled with potential greatness, few so often mucked up by incompetent kitchens trying to do too much with a thing that’s so good when left pretty much alone. Luckily for us, Le Central not only knows how to handle mussels properly, but it offers them in huge portions for under ten bucks, sided with excellent pommes frites in all-you-can-eat quantities. Le Central’s kitchen prepares the moules nine ways, including a simple white-wine mariniere; a less simple, Pernod-rich provenal; and the exotic au saffron, with tomatoes, saffron and onions in a cream-and-shallot broth.

Okay, we all understand that the only seafood that should be eaten in a steakhouse is that queen of the deep blue sea, the lobster, right? The Capital Grille gives lobster the royal treatment, serving up crustaceans that weigh anywhere from two pounds to the-monster-that-ate-Cleveland size. Bibs are available (and necessary), as are an array of nasty-looking shell-cracking implements, but the best way to get at the sweet meat hiding inside all that armor is a hammer. Too bad this dining room is a little too classy for the mallet-and-cocktail-fork approach.

First clue that you’re in a good seafood restaurant: no ambulances out front. The second? A menu that changes every day, and sometimes twice a night. At McCormick’s, the dozens of varieties of sea critters available each day are grouped like some kind of aquatic U.N., by their nationality or ocean of origin. Everything is beautifully fresh, presented simply and treated with great care by a kitchen now in the competent hands of chef Steve Vice. Great crabcakes, crawfish, lobster and classics like baked salmon and fillet of sole are the mainstays, but if you’re looking for adventure, jump in. The water’s fine here.

Club 404 is unique to the Denver dining scene, an irreplaceable landmark in a city that doesn’t have many left. There are regulars who’ve been coming here since Nixon was in office, and one owner, Jerry Feld, who’s had the 404 since the Eisenhower administration. There are twinkle lights behind the bar, as well as an albino frog in the aquarium and souvenirs of fifty years’ service pinned up everywhere, like the fetishes of cargo cultists. But what’s best about the place is the menu, another relic from a bygone era. At Club 404 you can get a steak — the 404 T-bone — for $8.95. It’s preceded by a salad in a plastic bowl and dressing in a giant syrup jug, and when your meat arrives, it does so with out-of-the-box mashers on the side topped with gravy from a can. Still, the steak is good — bloody, tender, meaty but not too thick, a rind of grill-crisped fat running all the way down the edges — and a meal at 404 is exactly what you’d expect in a joint like this: generous, filling, handled with decades of experience, and cheap. There are steakhouses downtown where it costs twice as much to park as it does for an entire dinner here, and if you’re willing to suffer a cut less delicate than the prize T-bone, dinner can be had for five bucks.

Bastien’s isn’t retro; the rest of the world is. If you’re looking for the cocktail culture of the ’50s, a time capsule of early-’70s swinger swank still sealed and unchanged, then head straight for Bastien’s. If anything in this place has come around again into a third generation of recycled cool, it’s only a happy accident. The Bastien’s we know and love today came to life on January 1, 1959, and was an instant hit, a destination in a time when there weren’t many. Truman Capote hung out here, fer chrissakes. And forty years later, the trappings of Bastien’s best years are still intact. So are the deals: You can still get an entire dinner — good steak, drinks and dessert included — for under thirty bucks, and eat like a successful aluminum-siding salesman would have on a Friday night forty years back. Like they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and the batteries on Bastien’s Timex ran down a long time ago.

Soup served out of communal iron pots, straight iceberg salads made by the hundreds every day, big bowls of peanuts on every table and dead animals on all the walls: This is what a steakhouse used to be, before the suits got ahold of the idea and started turning them into hifalutin, cigars-and-martinis clubhouses for the rich and powerful. The Northwoods Inn, which has been in operation more or less continuously since 1961, harks back to those days when steakhouses were restaurants for the common man — places that needed spittoons, where you could order your dinner by pointing at the appropriate trophy head on the wall. These days, the Northwoods Inn caters primarily to families and big parties that, no matter how huge, can still get lost in the giant 250-seat dining room. The restaurant is so popular that waits of up to two hours on the weekend are not uncommon. The food is simple — big whacks of meat, well prepared and served as a package with soup, salad and baked potato — but even with the volume this kitchen does, every order still receives the personal attention deserved by good cuts of prime meat. If Charlton Heston ever comes back through Denver, we suggest he stop by the Northwoods Inn for a taste of old-time Colorado — when men were men and no cow was safe.

Over the years we’ve eaten our way around Rosa Linda’s menu, devouring everything from the soft chiles rellenos to the classic shredded beef burrito. But for a Mexican meal that really sticks to your costillas, try the steak ranchero — tender diced beef mixed with chiles and onions in a killer red chile sauce.

In the classical canon, there are five mother sauces — delicate and complex base mixtures from which all other sauces are born. But since this list of mothers was compiled ages ago by the French culinarians, it was weighted heavily in the direction of old Continental classics, and nowhere among the five is there a sauce that, through any miracle of reproduction, could produce a chile like that offered up by Marcela Guerrero and her kitchen at Cielo. This is a travesty of geographic isolationism, because these days, chile sauces belong among those charmed few bases from which all things spring. Cielo’s green is a sweet, meaty, thick stew of flavors, primary among them the complex taste of chile as fruit. And the red is a smooth lava of heat mounting on heat, tempered in its upper reaches by a singing touch of honey. These are not just simple chile sauces, but artistic, well-balanced creations that — in the true style of the mothers — have been built up from a classic base into something related to, but wholly different from, that which gave them birth. But beyond all that — and most important — they’re delicious.

There are those who go for the cheap thrills — the quick, delicious burn that green chile makes when it reaches the sinuses. But red has its pleasures, too, and there’s no red chile more pleasant than the version that La Fiesta’s been dishing out for close to thirty years. This red chile has a fire all its own, a complex layering of flavors that speaks of much more than mere chile powder. But, of course, you’re not going to eat it on its own. You’re going to order it smothering an enchilada filled with gooey yellow cheese or drowning the best crispy chile relleno in town. This plate is hot!

At Brewery Bar II, there’s no element of Mexican cuisine that cannot be improved by the addition of melted cheese. No ingredient that can’t be wrapped in a tortilla or deep-fried, no weakness in flavor or texture that can’t be bullied up with a liberal dose of the house’s custom chile — a red-and-green blend that’s heavy on the pork, but so far from the pure heat and flavor of traditional verde that comparison is nearly impossible. If, like us, you’ve strayed a bit from your Hatch-purist prejudices, then you, too, can grow to love this biracial chile without reservation. Sweet, watery, hot without being numbing, it kicks the endorphins into overdrive, then throws in that killer jolt of chile flavor right at the end to make everything it touches taste better.

Jack Martinez is the green-chile king, and until someone comes along who knows his pods better and loves them more, Martinez’s Jack-n-Grill will wear the green-chile crown. At Jack-n-Grill, the Martinez family treats beautiful Socorro green chiles with the sort of reverence the Italians have for tomatoes or the French for cheese. They’re brought in by the truckload from deep in southern New Mexico, used whole, used chopped, used in sauces and on burritos, and — in season — roasted right on the premises in big, gas-fired tumblers and sold by the pound to chile-heads who sometimes line up down the block for their shot at a bag of Jack’s green gold. There’s nothing quite like the smoky-sweet smell of the place during roasting season, no sound more beloved among the faithful than the scratchy pop and afterburner roar of the roaster going full blast, and no place we know to get green done better than at Jack-n-Grill.

It’s papadum, not tortillas, and the salsa isn’t a cruda or a fresca, but a spicy-sweet tomato chutney. And it’s served in a Tibetan/Nepalese restaurant, not a storefront dive on Federal. Still, the chips and salsa at Sherpa’s Adventurers Restaurant are deserving of not only this prize, but many others. For starters, they’re free; there’s been a disturbing trend lately of some places charging for their chips and salsa, which, in our world, is tantamount to a dive bar charging for bowls of stale pretzels. Second, they’re good. The papadum are crisp, light and nutty, and the broken-up pieces fill a generous-sized basket; the salsa is smoky-hot, complex in flavor, and layered with an underlying sweetness that makes it absolutely addictive. And third, the world is changing. So let Sherpa’s award be the clarion call. Cuisines are no longer as distinct and insular as they once were, and those Mexican joints that used to be the sole purveyors of the chips, salsa and three-beer lunch are now in contention with comers from around the globe.

Long touted as mankind’s only guaranteed cure for the common hangover, menudo is a hearty, spicy, slow-cooked stew made from hominy, chiles and tripe, feet, knuckles or any other unattractive cut requiring several hours of cooking to bring out its more subtle charms. On weekends at El Taco de México, these lowly ingredients are brought together into something far greater than the sum of their parts in one fine menudo. The kitchen is wise enough to use honeycomb tripe (the darker, more strongly flavored muscular lining from the cow’s second stomach) along with the fattier first stomach, which gives the soup a strong, heavy flavor and reduces the greasiness you get from using only smooth tripe. The menudo is spicy enough that you’ll work up a good sweat, but it comes with tortillas to cut the heat and little bowls bearing limes and a red-chile sauce in case you feel up to tinkering with the flavor.

Things do not move fast at Jack-n-Grill. Actually, everything moves fast, but nothing happens quickly. Even with the expansion completed this winter, the wait for a table and the wait for your food can be extreme during peak hours. But should you find yourself in this situation, take a lesson from the regulars who sit with Zen-like indifference to the sweeping passage of the hands of the clock. Just wait, and you will be rewarded by something like the kitchen’s vaquero tacos, which are so good that you might never want to eat anything else again. Four tortillas, fried in butter on the flat-top, come laid open on the plate like a taco autopsy, with all of their insides showing. Each one holds a dollop of tender, shredded beef soaked in an incredible smoky-sweet barbecue sauce so dark it’s almost black; a sprinkling of diced tomatoes that pair up against the sweetness of the barbecue sauce better than peanut butter does with jelly; just enough melted cheese to weld everything together; and a dainty little curl of sour cream to top things off. It’s taco perfection, and if you haven’t tried one yet, you don’t know Jack.

Down in Texas, right on the border between El Paso and Juarez, there’s a stand — really nothing more than a shack –that sells the best tamales in the known universe. They’re made by the hundreds every day, wrapped, then left in bowls inside this tin-roof tamale stand where they have all day to get good and funky. If they don’t kill you, they are the best tamales you’ll ever eat. And they’re only slightly better than the much safer, significantly more hygienic, green-chile tamales sold every day at La Popular. These fat rolls of masa, chicken and whole chunks of fiery chile come freshly steamed and still wrapped in their husks for easy eating on the run.

There are three things we love about the little, often-overlooked Jalapeo Mexican Grill that squats on Leetsdale amid all the paint stores and mechanics. We love the patio, which is the ugliest patio in the city, with the worst view in the state. We love the fish tacos, which are basic, pedestrian and the closest thing to the real Juarez article you’ll find off Federal Boulevard. And we love the La Jolla fish burrito — as thick as a grown man’s forearm and stuffed full, a California take on coastal-Mexican cuisine but much more complex than the simple fillet-salsa-tortilla wraps served on those Mexican beaches devoid of tourists. The La Jolla features the same fish as Jalapeo’s tacos — a firm-fleshed, mild whitefish sealed inside its chewy armor, rich enough to leak grease over everything — along with rice, beans and a sweet pico de gallo that’s much better than Jalapeo’s weak salsa. Go with black beans over pinto; they’re slightly firm, never gooey, and have a clean, almost meaty taste that lends extra bulk and flavor.

A truly great breakfast burrito must be three things: It must be big, it must be messy, and it must be capable of curing anything from a simple hangover to Patagonian skull fever in just one serving. At Pete’s, the kitchen makes a breakfast burrito that accomplishes all three admirably. First, this burrito is huge — a big tortilla, liberally stuffed with potatoes and a simple omelet of meat (bacon, sausage or ham) and two eggs, large enough to fill an entire platter end to end. Second, it’s plenty messy, because the cook takes this big-ass burrito, hits it with a fistful of traffic-cone-orange shredded cheese, then glops up the whole thing with pork-spiked and spicy Colorado verde. And third, you can forget your grandmother’s chicken soup; there’s no malady known to man that can stand up to one of Pete’s massive burritos. So no matter what ails you, if you have the strength to stagger up to the counter to order one of these monsters, we guarantee you’ll be feeling better by the time you leave.

It’s such a simple thing, the burrito. Take some rice and beans, some meat, a little salsa, spread it on a soft tortilla, fold and go. It’s the ultimate convenience food, was in the vanguard of the Mexican-cuisine invasion that changed the way our entire country eats, and still stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the dumpling, the cheeseburger, foie gras and cassoulet in the pantheon of mankind’s great food innovations. Although the burrito is now served in wondrous variety at hundreds of restaurants across the city, Chipotle takes the prize for its constant improvement of what started life as the best burrito in town and now has become the best burrito on the planet. From free-range Niman Ranch meats to organic beans, fluffy rice that’s perfect no matter what hour you arrive, chewy tortillas heated to order, three distinct salsas and great guac made fresh all day, this Denver creation born out of the newfangled ideas and dedication of hometown boy and former line cook Steve Ells does everything right. True, Chipotle is now a McDonald’s brand. And yes, what began as a simple University of Denver-area taquería has been transformed into one of the fastest-growing, most pervasive chains in the country. But you know what? Sometimes success comes to those who actually deserve it.

There’s so much to love about Parisi, beginning with the restaurant and ending with the deli, which is what dedicated foodies hope heaven will look like when they die — from the frozen Muscovy ducks to all the homemade stocks for the home cook. But the best thing at the deli, and one of the reasons the food in the restaurant section is so good, is the big basket of baseball-sized rounds of handmade, fresh-milk mozzarella. Depending on when you arrive and how the kitchen is operating, you can have a taste of cheese made just moments before you walked in the door, and you’re never going to get cheese more than a few hours old, because this stuff sells fast. Smooth, silky, milky and mild, Parisi’s mozz is a cheese whiz.

“It’s the best macaroni and cheese you’ll ever have,” our server told us, and in his eye was the gleam of the fanatic. Eat out enough, and you’ll hear that kind of thing a thousand times — that blank is the best blank you’ll ever have — and it always comes from servers who are adamant in their convictions and usually wrong. But at Le Chantecler, our waiter was absolutely right. The kitchen’s lumache pasta with hard Spanish mahón cow’s-milk cheese is not just the best mac-n-cheese around, but better by leaps and bounds than its closest competitor. It’s cheesy, gooey, warm and satisfying, perfectly colored, perfectly cooked. And Le Chantecler gets bonus points, because this mac-n-cheese isn’t even a main course, but comes cuddled on the side of an excellent spread of roasted pork medallions in a ham-hock jus.

Forget your jumped-up truffled mashers, your milk-and-cookie menus, your comfort food in all its gummy incarnations. That fad is played out, and good riddance. What’s replaced it is a focus on those uncomplicated culinary pleasures that — when done well and treated with respect, rather than tongue-in-cheek smart-assitude — can bring more actual comfort than a hundred gallons of gussied-up beans and weenies. The best among them? The grilled cheese sandwich. At Chedd’s, owners Dirk and Wendy Bruley have made this modest sandwich an object of gustatory worship. Grilled cheese is all they do at Chedd’s, in about 17 billion combinations. On the chalkboard behind the counter, they’ve listed twelve kinds of bread, over thirty kinds of cheese, eight meats, a dozen varieties of vegetables and spreads, and assorted condiments, which you can mix and match for the grilled cheese sandwich of your dreams.

The founder of Taste of Philly, a six-seater joint, came from Yeadon, Pennsylvania, and its new owners are from South Jersey — but that’s okay, because Jersey is a lot closer to Philly than, say, Littleton or Lyons. The space is decorated in East Coast-refugee style, with a bunch of Philadelphia paraphernalia tacked up on the limited wall space, including the requisite framed print of Rocky Balboa. More important, Taste of Philly’s Philly delivers the true taste of a Philadelphia cheesesteak — an ex-pat restaurant’s only real duty. Tender meat, chopped rough, is cooked perfectly on the grill, with provolone melted all through the meat, and the delicious result — along with thin, stringy fried onions — is then packed into an Amaroso roll (recognized as the Philly cheesesteak standard the world over). All in all, Taste of Philly puts together a memorable sandwich, the kind that people would drive across time zones for. But aren’t you glad you don’t have to?

The panini at Vincenza’s, a revitalized bakery in the old home of the Wheat Ridge Dairy, start with great fresh breads. Case in point: the sausage sandwich, a chewy baguette stuffed with peppers, onions, provolone and a hungry-guy-sized portion of well-seasoned sausage. If Ralphie hadn’t been decapitated during the fourth season of The Sopranos, he’d lose his head over this one.

Ironic, isn’t it? Not only does Anthony’s put out the best white pizza in town, but it also has the best red sauce in a field crowded with contenders. A mild, slightly sweet sauce, neither too thick nor too watery and with good depth of flavor, Anthony’s red is put to use not just on its pies, but also on a short roster of serviceable pastas and a solid board of pizzeria-style heroes and parm sandwiches. To west-of-the-Mississippi palates tuned into the heat of capsicum in all its chile incarnations, this sauce may seem too weak, too blah. But for those of us who remember that tomatoes are a fruit whose best essence is translated by long, slow cooking and an easy hand with the spices, Anthony’s red is the tops.

Making a great white pizza is a delicate business, because one of the three primary ingredients of your standard pizza — the sauce — is no longer in play. Without that red to wed the texture of the crust to the flavors of the toppings, things can very easily get out of whack. Some pizzerias’ whites are too dry, others overcompensate by loading on the cheese. Anthony’s avoids all of these common pitfalls by topping an already excellent crust — stiff but not crunchy, with a solid backbone of flavor — with a perfectly balanced ricotta cheese sauce. The result is a mellow, mild white on a chewy, thin-boned crust that tastes great fresh out of the ovens…and even better cold for breakfast the next morning.

Step through the doors of New York Pizzeria and you’re stepping into a true New York pizzeria. The smell of hot ovens, sweating dough, sweet tomatoes and charred baking flour is as unmistakable as it is universal, and while the decor isn’t much to speak of — call it Brooklyn street-corner chic, with a black-and-white linoleum floor, a dozen scattered tables and booths, and the ubiquitous New York skyline prints — we’d like the place less if it were any different. Linen cloths and real table settings have no place in a proper pizzeria; the slices here come on paper plates already going limp from the magic orange grease leaking all over everything. The sauce is mild, the crusts are thin and limber, the ingredients are fresh, and every pie is proof that this kitchen knows every trick, every taste and everything that a kitchen in Denver can about making a New York pie New York right.

Some things never change, and the thick-crust, Sicilian-style deep-dish pizza served up by the Sarlo clan is one of those things. The pizza has been made the same way through three generations of this family, most recently by Anthony Sarlo and his crew at Vita Bella, the Italian eatery they opened

in suburbia two years ago. This pie is assembled from the best ingredients — fresh spinach, stemmed by hand, astringent black olives, Pecorino romano, fresh mozzarella, garlic, garlic and more garlic — that are sealed up inside a thick double crust like a true pie, then baked just the right amount in one of Vita Bella’s big ovens. If you’re thinking of ordering one of these monsters, you’d better be prepared to wait; even under the best of circumstances, they can take upwards of forty minutes to finish. But once you lift out that first slice? It’s like Disneyland: You never remember the wait.

Really, Parisi makes the best pizza, period. End of contest. It just happens to be on a thin crust. The cooks laboring before the blast-furnace heat of Parisi’s stone ovens could put their pizzas together on cardboard, spread sauce and melt cheese over Wonder bread, assemble the ingredients for a Margherita, Rustica or caper-and-anchovy Napoli on top of old Pinto seat covers, and we’d still die for these pies, because at Parisi, what goes on top matters so much more than what’s underneath. That’s not to say the crust isn’t good; it is. But the handmade mozzarella, speck, scamorza, artichoke hearts and prosciutto are what really set these pizzas apart. For their new, expanded location, owners Simone and Christine Parisi have assembled a list of two dozen pies — enough to satisfy even the most esoteric tastes — and every one we’ve tried has been exemplary.

That benchmark of Asian food, that great equalizer of world cuisine, that humblest, most savory of bites. Ladies and gentlemen, we give youŠthe dumpling. In a town chock-full of restaurants churning out thousands of dumplings of every conceivable nationality seven days a week, Little Ollie’s is the place that does them best. Plump little pillows, pan-fried, stuffed with a smooth paste of pork, herbs and spices, these dumplings are best when dipped in a side of the warm, gingered soy sauce served with every order. This Cherry Creek landmark has been dishing up Americanized Asian fusion cuisine for years, and the dumplings never fail to please.

At more raucous dim sum restaurants, you order your meal by shouting and pointing at a favored plate on a passing cart. At Mee Yee Lin — a bright and busy little dim sum restaurant in the same neighborhood as its more cavernous competitors — the service works sushi-bar style, with every table getting a paper menu and pencil so that diners can pick precisely what they want and how much of it they’d like. And while that eliminates some of the adventure, it also guarantees that you have no one but yourself to blame if you wind up with chicken feet. Our advice: Concentrate on meats that come from above the ankles, as well as the many variations on buns and dumplings.

Other people eat this. Just keep telling yourself that other people eat this every day and enjoy it a lot. They must, because otherwise why would fried intestine be on Mee Yee Lin’s 75-item-strong dim sum menu? So be brave. Be resolute in your desire to sample the true cuisines of other lands. Now taste. See? It’s not as bad as it sounds. Mee Yee Lin’s fried intestine is crisp and crunchy and tastes something like pork rinds, something like the meat in menudo. In fact, it tastes exactly like fried intestine. Like how you’d think that something’s guts, cooked until crunchy, would taste.

Radek Cerny — chef, owner and sole motivating force behind the unbelievable L’Atelier — never does anything small, never does anything simply. His restaurant is a riot of strangeness and color, and his giant plates would be a joke if it weren’t for the fantastic stuff that comes on them. Of particular note are his sweetbreads, which arrive in a classic Cerny potato-starch tuile, floored with whipped Yukon Golds, on a plate done up like a Nagel print from the ’80’s — triangles of black and white with doodles of pale green and hot-pink infused oils. The centerpieces of all this artifice are the delicious glands, perfectly cooked, tender and swimming in a dark sugarcane sauce that gives them a well-balanced, high, humming sweetness.

Marilyn Megenity can’t stand cars. Most days, she walks to the Mercury Cafe, the restaurant/cafe/community hub she’s owned for more than two decades in an assortment of locations, most recently in this comfy two-story building on the edge of downtown. But even this dedicated piéd-ophile has to hit the road now and then. And when Megenity gets motoring, she drives her Peacemobile, a 1982 Mercedes sedan that’s fueled by waste, not gas. Megenity uses a fuel hybrid that’s processed from reconstituted cooking oil, vegetable products, even fry grease. Painted in bright colors, with banners advertising its eco-friendliness, the Peacemobile is usually parked in front of the restaurant it has come to symbolize. Megenity makes a gas-free life seem easy, practical and worthy of a test drive.

Last year’s winner of the Best Fried Twinkie award makes it into the record books again for continuing to milk a fad that never really made it big. Even so, Derrol Moorhead, owner of Wingin’ It, just couldn’t stop with Twinkies, so this year he’s added to his offerings battered and fried candy bars — everything from Snickers to Milky Way — as well as deep-fried bananas and even that county-fair fave, funnel cake. No more do you have to wait for that creepy carny in the paper hat to serve you funnel cake on a limp paper plate from the back of a converted Airstream. Instead, you can get the real thing anytime you want from Moorhead and his maniac fryer crew. Oh, and while you’re there, remember that Wingin’ It fries up excellent chicken wings, too.

The brand-spanking-new Zengo is so big, so opulent, that we’ve just started to take it all in — from the retro-hip decor to the exotic cocktails to the extra-squishy bar stools from which you can appreciate those cocktails. The menu is expansive, so yin-and-yangy that it demands study. Meditation, even. So we’ve started small, dropping by for a quick meal of sake and the best unexpected fried rice in town. As with everything else about the restaurant, care has been taken with each little tidbit in the dish, so that every bite provides a burst of fresh, tantalizing flavors. You’ll leave wanting more. More food, more sake, more Zengo.

Food fads come and food fads go, but our love for Little Shanghai remains eternal. This Chinese restaurant has been a Denver institution for close to thirty years, drawing big stars — the Rolling Stones are reputed fans — and small-fry alike. Everyone has their favorite dishes at Little Shanghai, but we’re partial to its take on fried rice. Its very, very rich take. An order of Rich Man’s Fried Rice brings an elegant yellow half-globe to the table, with a shell of egg covering the treasure of scallops, shrimp, broccoli and rice. One bite of this, and baby, you’re a rich man, too.

The chicken-fried steak at Lola comes as a double surprise. First, who’d even imagine that this upscale coastal-Mexican restaurant would be open for Sunday brunch? Given how packed the place is on weekend nights, you’d think that the staff would want to sleep in — while their customers sleep it off. Instead, Lola opens its doors at 10 a.m. on Sundays, and while the Bloody Mary cart services the walking wounded, the kitchen cooks up a half-dozen brunch items, from exotic omelets to Mexican-style French toast to an incredibly good chicken-fried steak. Chef Jamey Fader pounds the hell out of a New York strip, coats it in a lightly spiced batter, fries it up and then smothers the whole thing with a sausage gravy made even better because it’s based on Lola’s homemade chorizo. Rise and shine!

Breakfast King is where we go when we need to commune with the food gods of our forefathers. We come here to be reminded of a simpler time when there was fine dining only on special days and diners for all the others. We come for the chicken-fried steak. At the King, the steak is crisp and wrinkly on the outside, like an old man left out in the sun too long, and tender within from a good pounding with the tenderizing mallet and a soaking in milk; its thick crust holds up even under the weight of a thick, peppery, artery-choking, Southern-style white sausage gravy. And while the chicken-fried steak is undeniably the star of this plate, it comes dotingly attended by two eggs and fresh home fries in munificent proportions.

Caribbean Cuisine Plus, a relatively new storefront restaurant tucked back among the butchers and barbers and motor-vehicle offices in Aurora’s suburban sprawl, does a lot of things remarkably well. Its friendly staff handles the large crowds with zero stress, takes orders smoothly, and turns out excellent cornbread, curried goat and Jamaican meat pies. And it does them all from a space that seems tiny enough to fold up and put in your pocket. But what Caribbean Cuisine Plus does best is jerk chicken — that staple of Caribbean restaurants the world over. In this version, the meat is soft, perfectly spiced with onion, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg and black pepper, and served over steamed white rice. The dish looks and tastes so simple, but remember: Making it seem easy is what the best restaurants all try to do. At Caribbean Cuisine Plus, the easiest thing about this chicken is enjoying it.

When you want fried chicken done right, you have to go to the source. You have to fall back on tradition — when it was done best, first and with the most love. Yup, we’re talking soul food, and in Denver, soul food really means just one place: Pierre’s Supper Club. Although this longtime institution recently changed hands, new owner John Lewis doesn’t plan to make any changes to what’s been coming out of the kitchen for decades. And that would be the best catfish in town, great cornbread, good ribs, deep-green and flavorful collard greens, and — most important — perfect, crispy, peppery fried chicken. The breading is stiff and crunchy, the meat steaming-hot and tender, and when accessorized by a few shakes from the bottle of Pierre’s Hot Sauce (one of the great bottled sauces of our time) sitting on each table, this chicken flies beyond the realm of backyard-picnic fare into something divine. There’s a reason they call this stuff soul food, folks. And after a couple of pieces of Pierre’s fried chicken, we think you’ll know why.

Caro’s Corner can be tough to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for, and even once you do find it, you won’t see the niceties that some people find necessary for their dining enjoyment. Little things like tables, a menu, waitresses, regular hours, a phone. But if you can get past all that, you’ll realize you’re in a place where the grillman’s art is still being practiced with a purity and simplicity that’s all too rare these days. Owner Jeffrey Patterson does nothing but burgers. Hamburgers, cheeseburgers, doubles of either, and that’s it. There’s a chalkboard on the wall that lists fries, and catfish nuggets on Friday, but forget those. At Caro’s, the meat is what matters, and Patterson makes a beast of a burger, big as a dinner plate and as fresh as you’ll get anywhere — because nothing is done until you come through the door and ask for it. Yes, this means you’ll have to wait a while, but know that in the end, the wait, the drive, everything, will all be worth it.

It’s Friday night on Old South Pearl, and you forgot to make dinner reservations. Have no fear: There’s always room for you at Hanson’s. This idealized, college-town neighborhood bar comes complete with a great crowd, plenty of history (it used to be the legendary Oak Alley Inn) and the best bar burger in town. Ten ounces of grilled ground chuck, a soft kaiser roll and a side of the kitchen’s zucchini fries are just the beginning, because what truly makes Hanson’s special are the high-end toppings available on any burger. There are five kinds of cheese on the board, not counting the jalapeo-cream variety. Artichoke hearts, guacamole, garlic or lemon aioli, grilled pineapple, green chiles and prosciutto are all yours for the asking, as are the standard toppings. At Hanson’s, everything is fresh, everything is well-handled, and the guys on the grills really know medium from medium-rare — ten degrees of difference that make all the difference in the world.

From the outside, Burgers-n-Sports could easily be mistaken for just another strip-mall burger joint. From the inside, it looks more like the dugout of a very well-off parks-and-rec ballfield after a tragic collision with a fast-moving gift shop. But out of this mess of green chain-link, cement, commemorative photos and baseball hats comes a burger worth bragging about. Burgers-n-Sports uses good-quality American prime for its patties, tops them with simple but immaculately fresh ingredients that adhere strictly to the burger-maker’s canon of whole onions (rings, not diced), fresh tomato slices, crisp lettuce, pickles and secret sauce, in that order, then squeezes everything together between two halves of a soft, chewy roll. The resulting masterpiece is wrapped in an envelope of waxed paper for easy travel, because burgers are made for eating on the run. If you can wait until you get home before sinking your teeth into one of the doubles, you’re made of stronger stuff than we are. Goose Gossage’s place knocks it out of the park every time.

Something about the Cherry Creek Grill 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 restaurant fits so well into its corner in Cherry Creek, it’s hard to believe that it’s part of a chain — and that’s even harder to believe once you take a bite of the burger. This kitchen turns out a monster cheeseburger, made with excellent beef that stays juicy even when ordered well-done, set on a good roll and stacked with enough fresh accoutrements (lettuce, pickles, relish, huge slices of tomato, onions, etc.) that you almost have to unhinge your jaw like a python just to get a bite. Good burgers are a dime a dozen these days, and great ones come along maybe once in every dozen. But the best burgers hang with you a long time, and though we’ve tried many, many burgers this year, Cherry Creek Grill’s is still the one to beat.

Over the years, the almost claustrophobically cluttered India’s has gained a very loyal following with its Mughlai Indian cuisine, a gentler and beautifully complex culinary counterpart to the wholesome simplicity of Haryanvi and the richness of Bengali seafood. Whether you’re after an adventure, an education, just lunch or a little of all three, the best way to begin is with the tandoori offerings — and, in particular, the tandoori chicken, the hallmark of Mughlai food, cooked on the bone and stained brick red by spices and tradition. Watch the cooks pull fresh orders out of the smoking tandoor on long metal skewers: This is what it means to barbecue in the mysterious East. India’s chicken is sweet and smoky, served in big chunks, bones and all, dressed only with raw slivered onions and lemon quarters — and that’s all it needs. An Indian restaurant may not be what you think of when you’re hankering for barbecued chicken, but India’s is always our first stop.

If you must avoid sugar, barbecue sauce is typically a no-no — especially here in the West, where we like our sauces sweeter. Old West BBQ to the rescue. Its line of exceptional sauces includes a flavor-rich, sugar-free version that provides sweet relief for diabetic ‘cue fans. Splenda is just one of the secrets to this splendid sauce.

The house barbecue sauce from brothers Nick and Chris Sullivan is something of a sibling rivalry in a bottle. The city’s best meat paint pairs the charm of old-school Kansas City sauce with hints of Memphis tang and Texas sweetness. The result is a sauce that hits home with brothers and sisters from all parts and goes great on barbecued ribs, pork and chicken.

Juicier, fattier and more tender than racked ribs, the taste not quite as intense but better wedded to the flavors of smoke and sauce, small ends are the filet mignon of the rib kingdom. And M&D’s small ends rule. After the meat and smoke, of course, the most important key to ‘cue is the sauce. And you can forget the sweet tar of a Kansas City mop or the thin vinegar juice used in the Carolinas’ tidewater shacks: M&D’s offers a Southern-style pepper sauce in mild, medium and hot for which the Shead family has become justifiably famous.

Blest’s ribs are truly blessed. To make these down-home spears, owner Gene Washington slowly smokes his pork ribs over hickory until they’re infused with rich flavor and achieve slip-off-the-bone tenderness. The house sauce is a dreamy, Southern-style version with unholy amounts of vinegar tang and a dose of balancing sweetness, perfect for the ribs. The sides are heavenly, and the pies by Gene’s wife are the ideal end to a finger-licking meal. We’re blessed to have Blest around.

American BBQ is good, but Mexican can be better — and the high-tone norteo costillas at Cielo are proof. These pork ribs are smoky, slow-roasted, meaty masterpieces of balance and simplicity, crusted with crushed black pepper, rubbed with chiles and piloncillo, then slathered in a thick, sweet-hot adobo-chile barbecue sauce that plays perfectly against the pork’s mildness and the simple three-note harmony of the meat’s dry rub. Texas, Kansas City and the Carolinas may be where most people consider the home turf of fine ‘cue, but in Denver, the flavors of the pampas and the simple spice of Cielo’s perfect pork ribs have put us in a sur de las Américas state of mind.

One million dollars. That’s what it cost to bring the new and improved M&D’s Cafe back to the Denver dining scene. One million dollars, and what do we get for all that money? The best BBQ joint in town. But Mack and Daisy Shead’s new spot is no hole-in-the-wall joint; it’s a clean, well-lighted space with a large waiting area, a great sound system and plenty of room for loading up on terrific ribs, succulent catfish and wonderful sides that complement the flavors of good ‘cue, balancing savory, sweet and sour against the smoky heat and heavy meatiness. Nothing makes a rack of baby-backs go down smoother than knowing there’s something as good as M&D’s gooey peach cobbler or a slice of perfectly spiced sweet-potato pie waiting on the other side. A million dollars might seem like a lot to spend for a barbecue restaurant, but one meal at M&D’s, and we think you’ll agree it was worth every cent.

Smokey Serrano, a homegrown wonder bottled by the Boulder Hot Sauce Company, accomplishes the almost impossible: It matches a hit of heat with a blast of flavor. Made from smoked poblano peppers and fresh serranos, this gourmet condiment sports glorious amounts of woody smokiness, followed by a pleasing, not-too-heavy number of BTUs

Short of chili, the next best thing for putting a cap on that dog is Mady’s Olde Tyme Beer Mustard. This thick, spicy beer mustard is the pride and joy of Mady’s Specialty Foods, a Highlands Ranch outfit that also does champagne and honey mustards, bread mix and peanut brittle. Made locally, out of nothing but quality ingredients and Killian’s Irish Red lager, this mustard is a solid blend of flavors, bittersweet and powerful, textured like French whole-grain and perfect for boiled dogs fresh out of the water.

A hot dog without chili is a pathetic pup indeed. So we went straight to the source: Sam’s #3. There’s an art to the chili dog that’s been lost in most places west of Chicago, but in the kitchen at Sam’s #3 on Havana, it’s been kept alive, because it’s still practiced every day. First you need a good bun. Not some sissy supermarket roll, but a big, solid, hot-dog bun dense enough to hold some weight. Next, you need a good dog, and Sam’s uses nothing but the best all-beef wieners for its Coney Island classic. After that, you need chili — strong, meaty, steam-table chili with a consistency thick enough to glue everything together. Thin chili will only turn the bread to mush; spicy chili will overpower the taste of the split and grilled dog. But at Sam’s, the chili is just right — dense, sloppy and mild, but capable of causing instant, fierce heartburn in those of weak disposition. And finally, the last thing a truly great chili dog needs is a fork — because if you can pick the thing up and eat it with your hands, it ain’t done right. The new Sam’s #3 downtown (which occupies the site of the very first Sam’s) is trying hard, but if you want a dog with real bite, head to Havana.

In terms of food, there are many ways to classify people. Are you a thin-crust-pizza person, or do you prefer thick? Hot meatloaf for dinner or cold meatloaf sandwiches for lunch? With french fries, the choice is between thin-cut or thick. And if you’re a thick-cut, skins-on, boardwalk-style french- fry sort, then Santoro’s Brick Oven Pizzeria is for you. The kitchen hand-cuts its spuds on the fat side, fries them brown and crisp, almost like home fries, then serves them up in huge, greasy portions, liberally sprinkled with coarse-grain salt for a little taste of the county fair, neighborhood carnivals and summers spent slumming it at Thrasher’s on the Ocean City boardwalk.

No. For the last time, the French did not invent the french fry. That was the Belgians. But as with so many things, the French took them, made them better and claimed all the credit. This means two things. One, it must suck to be Belgian, having your one great idea stolen like that. And two, when you’re looking for great frites, your search should start and end in the French cafes. In Denver, that search inevitably leads to Le Central, which does pommes frites better than anyone else. The kitchen takes shoestring-cut potatoes, blanches them in oil, holds them, then sends them down again for a proper frying, with the result being hot, crisp frites, crunchy on the outside and soft within. They’re the perfect accompaniment to sandwiches (in particular, Le Central’s sandwich de lardons — a bacon sandwich, again co-opted by the sneaky French), are classically paired with strip or hanger cuts of steak for steak frites, and come in an all-you-can-eat portion alongside the huge bowls of mussels that are Le Central’s other spécialité de la maison.

Much has been done to the poor french fry in the name of progress, and most of it has been bad. But Max Burgerworks has finally managed to come up with an innovation that’s a real improvement. The fries, hand-cut and nicely handled by the kitchen’s fryer crews, are big, crisp, lightly salted and served in generous portions. They’re fine on their own, but on request are served with a side of good, fresh guacamole and salsa. Chips and salsa, chips and guac — those are good pairings, no doubt. But if there’s one fusion novelty that deserves a prize, it’s Max Burgerworks’ notion of serving french fries and Mexican guacamole together in an American burger joint.

Sharon Guisinger is the only O.B. (original bartender) left at the High Street Speakeasy, which opened just a year ago, but in our book, she’s the best anywhere in town. It’s telling that Guisinger — a registered nurse by day — is studying to become an emergency-room nurse or Flight for Life EMT, because she’s cool under pressure and able to multi-task at warp nine when her bar’s packed. (She generally works Mondays, Tuesdays and Saturdays.) But when the Speakeasy’s down to just a handful of customers, Guisinger’s truly at her best. She’s a naturally feisty conversationalist, as well as an excellent listener — and both are prime bartender traits. She also mixes a mean drink, especially her own original concoctions. Try the sticky but tasty Astronaut (sorry, secret recipe) or, better yet, her Iced Diva (fresh coffee, Godiva White Chocolate Liqueur, half and half, Baileys and Kahla).

Most people know Fort Collins-based New Belgium Brewing for its huge-selling Fat Tire, but serious beer nuts love its more ambitious beers. And Trippel is the best of New Belgium’s bolder bunch. This honey-hued, bottle-conditioned wonder is brewed with a Belgian yeast, by a Belgian brewer (the revered Peter Bouckaert), and blessed with Saaz hops. Better and more elegant than most of its brewed-in-Belgium counterparts, Trippel delivers a crisp malt profile, hints of herbal bitterness and a deceptive 8.5 percent alcohol by volume.

Take a seat in the front room of the Mountain Sun and enjoy the wondrous array of world-class beers served here. Peek into the brewery at the back of the pub, and wonder how such a tiny operation can craft so much liquid treasure. Brewmaster David Chichura’s lineup is astounding, from the Sun’s hoppy gems to its finely crafted ales, wheat beers and the legendary Java Porter. A rich roster of guest beers gives this brewpub the finest suds selection in the state.

The Bull & Bush’s award-winning India Pale Ale gets even better when it’s served off the beer engine at the B&B. The cask-style Man is a hazy, golden nectar for hop-heads, loaded with verdant, thrilling hops flavors and a complement of pale malt tastes and alcohol. Yeah, Man.

Falling Rock’s long list of “best taphouse in the nation” honors includes a fresh nod from Celebrator Beer News, and the house lives up to the acclaim. Over seventy taps of the world’s best beers — as well as a hefty collection of classic and obscure bottled beers and knowledgeable staffers serving them in a great relaxed atmosphere — make Falling Rock a mecca for local and visiting brew fiends alike.

What do you get when you combine seventeen liquors with a smidgen of water? At Mario’s Double Daughters, it’s called Succo Vaffanculodi Mario, which translates roughly into English as “Mario’s go-fuck-yourself juice.” While the super-strong recipe is a well-guarded secret, the bright-red concoction is on display front and center in this whimsical LoDo bar, mocking weak stomachs as it gurgles in a glowing brass-and-steel tank riveted behind the long bar. If you’re smart enough to pair the potent cocktail with a slice of greasy pizza from next-door sibling Two-Fisted Mario’s, you might not black out after two glasses. But don’t count on it.

Good margaritas are a dime a dozen in this town. But Cielo raises the tequila bar with its Hot & Cold margarita, a hot twist on the cool classic. Made with triple citrus and chile-infused Chinaco Silver, a splash of dry vermouth and olive and serrano-chile juices, this marg bursts with exotic flavors and leaves a warm, spicy afterglow on your tongue. Douse the fire with complimentary nibbles in the candlelit Hacienda Bar, which spills out onto Cielo’s stucco patio — an ideal spot for springtime sipping.

Like its agave-derivative namesake, Mezcal — the upscale Mexican cantina that opened on a gentrifying-by-the-second block of East Colfax last December — is getting slammed on a nightly basis. And rightly so. From its glowing Moroccan lamps and sunny walls painted with Sol Cerveza advertisements to such kitschy decorations as a chrome low-rider bike suspended from the ceiling and a plastic baby Jesus affixed to an exposed-brick column, Mezcal looks like the real thing. And Mezcal tastes like it, too, with its stash of over a hundred premium tequilas, served straight up or mixed into fabulous fruity concoctions. But the only true measure of a tequila bar is the house margarita, where the mix is key. Too much sweet in the sweet-and-sour, and your marg tastes like soap. Too little, and your cheeks get glued together in a permanent pucker. Mezcal makes its mix daily from freshly squeezed Key and Persian limes; add in the Triple Sec and Silver Herradura — the very generous house tequila — and you’ve got one great marg. It’s even better at happy hour, when a tall, tall glass runs only $3. Since the kitchen stays open until 1 a.m. every day of the week, there’s plenty of time to order a burrito to soak up all that excess alcohol. And before you head for home, remember to check out the bao de caballeros, which is full of busty Mexican pinups.

There was a time not so long ago in American culinary history when wine was ordered simply by asking for the house red or white. Bastien’s is a product of that period. And while settling down for a night in this time-warped Colfax fixture may not inspire your thirst for a delicate Ctes du Rhne or hundred-dollar bottle of bubbly, that’s all for the best: Bastien’s wouldn’t have it, anyway. What it does have are house reds and whites going by the glass in the single-digit range and the occasional, surprising Aussie shiraz or South American cabernet that’ll still only run you somewhere in the neighborhood of a five-spot. Though Bastien’s throwback atmosphere may move you to want the sort of cocktails Truman Capote would’ve sucked down when he used to visit the place, just remember that man does not live on martinis and sidecars alone. Cheap wine has its place — and Bastien’s is it.

It’s no surprise that Charlie Master, son of Mel and Jane, would come up with a good wine list at his first restaurant, whose very name is a word used for measuring the sugar content in wine. At Brix, Charlie set out to create a list of appealing, very drinkable bottles, none of which would come in above thirty dollars. And with the kind of experience he has from growing up in a wine-and-restaurant family, he was up to the task. If you’re not a grape-juice fan, Brix still has you covered with its nightly “white trash beer specials,” with Schlitz and PBR in the can to go along with the kitchen’s simple menu of hot dogs, burgers, tarragon chicken, mussel stew and other high-class, low-price comfort foods.

In Denver, Mel and Jane Master are known for a lot of things. Their flagship restaurant, Mel’s, is one of the most consistently excellent eateries in town, with a staff of top-notch professionals and a menu that’s high-end and comforting at the same time. Outside of Denver, though, they’re probably best known for the name they’ve made for themselves in the wine business. Lucky for us, Mel’s gets to act as a focal point for all that grape expertise, and the restaurant’s list — which features primarily French vintages — maintains a nice depth and breadth without pricing out the casual drinker or becoming too fussy. But what truly sets Mel’s apart from the dozens of other good lists and good houses is the way the wine is neither elevated above nor subsumed by the food. The two menus strike a perfect balance, complementing each other equally and proving that the best companion you can ever have for a fine dinner is an equally fine bottle of wine.

What is it they say? That good things come in small packages? We wonder how sick chef/owner Sean Kelly must be of hearing that. Still, it was never so true as it is at Kelly’s Clair de Lune, where everything — from the menu to the dining room to the kitchen to the wine list — is small, controlled and perfect. The wine bottles find a home in the racks beside the bar and in cubby holes along the walls in the dining room, and are carefully chosen to pair up wonderfully with whatever is on the menu that night. Crisp whites, strong, dark Bordeaux and Chimay — the champagne of beers — are the highlights of Clair’s stock, and if you ever need help in choosing what will go best with what, just ask. The benefit of a short list is that the staff becomes intimately acquainted with every bottle. And at Clair de Lune, help is never far away.

It’s unlikely that any restaurant will ever top Adega when it comes to the size, depth and complexity of its wine list. That is, it’s unlikely until someone else builds a restaurant around a wine room the way Adega did, until some other enterprising gang of booze-hounds assembles a store of 800 labels and thousands of bottles the way Adega’s owners did, and until some other house arranges a menu so carefully tailored toward pairing. In the meantime, we have Adega, and — lucky us — it is both the best-stocked and least-intimidating wine board around. With a sommelier on the floor and a staff of native guides, you never have to wonder what to drink with dinner. Red or white, champagne or port, from the dizzyingly expensive to the sublimely affordable, no matter what your taste, Adega has a grape to feed your need.

True, true, dogs these days are already too fat. But since you’ve already committed to pampering your pets, you might as well try to make the snacks they’re vacuuming up healthier and tastier. Blue Hills not only creates new doggie takeout dishes every day, but on Saturdays it hosts an all-you-can-eat buffet for pooches, where the dishes range from buffalo pizza to salmon hot dogs, turkey meatloaf and — mmm, mmm — liveroni. Thankfully, they also provide doggie bags. Atta boy!

Flamingo, a converted Congress Park salon, once was devoted exclusively to ladies’ locks. These days, it helps look after their tots. This coffeehouse caters to adults by providing the usual coffee drinks, pastries and occasional live entertainment, but it also offers a play area for toddlers and after-school snacks suitable for older kids. People reluctant to give up those long, relaxing hours in the coffeehouse just because they’ve become parents should flock to Flamingo.

Big Bowl is one of those places we like to think of as dressed-up fast-food chains: They’re more expensive and time-intensive than McDonald’s, or even Noodles & Company, but then again, the portions are bigger and the extras more extravagant. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially when you’re trying to please everyone — your chic sister-in-law, customer-service-intensive grandmother, ravenous uncle Randy, half a soccer team and a thousand and one small, hungry, whining children. At times like these, it’s the little things that count. Immediately on arrival, Big Bowl presents your kids with a bowl of rice and a cardboard takeout box filled with crayons, small toys, rookie chopsticks and a children’s menu. That’s enough to keep them occupied while you peruse the grown-up menu, which is expansive enough to include mac-n-cheese along with the stir fry for small-fry, potsticker and grilled-satay offerings.

With the Dragonfly Cafe, Greg and Christie Metheny hit on an idea whose time had truly come: a restaurant that wasn’t just kid-friendly, didn’t just make a few half-assed attempts at catering to children, but was actually built as a place for the little rugrats to congregate. But they kept the parents in mind, too: The Dragonfly’s coffee shop/lunch bar is built around a play area for kids, so that Mom can keep an eye on Junior while grabbing a quick breakfast or lunch or cup of java. The menu includes wraps, panini sandwiches and salads, with PB&Js, sliced apples with caramel and plenty of other healthy choices for kids.

Short of roofies, booze, candles and dim lights are still the best way to kindle the fires of passion. At Vesta Dipping Grill, fire and passion are the primary elements on display. And booze, of course. With its virtually endless combinations of appetizers, entrees and thirty-odd dipping sauces, Vesta’s menu is structured for sharing. And the gorgeous space — all wrought iron, wood and brick, with deep, horseshoe-shaped booths and well-spaced tables illuminated by guttering candlelight — is made for getting that mojo working. What are you waiting for? The good folks at Vesta are doing all they can to make it easy on you, Romeo, so splash on some cologne, polish up that gold card, and get ready to feel the love.

Thirty years after it made its debut on Kalamath Street, Brewery Bar II is now about as close as you can get to honest, unmanufactured perfection in a divey, old-guard neighborhood bar. It’s small, cramped and homey, smells alternately wonderful or horrific, depending on how close you end up to the men’s room, and the walls are covered with the knickknacks of a collective beer-drunk sports culture. At this hole-in-the-wall, you can expect (and deserve) an earful of abuse from the staff if you try to do something like split a check three ways during overtime in a Broncos game or demand that the kitchen serve your chile on the side. But once you get in the swing of things, Brew II is the perfect spot for an unpretentious lunch or just a few too many drinks with the guys. On those nights when you’re after a hot, greasy, cheesy Mexican meal and have no one to impress, Brew II will fill you up right.

What impresses your folks? Big steaks? A good bar? A crowd that arrives for dinner dressed in something better than work boots and an Avs jersey? No matter what you think will make Mom and Pop sit up and take notice, odds are you’ll find it at Mel’s. From the swank Cherry Creek address to the beautiful space, from the expert staff to the new, elegantly simple menu courtesy of Tyler Wiard, Mel’s is all about making every dinner and every diner feel like something special. So whether you’re out to brag about your promotion, show off that new engagement ring, celebrate your release from detox or just try to make the parental units forget that you’re 32 and still living in their basement, Mel’s provides the ideal backdrop.

“Johnson? Consolidated Widget is looking for someone to promote their new line of shower-curtain rings. Their man will be in town tomorrow, and I don’t need to tell you how much we need that contract. Play hardball, boy! Send them a muffin basket!” Or better yet, get on the phone and call for reservations at Adega. Chef Bryan Moscatello has been wowing folks on a national scale for almost two years now by helming one of the top restaurants and wine bars in the country. And while the hype has died down a little locally — there’s no longer a three-month wait for Friday-night reservations — Adega is still going strong. With artistic and sometimes whimsical New American menus featuring such dishes as venison steak and eggs, pork loin and country-fried rabbit; excellent service; and a beautifully appointed dining room that surrounds the giant, glassed-in wine room from which Adega takes its name, the tables at Adega are always set to impress.

Back in the day, Griff’s could have given McDonald’s a run for its money. But today is not that day. Now, as you pull off Broadway into a parking lot dwarfed by the I-25 interchange, you see the remains of a chain that coulda been a contender — one of the last surviving locations of an empire that once covered several states. The board of fare sketched out on Griff’s menu is dominated by the classics: burgers, fries and milkshakes, all assembled with care. The oddly named Giant burger consists of one small patty on a soft burger roll with fresh onions, pickles and mustard. It’s fine on its own, but order it as part of a Monster Meal, and it’s a real deal. For less than five bucks, you get a burger, a bag of greasy, crisp and perfect fries, and a drink — more than enough to get you where you’re headed, even if where you’re going is nowhere fast.

When you want to meat and greet, you go to the Palm. When you want to get down to serious business, you go to Morton’s of Chicago. From the moment you step through the barely marked door on Wynkoop Street into this intimate, almost cave-like steakhouse, you feel as though you’re in the most important, secret club in the world — one where the service is white-linen elegant yet chummy; the conversations are hushed, perhaps in homage to the amounts of money being discussed; and the deals are as big as the 48-ounce porterhouse — and just as bloody rare. From the martinis huge enough to quench the most powerful thirst, to the still-squirming lobster that just went by on the morgue-like cart that displays your eating options, to the late-night liqueurs brought out for special customers, dinner at Morton’s is a very big deal.

More deals per square inch are made in this place than anywhere else in the city. One reason, of course, is that the Capital Grille is so crowded. Amid the dark wood, red leather, polished mirrors and trophy heads, business is taken care of, futures are made and broken, and — through it all — a fantastic lunch is served. The Grille specializes in steaks, but the menu is also full of classic steakhouse extras. There are burgers, including one made of lobster and crab; half-chickens roasted on the bone; great mashed potatoes; shrimp cocktails; and the best lobster bisque in the city, all doled out by a staff of waitresses, managers and floormen who are second to none. If you consider yourself one of the city’s power elite, you’d better put a few Grille lunches in your Blackberry, because that’s where business is getting done these days. And if you don’t, you might want to spend your next lunch hour polishing up that resumé.

Talk about bang for your buck! These days, five dollars won’t go far in most places. But most places aren’t the Diamond Cabaret, where lusty lunchers can dive into a lavish, all-you-can-eat buffet for only $4.95. And the scenery is free! While lovely ladies prowl the stage — albeit a tad less enthusiastically than during the evening hours — diners down heaping plates of smoked turkey or juicy prime rib, with a salad and maybe a cup of tomato-basil soup on the side, as well as cake and cookies. Offered Monday through Friday from 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., this steal of a deal attracts a lot of testosterone-rich men, who use their leftover lunch money to “tip” the friendly staff. But be prepared for a shock when you leave: In this deliciously dark den, you can forget that it’s only mid-afternoon and your cubicle awaits.

There’s a fine distinction between the classic egg-batter-and-French-bread breakfast most people think of as French toast, and the slices of pure American ingenuity dished up at Dozens. The Aurora eatery (which also does some lunches, but only until 3 p.m.) has a way with eggs, with hash, with everything a man could need to get up and going in the morning. But what this kitchen does with true distinction is French toast — cranking up the calories and pumping up the pleasure by slathering a couple of thick slices of battered and grilled bread with raspberry cream cheese, then serving the whole thing with a good-sized portion of fresh fruit. Only trouble is, our favorite part of French toast is the syrup. And after all this, doesn’t syrup seem like overkill?

Nothing gets a morning started like a lovely pain perdu, the French version of French toast. At Bistro Vendome — a comfy, bright spot tucked down an alley behind Larimer Square — the brunch-menu fave is made from a single piece of soft, center-cut bread, perfectly browned, then sprinkled with confectioners’ sugar. The strong citrus honey this pain is served with can be overpowering, but that’s why it comes on the side — so that you can add a little, add a lot, or just ignore it entirely and dig into the bare toast, which is ideal on its own.

The happy-hour menu at McCormick’s, the bar that fronts the seafood restaurant in the Oxford Hotel, is a perennial favorite. From 3 to 6 p.m. every day of the week and from 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 p.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday, McCormick’s bar menu features over a dozen $2 dishes, an unbelievably diverse spread of everything from sashimi-quality tuna rolls to crab cakes to respectable cheeseburgers with fries. Although McCormick’s wood-accented and well-windowed bar is popular at all times, what’s known as cheap time has become an incredible draw. And now a good deal has gotten even better: On Sundays, parking in LoDo is free, courtesy of Mayor John Hickenlooper, a McCormick’s neighbor. So put those quarters to good use — you can buy another burger rather than two hours of time. Respect the Sabbath and keep it yummy.

If you want something done right, sometimes you just have to do it yourself. And some mornings, nothing is more right than the build-your-own Bloody Mary bar at Piscos. For $3.50 every Sunday from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., you can doctor your vodka — and your hangover — with everything from the standard Tabasco, Worcestershire and horseradish to enough peppers and celery sticks to make your drink look like a salad. Those seeking more substantial fare, though, should consider taking on one of Piscos’ South American dishes or making a run at an overflowing intercontinental buffet of cold cuts, cheeses, pastries and fresh fruit.

Besides serving some of the best Bloody Marys in town — rich, spicy and spiked with globs of horseradish and cucumber spears — Williams Tavern offers a free, all-you-can-eat brunch for the hungover hordes every Sunday. But don’t look for quiche or candy-ass eggs Benedict here. Instead, bartender Gina Ko dishes up a simple, tasty buffet of stomach-anchoring dishes like spaghetti and meatballs, homemade hummus and falafel, beef-and- bean nachos, even macaroni and cheese. Come for the booze, but stay for the grub — there’s no better (or cheaper) way to chase down that hair of the dog.

Paul Bunyan never had it as good as the grub dished up on the chow line at Java Moon. Jim Ilg’s little coffeehouse and cafe tucked among the pawnshops of Broadway serves an order of biscuits and gravy hearty enough to fill you from toes to cowlick. Add to this big, smothered breakfast burritos, fruit smoothies (we all know Paul liked the occasional triple-berry smoothie) that are almost a meal in themselves, and a full roster of quality coffee, and Java Moon can keep you going all day. Don’t let the name fool you: Sunrise is definitely Java Moon’s best hour. The doors open at six but close by four, so if you’re smart, you’ll be like a lumberjack and come early, come hungry and leave happy.

For starting your day in a powerful way, Dixons is the winner and still the chomp. There are plenty of reasons this restaurant deserves its loyal, early-morning following: an interesting menu that ranges from healthy cereal and fruit offerings to hearty skillets and eggs Benedict; cheery, accommodating servers who keep the coffee coming; a spacious dining room with tables where you can see and be seen, as well as more remote booths where you can do your business in relative privacy. But two recent developments further enhanced Dixons’ already extraordinary drawing power. One was the temporary closure of Racines, its sibling restaurant that will reopen this spring on Sherman Street. The other was the election of Mayor John Hickenlooper, a denizen of LoDo (and a very, very small-percentage owner of Dixons) who need only stumble a block from his loft in order to call a breakfast meeting to order. Mayor, about that parking ticket…

Ahh, Johnny’s… No one does breakfast quite like this half-boxcar, half-cafeteria diner right in the middle of Aurora’s burgeoning Korea-town sector. The coffee is hot and strong, the food greasy as hell, the service non-existent because of the order-wait-and-pick-up style of delivering meals to the crowds that come through here on the weekends, but the kitchen is fast, and things work quickly at the counter, too, provided you bring cash. From the pure plastic Americana of the decor to the car-cult fixtures and fast-forward regulars cramming breakfast burritos, bacon sandwiches and scrambled eggs into their mouths with steam-shovel efficiency, there’s no finer example of the all-American breakfast bar.

The crowd outside Zona’s is a telltale sign that last call has been called. Shortly after 2 a.m., patrons line up — rain, sleet or snow — for a taste of the down-home cookin’ that’s served hot and fresh until 3 a.m. And what Zona’s lacks in amenities — there’s no seating, for example, unless you park yourself on the hood of your car — it more than makes up for in expansiveness. The late-night menu is the same as the daytime menu: fried chicken, smothered pork chops, pig’s-ear sandwiches, steak, killer yams and turnip greens and, of course, tamales. A stop at Zona’s sure beats another slice.

If you sometimes find yourself wandering the city’s grayer quarters at odd hours, looking for a place to come down, sober up or just think those kinds of thoughts that come best in the middle of the night, then head straight for Pete’s Kitchen. This year, everyone’s favorite breakfast spot made the jump from being a weekend-only all-night destination to a 24/7 outpost for Denver’s party boys, vampires and insomniacs. Which means you can now get a strong cup of bottomless coffee, a fix of avgolemono (Greek lemon, chicken and rice soup), a few slices off the meat stick or just a piece of homemade cherry pie whenever you want it. Add to this the warm glow that comes from spending the wee hours with the city’s most motley crew of nightcrawlers, and we think you’ll agree: Pete’s is where it’s at.

Americans now live in a 24-hour world. There’s no more 9-to-5, no more forty-hour weeks, and the dinner hour has become a fluid concept as people try to balance B-shifts and night shifts and all the responsibilities of days over-full of everything. But some good has come out of all this hurry and stress: Restaurant hours keep extending later and later into the evening. For a very delicious example, Brasserie Rouge now offers a full dinner menu until 11 p.m. on weekdays and until midnight on Friday and Saturday nights. Whether you’re a long-shift worker, a late-night eater or just another one of the young and restless out on the town, Brasserie Rouge will serve you duck confit, steak frites and charcuterie plates long into the night, and do so in a great, crowded, noisy, smoky bar that, if not an actual slice of Parisian nightlife, is certainly the next best thing.

People-watching is an important part of the diner experience. Second to coffee-drinking, it might be the most important part. And if people-watching were a sport, Breakfast King is where future Olympic hopefuls would come to train. The King attracts all sorts, from old farts to young fellas, from truckers to slummers to parents dragging their squalling toddlers behind. Everyone is ably tended to by waitresses (not servers, not waitrons, but old-fashioned waitresses who are good at their jobs and happy doing them) working off a menu that was already old when the King was new — a time-capsule version of American cuisine, circa 1970, that’s full of cheeseburgers and fries, Coney Island hot dogs, chiliette, biscuits and gravy, and ham with pineapple rings. The coffee is strong, the company easy, and no matter what hour you wander in, one thing is certain: It’s good to be the King.

Denver has an abundance of dives — some murky, some dark, some that smell funny, some that are just plain dangerous. There are joints, holes-in-the-wall and hellholes of every description in this town, but Tom’s takes the prize, because depending on what day of the week and what hour of the day you arrive, Tom’s can be any (or all) of these things. Squatting colorfully on one of the worst corners in the city, crime-wise, by day Tom’s is a great place for watching the world go by while eating some decent diner grub. At night the menu compresses, and most of those street creatures come inside for coffee and a place to rest their legs, so the people-watching gets up-close and personal. There are holes in the windows that may (or may not) be from stray bullets, locks on the bathroom doors, great servers, better corned beef hash, bottomless cups of coffee, and more entertainment packed into one place than you could find in a twelve-hour marathon of Cops.

There’s only one way to improve on dessert, and that’s to find a way to sneak some alcohol into it. Sure, this tactic has left us with a world full of rum balls, rum cakes and rum tarts, but don’t blame Mel’s. Here, ptissire Robert McCarthy has come up with the coolest, most boozerific dessert we’ve found: the Cosmopolitan. Served in a sugared martini glass, this beauty combines apricot sorbet, dried lime and tiny, clear cubes of vodka gelée. Put a spoonful in your mouth, and the melting sorbet immediately alters the liquid balance of the gelée, causing it to melt across your tongue like a high-end Jell-O shot. Cool.

You’ve just eaten one of the great meals of your life at Vega. You’ve been charmed by the beautiful surroundings, coddled by the staff, well fed from the kitchen’s upscale but approachable nuevo-Latino menu, and left with a tiny plate of amuse geules — sweet bites like handmade chocolate-truffle and fruit gelées brought out gratis. But you’ve still got a little room left between larynx and trachea that hasn’t yet been stuffed full of good eats. So it’s a good thing that in defiance of all the pomp and swank of the dinner menu and dining room, Vega offers a guilty-pleasure dessert: hand-spun cotton candy made in-house and served like smoke rising from the charred, crackly top of a true crme brlée. Go ahead and order it — you know you want to. And don’t worry about what that table full of stuffed shirts behind you will think when they see you licking spun sugar off your fingers. Because soon enough, they’ll be doing it, too.

Chef John Broening loves charcuterie. He left his last executive-chef gig because that menu was too dainty, too precious. And now he’s at Brasserie Rouge, LoDo’s hot new French bistro, where he turns out big, lusty flavors night after night. The biggest can be found on the assiettes de charcuterie platter, the town’s

best way to start off a meal without firing up the oven. Each platter includes fragrant, cold lamb sausage spiced with fennel on rounds of baguette spread with spicy Dijon mustard; duck-liver pté beaten into a smooth, airy mousse just waiting to be smeared onto chunks of French bread torn from loaves made by the restaurant’s in-house bakery; chilled slabs of gamey rabbit pté buried under a fall of baby greens and touched with a compote of sweet apples, delicate herbs and sharp autumnal spice. All of it is lovely, all of it is delicious, and paired with a smooth glass of anything from the Brasserie bar, it’s a meal in itself.

On the outside, fresh, hot flatbread, crisp and golden and rich with clarified butter. On the inside, sweet caramelized onions and mashed potatoes, smooth and gently flavored like a warm breeze over the spice market. Sitting at a table at Kabul Kabob with a plain, white plate of bulanee kachalu before you, you can’t help but think that this is not just the best starter in town, but the best starter ever. And you can’t help but order more. The dish is so basic, so plain, so expertly handled and so delicious that you occasionally wonder if man could live on Afghan turnovers alone.

Sunflower’s kitchen can cook, there’s no doubt about that. Almost everything this crew touches turns to pure culinary gold. So who would suspect a pastry to be the dish that truly shines? Sunflower does a dessert — a fresh berry shortcake swimming in sweetened tofu cream, of all things — that’s so good it takes our breath away. The berries are fresh, the shortcake sweet and spongy — and the tofu cream? A true treasure, even if tofu itself is a joke, made from curdled soy milk and therefore a food to be laughed at. It certainly has no business being turned into something this decadently delicious. But when we order the berry shortcake, we’re so busy eating that we don’t let a snicker escape our lips.

The best way to treat the humble soybean is to leave it pretty much alone, and that’s just what Moongate Asian Grill does with its edamame. The pods are steamed, lightly salted, then served hot, sans fuss. You can eat a whole bowl of these addictive little buggers — nutty in flavor and green as nuclear beer nuts — and know that you’re filling up with one of nature’s most perfect foods, packed with all those vitamins, nutrients, oils and good stuff that’s so sadly lacking in our drive-thru, fast-food culture. So dig in.

What makes Sunflower a winner? It’s not only a vegetarian restaurant. Although chef Jon Pell has been immersed in the nuts-and-sprouts scene for more than a decade and his restaurant is known nationwide as a destination for itinerant veggie-heads, this bright, cozy cafe does its thing with no politics attached. And while Sunflower may be fawned over by every meatless, wheatless, smoothie-sucking, twig-and-berry devotee who’s ever visited Boulder, this is not a vegetarian restaurant. It’s a great goddamn regular restaurant that — along with everything else it does with talent and dedication — also serves wonderful vegetarian and full-on vegan fare. All of the food is fresh, not frozen; the produce is organic, the meats drug- and hormone-free. And that’s all fine, but what matters most is that Sunflower’s veggie cuisine is so good, you’ll forget halfway through that it’s supposed to be good for you, too.

Don’t let the wedding cakes on display fool you: The Cream Puffery isn’t just for special occasions. This bakery, bar and cafe has something to satisfy any sweet tooth, whether you’re celebrating a marriage, a divorce decree or just the fact that it’s Tuesday. Owner and ptissire Amy DeWitt has forgotten more about baking and pastry and the hard science of whisks and convection than most people will ever know. Leaving her native Miami three years ago, she brought all of this accumulated knowledge to Boulder, where she and her Cuban-born partner, Lourdes Sanchez, opened the Cream Puffery and started turning out beautiful Key lime pies, rich dulce de leche cakes and the best ropa vieja money can buy. There’s no place better for a little taste of Big Havana.

Baker Michael Bortz is the very devil that Atkins devotees see when they look over their shoulders. As they lie awake at night, dreaming of chewy sourdough and baguettes hot out of the oven, they hear Bortz’s voice whispering, “Go ahead. What could one loaf hurt?” At Paradise Bakery, you walk right into the guts of a working kitchen and order your carbs directly from the guys who’ve been there since 4 a.m., turning the dough, nursing the starters and babysitting all those racks of warm, fresh goodness. Whether you’re dropping in for a couple boules to go with dinner or sneaking in to load up on decadent black-cherry-chocolate miche, it’s diet be damned in Paradise.

These days, everyone and his brother and their sister are hopping on the low-carb bus, tossing the rice, the tortilla, the pasta, the pastry, the bread and the bun out the window. But Carl’s Jr. gives you a little something to hold what’s left of your meal — and your dignity — together. Its fast-food burger comes neatly wrapped in lettuce, so that you can still experience the carnivorous thrill of eating with your hands, not a fork. Hint: That fellow at the drive-thru next to you is probably Barry Fey.

Man does not live by bread alone. In fact, man shouldn’t be eating bread at all these days, not if he’s on a low-carb diet. Instead, he should do what Denver’s fat cats have done for over a decade: stick his big butt down in one of the Palm’s cushy booths and dig into a big, no-carb steak. And just in case he has problems deciding whether those bleu-cheese crumbles are going to throw off the count, the Palm has come up with a handy guide to its “favorite low-carb selections” to help eaters stay within Atkins and South Beach diet guidelines. For a set price of $47 or $40 — hey, you can never be too rich or too thin — you get a no-carb entree (steaks for the higher-priced spread, seafood and chicken for the lower), a salad (no croutons, of course), a vegetable (half portion) and a low-carb cheesecake that has diners swooning. And think of all those calories you’ll work off as you swivel your head trying to see what VIPs have just walked in the door and then start aerobically glad-handing them. Hint: That fellow at the bar having an animated argument with Bill Husted’s portrait on the wall is probably, well, Bill Husted.

Remember all that Freedom Toast crap last year? All that screeching on AM radio about how patriotic Americans ought to pitch out their French cheese, pour their French wine into the gutter and abstain from all French kissing until the Frogs stopped thinking for themselves and, like Tony Blair, just blindly agreed with everything our president said? Yeah, that was some freaky, flag-waving shit that went down — and leave it to Robert Tournier, owner of Le Central, to turn it all to his advantage. At the height of the mock crisis, Tournier decided to hold an essay contest, with prizes (most of them involving free dinners at Le Central) for the entries that best expressed a love of all things French, and more prizes (mostly consisting of French wine and chocolate and free dinners at Le Central) for those that best typified an American’s loathing for the French. Well, big surprise: Tournier’s business increased by more than 10 percent during the controversy.

Yes, Mao is the hippest, slickest, South Beach-iest joint to debut on the Denver restaurant scene in a long time. Yes, they spent some godawful huge wad of cash on the trippy, color-changing ceiling and fiber-optic bar top. Yes, there are flat-screen TVs in the can, and, yes, that very well might be your neighbor/landlord/congressman in the corner booth getting busy with that pretty young thing who isn’t his wife. But amid all the high-end decor, the weirdest, oddest, most jarring juxtaposition has to be the giant, lovingly rendered portrait of Joe Pantoliano dominating the back wall. Sure, we loved him in The Sopranos. And we agree that he’s probably one of the most underappreciated character actors working today. But why it seemed like a good idea to put a huge picture of him striding along, hands in his pockets, trademark slouch hat turned backward on his head, in a restaurant dedicated to the happy memories of a murderous communist revolutionary is beyond us. Still, it looks nice, and if Joey Pants should ever come through town, we’re sure he’ll appreciate it, too.

Kabul Kabob, an unassuming little joint tucked away in a strip mall, does everything flawlessly, without ever appearing to try too hard. The kitchen specializes in a cuisine that’s east of the Middle East, north of northern India, flavored by the trickle-down influence of all the cultures that surround Afghanistan on the map; the menu reads like a history lesson taught in flavor, with tastes and spices and preparations mingling in every dish. From the casual service, to the space — all regal gold and purple — to the unpretentious atmosphere, this is a restaurant you want to come back to again and again, if only because on every visit you’re tempted to eat three of everything. And since the place is incredibly inexpensive, you could easily do just that.

We all remember our first underage drink, and for a lot of us, it was probably cadged from an understanding (or careless) bartender at a Chinese restaurant. At Twin Dragon — where we’re sure they carefully check every ID — you can get a fresh taste of those illicit thrills as an adult. The specialty-drink menu features Fog Cutters, Zombies and rum-heavy Scorpion bowls, but most important, it has Mai Tais — all syrupy-sweet with fruit juice, garnished with neon-red cherries and limp orange slices, and liberally dosed with the hard stuff. Second only to a cold Tsing Tao, nothing cuts the burn of good General Tso’s Chicken like a Mai Tai, that classic of the cocktail set. And in keeping with tradition, Twin Dragon still serves this tiki-bar special in its only proper vessel: a big, chipped ceramic pineapple.

When an American christens a place Brasserie Anything, the temptation is always to crank up the Continental ostentation, but Brasserie Rouge — opened last August in a long-vacant space in the Ice House by not one, but two Americans, Robert and Leigh Thompson, with a kitchen overseen by a third, John Broening — avoided this pitfall. Wisely, these three skipped over the glitz, the luxe, the fifty-dollar dinner plates, and instead created a place that has the vibe of a comfortable neighborhood spot, of a bistro along the Seine where everyone happens to speak English and you can pay for your coq au vin with American money. It’s crowded with bustling servers in short-sleeved white dishwasher’s jackets and filled with steam from the line, smoke from the bar, and the good smells of everyone else’s dinner. The food, while simple and straightforward, has been as carefully researched and re-created as the copycat grand chandeliers that hang over the dining room. Brasserie Rouge seems to get everything right without even trying — as if it just happens, every night, like magic. And that’s why this restaurant is the best thing to hit the Denver dining scene this year. It’s not just the food, not just the space, not just service or the looks or the hype, but everything combined. What matters most about a great meal is what we take with us after the bill is paid, all the little details we’ll never forget. And Brasserie Rouge is simply unforgettable.

Every city has Greek food. Every city has Italian. And there aren’t many cities where you can’t find at least one French restaurant, one sushi place (however frightening it might be to be eating sushi in Fargo, Billings or Texarkana), and a handful of Mexican restaurants fighting it out on the edge of town. But you know you’re becoming a real food city when some of the odder ethnic cuisines start sneaking in. Ethiopian, Moroccan, Brazilian — Denver has all these, and now we even have an Afghan restaurant to call our own: Kabul Kabob. For a basic understanding of Afghan cuisine, you have only to look at a map. It exists on the culinary spectrum precisely where Afghanistan lives geographically. But to understand why this particular restaurant is so deserving of a prize, you must sit down in the beautiful, richly appointed dining room, close your eyes and taste. Everything on this menu is delicious. Nothing is overdone, overthought or overworked. There is lightness and weight, sweet and savory, Indian naan bread, dough like a yogurt lassi, mantou dumplings, Turkish coffee and heat and cold and flavors by the dozen all vying for attention, but never struggling against one another. At Kabul Kabob, everything, absolutely everything, is beautiful.

Nineteen steps. That’s what it takes Frank Bonanno to get from his first restaurant, Mizuna, to his second, Luca d’Italia. He can do it in the blink of an eye — and does, several times a night, moving from the classy, comfortable fare of Mizuna to the complicated, unbelievably delicious Italian menu at Luca. From lobster-spiked mac-and-cheese to gnocchi in a crabmeat-and-lobster gravy and back again, over and over, all night. Fitzgerald once said that American lives have no second acts, but Bonanno has proven this old saw false with the continued popularity of Mizuna and the success he’s seen bloom at Luca. That he’s done so despite the loss of his partner, Doug Fleischmann, in a tragic car accident last summer makes the success of both restaurants even more remarkable, if bittersweet. So here’s to you, Frank. We don’t know how you do it, and we don’t envy you the miles you run every day overseeing these two fabulous houses. But we’re glad you’re up to the task — because we’d never want to see either place without you.

Sean Kelly’s restaurant, Clair de Lune, is almost beyond categorizing. Although it’s very small — Kelly can seat a maximum of twenty people in the dining room and three at the bar — it’s huge in terms of its importance in the interlocking mesh of Denver’s food scene. It’s not known for a particular dish, because they’re all so good and because they change week to week and often day to day. Although technically it’s a Mediterranean restaurant, because that’s the broad area of the world from which Kelly draws his inspiration, that label doesn’t do Clair de Lune justice, either. The menu, though compact, is impossible to pigeonhole into some imposed classification. But whatever his restaurant may be, one thing’s indisputable: Sean Kelly is the best chef in Denver. Which also means the best owner, best cook and best manager. He has the best kitchen at the warm and frantic center of the best house in Denver; the best tables, attended to by the best staff, with the best food in the city. Kelly’s our man, our chef. He’s simply Denver’s best.

A year ago, Radek Cerny — formerly of Papillon (now Indigo), formerly of Radex (now Opal), formerly of Le Chantecler (still Le Chantecler, only better) — looked like he might be down for the count. One by one, he’d closed the crown jewels of his restaurant empire. Among local foodies, the opinion was that it was about time: Cerny’s cooking had become increasingly derivative and copycat, his name synonymous with certain (mostly potato-related) excesses that were more recognizable on the plate than his touch was in the kitchen. But then came L’Atelier — The Artistry of Radek Cerny — and all that speculation went straight out the window. This was Radek re-energized. Radek times ten. Like an aging prizefighter getting his second wind, he came out swinging with a new restaurant that wasn’t just great for Denver, but great on a national scale. Every smart, innovative, bizarre thing Cerny had ever done in his entire career was crammed into this single expression of his unique vision, then doodled with sauce, stood on its ear and lit on fire. This workshop became a brilliant showcase for the skills that Cerny had always had, but that had gotten buried beneath the name and the reputation. L’Atelier is a fabulous house — a chef’s kitchen operating in constant tribute to the man whose name it bears. Welcome back, Radek. We didn’t know how much we missed you till you were gone.

Every kitchen guy we’ve ever known has been a movie-obsessed, pop-culture-spouting cinema geekus extremis. Their language comes straight out of a dozen Hollywood classics; their style and affectations are based half on the job, half on the image of the job as espoused by the media. But Mike Long, the chef at Littleton’s wonderful Opus Restaurant, has taken things a step further by twisting his love of food and movies (and of food in movies) together into one event: Opus Night at the Cinema. For this prix fixe dinner, Long pulled out all the stops with six courses, each keyed to a different Tinseltown classic and line-dog fave. There were fava beans and a nice chianti from Silence of the Lambs, peppers and sausage from The Godfather, a Timpano from Big Night and, for dessert, gold leaf-wrapped chocolate tickets à la Willy Wonka. It was truly a proud night for line cooks everywhere and a meal to remember for all fortunate enough to attend.

The measure of a great menu is the way it makes you consider the future. How long can I sit here eating before I’m kicked out? How much of this can I try before I burst? And how long before I can afford to come back? At L’Atelier, the answers to those questions are, in order: not long, not enough, and not soon enough. Everything on chef Radek Cerny’s wonderland board of fare is an amazing and singular creation — sometimes derivative, often strange, always delicious. The appetizer list alone, with its sweetbreads, tartares and artistic small bites, is enough to keep you coming back for months. From there, the menu expands outward, covering dozens of dishes from the land and sea, each arriving decked out in myriad sauces, demis, reductions and oils that should make even the most indiscriminate gluttons happy. In all, the menu is a piece of poetry, Cerny’s ode to his years spent serving the public, to the friends he’s made and the friends he’s lost. And at L’Atelier, this poem is being performed nightly for your benefit.

The food created by Ian Kleinman at Indigo has been called a lot of things: post-modern, new American, fused, confused, and just plain strange, to name a few. And true, the young chef has done some unusual things here. But what’s come out of all the crossover spring rolls, high-end popcorn, Mexi-French and Franco-Asian mixing fusion is a restaurant that straddles the sometimes very wide gap between houses run by chefs for foodies and those that actually want to make some money. There’s an element of puckish, FTW arrogance still lingering around the fringes of this menu, but Kleinman and crew have managed to bring a whole lot of the fun back into fusion cuisine — and that’s been sadly lacking of late. And whether you’re just dropping by the bar for a martini and some sesame buttered popcorn with wasabe peas and pumpkin seeds, or sitting down for a duck confit cracker-crust pizza with candied apples followed by an ancho-rubbed hanger steak with tomatillo purée, you can be sure that Indigo will deliver two things: a great meal in a great space and a peek in the direction where American cuisine may be heading.

This has been a weird year for the French-restaurant community. It began with all that Freedom Fries nonsense, followed by a wildly unsuccessful attempted boycott of all things French by a bunch of jingoistic ideologues. And then, in the midst of that, Denver and Boulder saw a sudden, inexplicable resurgence in French dining with several bistros, cafes and brasseries opening one right after another. Best among them — best among both old and new — is Brasserie Rouge, whose owners went to obsessive lengths to create a spot that, in their dedication to an atom-by-atom reconstruction of an honest French brasserie, is more real than the real thing. This restaurant faithfully mimics the best aspects of the brasserie in both its kitchen and dining room. From the butcher’s paper tablecloths to the servers with French-as-a-second-language accents to the real duck confit, excellent bouillabaisse and true charcuterie coming from the galley, Rouge deserves a prize not just for being the best French restaurant in town, but for bringing a little bit of the City of Lights to our own Queen City of the Plains.

With Luca d’Italia, chef/owner Frank Bonanno has done what most transplanted East Coasters would have thought impossible: He’s brought good Italian food to the Rocky Mountain region. No, not just good. Great Italian food. Wonderful, vital, superlative Italian food that’s absolutely without equal on the Denver scene. Luca’s menu is designed for gluttonous abandon, arranged for wild flights of pairing and sharing, set up in an attempt to make people eat the way the Italians do — with several courses of small plates leading up to the entrees. The portions are small, the plating simple, the combinations divine. And on plate after plate — from warm artichoke hearts to gnocchi in a crab-and-lobster gravy to the truffled rabbit parts that nearly killed us — the unparalleled skill of this kitchen and the dedication of its chef shows through with startling, wonderful clarity.

Here in America, our national drink of choice is cheap beer. But in Russia, the winner — hands down — is vodka, served clear and cold. To get the good stuff straight from the source, exile yourself to Red Square Euro Bistro, a restaurant that serves up hearty portions of stroganoff and goulash, and also pours Russian, German and Lithuanian beer. But the real star here is the Russian vodka menu, featuring over eighty options, including more than a dozen tasty fruit- and spice-infused Siberian vodkas. Grab a spot at the bar, start downing your selections, and you’ll soon find plenty of fellow travelers. Comrade!

When most Americans think of Russian food — if they do at all — they picture one of two things. They envision frozen gray latitudes, turnips and beet roots, with giant cauldrons of borscht — that most recognizable of old Soviet cuisine — steaming and bright, bloody purple in the pot. Or, going in the other direction, they imagine silver bowls brimming with iced caviar served with tiny gold spoons, roasting game and fresh fish, water crackers crusted with rock salt and absolute czarist luxury. Both perceptions are partially right, but both are also totally wrong. Russian food at its best and most basic — the way it’s served at Astoria — is like the American food we ate in the ’50s, full of fatty meat and potatoes swimming in butter; thick, hot soups; pickles; fried chicken and sour cream. In Astoria, a bunker-like restaurant tucked into the Russian Plaza, they’re cooking pure comfort food: solyanka, potato salad, caviar and blini, stroganoff, roast chicken and lamb chops. And, as with most comfort food, while it might be very, very bad for you, it makes you feel very good inside.

Sherpa’s owner, Pemba Sherpa, comes with heavy-duty street cred: The guy actually is a Sherpa, with more than twenty ascents over 20,000 feet to his credit. He grew up in Nepal, in the shadow of Everest, eating the kind of food he now serves in a restaurant that’s decorated with artifacts of his previous life — the snowshoes, gunny bags and ice axes of his former career — and photos of him today, still climbing. In addition to unique interpretations of standard Indian fare, Sherpa’s kitchen cooks up fantastic mountain-man cuisine: heavy, thick stews, spicy momo and fried paneer pokara. The service is friendly, with staffers (many of whom are Sherpas, too) intimately acquainted with the food they serve. And in keeping with the restaurant’s motto, the Adventurers Bar in the front of this two-story converted Victorian is the perfect place “to relive the glories of past adventures and plan new ones.”

Although there’s no such thing as bad Indian food in Denver, India’s clearly serves the best. Try a few benchmark dishes, and you’ll agree. First, the saag paneer: If an Indian kitchen can’t cook good saag paneer, then you must run, not walk, away, because this dish is the standard by which all others are measured. India’s is a divine blend of creamy spinach and stiff, almost squeaky house-made paneer cheese layered with a complex but subtle mix of spices. Next, there’s curry. At India’s, it’s like a dream — soft-edged and smooth, alternately bright with exotic taste or barely a whisper of flavor carried on the back of butter and cream. Finally, there’s India’s boti masala, in which perfectly tender chunks of lamb bathe in a smoky, earthy tomato cream sauce touched with a dozen subtle, grounded spices. India’s version is so good, it’s like falling in love. And you will, with India’s.

Looking for jackfruit juice? Ko-Mart’s got it. Whole dried pink shrimp? Smoked anchovy? Pork neck? Octopus tentacles? No problem. The front of this all-in-one market is dominated by a series of concessions selling everything from ready-made sushi and boba “bubble” tea (fruit teas filled with tiny tapioca balls) to bone-marrow soup, housewares and videos. Lining the market shelves are a hundred kinds of rice, a zillion types of mushrooms, and more brands of soy sauce than you can shake a smoked squid at. Ko-Mart also has one of the freshest, most diverse and most beautiful displays of fresh produce in the city, with what seems like an army of employees constantly stacking and restacking the melons, Korean peaches, lemongrass, ginger root, Chinese cabbage and mountain potatoes. Ko-mart stocks stacks of ramen, cans of white soda that taste like the stuff left at the bottom of a bowl of Fruity Pebbles, freaky bags of rice candy decorated with cartoon giraffes and big-headed children, boxes of Pocky and Ting-Ting Jahe ginger candies. The only thing it’s missing are durian fruit and candy cigarettes. Other than that, Ko-Mart is a non-stop ride on the Orient express.

Han Kang sits in a strip mall next to a piano lounge. It’s cool, quiet and, if not exactly dignified, then certainly muffled with smiling, soft-footed servers working the room and a giant TV kept to a murmur. The noisiest thing about the place is the food — everything bubbling and sloshing — and the splashy mural of an impressionistic Denver skyline that runs the length of one wall. The other three are usually papered with dozens of sheets of colored construction paper carefully filled with blocky Korean writing describing the daily specials and those menu items not available to outsiders. But every dish here is completely Korean. There’s non-threatening bulgogi, soy-sweet and sugary beef piled on top of caramelized onions with a strong dose of sesame oil. Bi bim bop — as much fun to eat as it is to say — and bi bim nengmyun, vermicelli noodles with sliced rib-eye, slivered radish and green squash. For the more daring eaters, there’s fried squid, deadly-hot chile dishes and, of course, kimchi — the ultimate test of any foodie’s will.

When we need to retune our tastebuds, when we crave bright, dominant flavors unmuddied by excess, we go to Thai Basil II. Here we can sample the simple pleasures of Asian cuisines — hot curries, sweet lime, peppery-sweet basil, vegetables cooked fast and served fresh without all the taste leached out of them. Thai is a cuisine best tasted in the juxtaposition between one flavor and its neighbor, and the best trick in Thai Basil’s repertoire is the cooks’ ability to keep flavors distinct while still making each plate taste like a full, wedded whole. The curries are the best example of this skill, with sweet and heat and sour and bitter ingredients all coming together into seamless aggregates of their parts.

Just because a Chinese restaurant isn’t authentic doesn’t mean it can’t be authentically good. Little Olive does Chinese food American style, but it does it right. Shrimp and crab dumplings, Mongolian beef, orange chicken, Peking duck, Thai curries and Vietnamese soft-shell crab come together on an Asian menu that has something to please every palate. Yes, it still serves the basics — the sweet-and-sour this and kung pao that we all remember from our childhoods — but with a commitment to making this mutt cuisine better, fresher and healthier than any other place in town. Little Olive shows us that even as our tastes mature, so do the best restaurants.

Eating in China is not like eating in the United States, and eating Chinese food in the United States is not like eating at Ocean City. As a matter of fact, it’s nothing like eating at Ocean City — as evidenced by the fact that on any given night, there are few round-eyed customers included in the throngs of regulars who crowd this slightly dingy but wholly authentic Chinese restaurant. The menu is packed with solid, everyday Chinese fare freshly made by a kitchen that’s kept honest by crowds who would know the difference if it wasn’t, and it’s dotted here and there with the exotic and the special. The food is usually served family style, with many small plates of many different things making the rounds of all the crowded tables in the big, neon-lit dining room. Sauces thickened with pig’s blood, seafood porridge, abalone and sea-turtle soup — these are not flavors made for everyone, but if you have an adventurous palate, Ocean City is a must-stop on your culinary journey.

At Indigo, chef Ian Kleinman has put together a globe-trotting, multiple-fusion board of fare, but his most outstanding creation — the one thing we can’t help but order anytime we find ourselves seated in Indigo’s blue-on-blue dining room — is the lobster spring rolls. This Asian-inspired appetizer combines fat chunks of perfectly cooked lobster and juicy shrimp with a rough green-onion brunoise and nutty candied garlic, then wraps the mix in crisp, maple-glazed phyllo tubes the size and length of a good Macanudo and tops them with a melting scoop of risotto gently flavored with citrus. It’s a dish that shouldn’t work — that doesn’t work on paper — and it’s a credit to the skill of Kleinman and his crew that something so odd, so derivative and with so many divergent influences works so brilliantly on the plate and on the palate.

Pho is the ultimate do-it-yourself Asian cuisine. It’s peasant food, lacking any pretension, based on frugality and the whole-food ethos that demands the use of any possibly edible bit of everything. Pho broth is slow-cooked, simmered and reduced simple stock kicked up with onions boiled until translucent, green onion stalks and spices. There’s always salt but never pepper; sometimes star anise and cinnamon, often lemongrass and soy. Every minute the broth sits on the stove changes its character in small ways. Every minute it sits before you, cooling as you eat, changes it. But there’s one thing you can be sure of at Pho 2000: No matter when you arrive, you’ll find the best pho in town.

The only bad Vietnamese food is no Vietnamese food, but the best Vietnamese food being done in Denver is coming out of the kitchen at New Saigon. With hundreds of choices on the menu, dozens of sauces, a friendly and accommodating staff, and plenty of talent in the galley, anyone with a taste for the cuisine of the mysterious East is sure to find something to like at this perennial favorite. And while you’re enjoying your spring rolls, nuoc cham and blazing hot curries, you’re also getting a lesson in authentic Vietnamese cuisine, because New Saigon cooks Vietnamese food the same way it’s been cooked in old Saigon for the past hundred years.

Sometimes we forget how lucky we are to have restaurants in Denver that foodies will travel hundreds of miles to visit. Domo is one of those restaurants. It serves “country food,” Japanese farmhouse cuisine, which translates as simple, elegant sushi presentations in hand bowls, yellowtail steaks, salted salmon donburi and a flight of exotic side dishes made fresh every day. Chef and owner Gaku Homma also has a traditional Japanese garden on site that’s one of the most peaceful places we’ve seen, as well as an aikido dojo, and a museum and cultural center. Domo arigato.

Any way you slice it, Sushi Den is a top sushi spot. It’s been a trendy destination for nearly twenty years, always loud, always crowded. Why? Because the house believes in importing everything it can straight from the warm, bloody center of the sushi universe: the fish markets of Japan. Oddly enough, this does not mean that you, the customer, will be getting the freshest of products, but you will be getting the best. Deeply purple tuna, iridescent toro banded with fat, excellent eel and beautiful shake pump up the menu here. Sure, the more exotic offerings are pricey, but like the man says: You get what you pay for.

Say you’re new to all this raw-fish nonsense. You’re curious about the fuss, but you don’t know your ebi from your uni. For you nigiri neophytes, we suggest making a lunch date at Hapa Sushi. While fish aficionados may scoff at Hapa’s jumped-up, fusiony, oh-so-flashy fare, this hip Cherry Creek hot spot has two very important things going for it. First, the menu is comprehensively descriptive; no matter what you order, you’ll know exactly what you’re getting, and you won’t accidentally find yourself with a plate full of sea urchin genitalia when what you wanted was shrimp and rice balls. Second, Hapa has a plethora of offerings that come baked, seared, fried and disguised with great names like the Spider Roll and the Multiple Orgasm, so no one will suspect you’re scared to eat it raw.

Classic edomae sushi has no better avatars than the guys behind the bar at Sushi Tazu. Sitting in this beautiful, understated space in Cherry Creek, you can indulge your purist’s cravings with everything from perfectly simple tuna nigiri to the bizarrely addictive sea urchin sashimi, from lovely tuna belly o-toro to more modern interpretations like giant crab-tempura rolls that look like big, leggy deep-fried spiders on the plate. Tazu also does less daring plates — simple tempuras and bento box lunches — and rounds out its offerings with cold Japanese beer and a good selection of sake. Sit at the bar, get to know the cooks, be brave, save room for unusual palate-cleansing desserts like frozen orange quarters, but always remember: Adding wasabe to your soy sauce before tasting the hand rolls is an insult. And at Sushi Tazu, you’ll never need the extra spice, anyway.

Chuck and Martha Koch, owners of the Bear Creek Tavern, have family living on the Alabama shore, and while visiting there in 1991, they discovered Royal Reds. These beauties have been on the menu ever since, shipped in fresh every week straight from the Gulf Coast shrimpers to Kittredge. As far as the Koches know (and as far as we’ve been able to determine), Bear Creek Tavern is the only restaurant in the Rocky Mountain West that serves them. These are deep-sea shrimp, huge, with pale red shells, a meaty texture softer than that of most Asian varieties, and a flavor like very good crab dressed up as lobster. They come to the table in a massive, salty pile, with heads, legs, antennae and shells intact, attended by real drawn butter and lemon (no cocktail sauce unless you ask, and you shouldn’t), Handi Wipes, a roll of paper towels and directions for coaxing the big monsters out. What they should come with is a pistol or something, so that you can defend yourself in case one of the bigger ones is only playing dead.

There are few foods in the world as perfect as the mussel, few foods so filled with potential greatness, few so often mucked up by incompetent kitchens trying to do too much with a thing that’s so good when left pretty much alone. Luckily for us, Le Central not only knows how to handle mussels properly, but it offers them in huge portions for under ten bucks, sided with excellent pommes frites in all-you-can-eat quantities. Le Central’s kitchen prepares the moules nine ways, including a simple white-wine mariniere; a less simple, Pernod-rich provenal; and the exotic au saffron, with tomatoes, saffron and onions in a cream-and-shallot broth.

Okay, we all understand that the only seafood that should be eaten in a steakhouse is that queen of the deep blue sea, the lobster, right? The Capital Grille gives lobster the royal treatment, serving up crustaceans that weigh anywhere from two pounds to the-monster-that-ate-Cleveland size. Bibs are available (and necessary), as are an array of nasty-looking shell-cracking implements, but the best way to get at the sweet meat hiding inside all that armor is a hammer. Too bad this dining room is a little too classy for the mallet-and-cocktail-fork approach.

First clue that you’re in a good seafood restaurant: no ambulances out front. The second? A menu that changes every day, and sometimes twice a night. At McCormick’s, the dozens of varieties of sea critters available each day are grouped like some kind of aquatic U.N., by their nationality or ocean of origin. Everything is beautifully fresh, presented simply and treated with great care by a kitchen now in the competent hands of chef Steve Vice. Great crabcakes, crawfish, lobster and classics like baked salmon and fillet of sole are the mainstays, but if you’re looking for adventure, jump in. The water’s fine here.

Club 404 is unique to the Denver dining scene, an irreplaceable landmark in a city that doesn’t have many left. There are regulars who’ve been coming here since Nixon was in office, and one owner, Jerry Feld, who’s had the 404 since the Eisenhower administration. There are twinkle lights behind the bar, as well as an albino frog in the aquarium and souvenirs of fifty years’ service pinned up everywhere, like the fetishes of cargo cultists. But what’s best about the place is the menu, another relic from a bygone era. At Club 404 you can get a steak — the 404 T-bone — for $8.95. It’s preceded by a salad in a plastic bowl and dressing in a giant syrup jug, and when your meat arrives, it does so with out-of-the-box mashers on the side topped with gravy from a can. Still, the steak is good — bloody, tender, meaty but not too thick, a rind of grill-crisped fat running all the way down the edges — and a meal at 404 is exactly what you’d expect in a joint like this: generous, filling, handled with decades of experience, and cheap. There are steakhouses downtown where it costs twice as much to park as it does for an entire dinner here, and if you’re willing to suffer a cut less delicate than the prize T-bone, dinner can be had for five bucks.

Bastien’s isn’t retro; the rest of the world is. If you’re looking for the cocktail culture of the ’50s, a time capsule of early-’70s swinger swank still sealed and unchanged, then head straight for Bastien’s. If anything in this place has come around again into a third generation of recycled cool, it’s only a happy accident. The Bastien’s we know and love today came to life on January 1, 1959, and was an instant hit, a destination in a time when there weren’t many. Truman Capote hung out here, fer chrissakes. And forty years later, the trappings of Bastien’s best years are still intact. So are the deals: You can still get an entire dinner — good steak, drinks and dessert included — for under thirty bucks, and eat like a successful aluminum-siding salesman would have on a Friday night forty years back. Like they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and the batteries on Bastien’s Timex ran down a long time ago.

Soup served out of communal iron pots, straight iceberg salads made by the hundreds every day, big bowls of peanuts on every table and dead animals on all the walls: This is what a steakhouse used to be, before the suits got ahold of the idea and started turning them into hifalutin, cigars-and-martinis clubhouses for the rich and powerful. The Northwoods Inn, which has been in operation more or less continuously since 1961, harks back to those days when steakhouses were restaurants for the common man — places that needed spittoons, where you could order your dinner by pointing at the appropriate trophy head on the wall. These days, the Northwoods Inn caters primarily to families and big parties that, no matter how huge, can still get lost in the giant 250-seat dining room. The restaurant is so popular that waits of up to two hours on the weekend are not uncommon. The food is simple — big whacks of meat, well prepared and served as a package with soup, salad and baked potato — but even with the volume this kitchen does, every order still receives the personal attention deserved by good cuts of prime meat. If Charlton Heston ever comes back through Denver, we suggest he stop by the Northwoods Inn for a taste of old-time Colorado — when men were men and no cow was safe.

Let’s hear it for the new kid on the very old block. In a market already saturated with high-end meateries, the Capital Grille — which opened in Larimer Square in late 2003 — sets itself apart by outdoing the competition in every vital category. The decor is picture-perfect, full of dark wood, leather and manly hunting-dog prints. The atmosphere is clubby without being exclusionary; the service is exemplary; and the kitchen is dedicated to the noble task of delivering meat to the masses with minimal fuss and zero distraction. All of the steaks are dry-aged for maximum tenderness and concentration of flavor, the sauces — from the tarragon-heavy béarnaise to the Roquefort maître d’ butter — are beautifully executed steakhouse classics, and the sides are kept simple, focusing primarily on the greater glories of a steak’s only proper companion: the humble potato. So kudos to the rookie: If meat matters to you, you can’t do any better than dinner at the Capital Grille.

Over the years we’ve eaten our way around Rosa Linda’s menu, devouring everything from the soft chiles rellenos to the classic shredded beef burrito. But for a Mexican meal that really sticks to your costillas, try the steak ranchero — tender diced beef mixed with chiles and onions in a killer red chile sauce.

In the classical canon, there are five mother sauces — delicate and complex base mixtures from which all other sauces are born. But since this list of mothers was compiled ages ago by the French culinarians, it was weighted heavily in the direction of old Continental classics, and nowhere among the five is there a sauce that, through any miracle of reproduction, could produce a chile like that offered up by Marcela Guerrero and her kitchen at Cielo. This is a travesty of geographic isolationism, because these days, chile sauces belong among those charmed few bases from which all things spring. Cielo’s green is a sweet, meaty, thick stew of flavors, primary among them the complex taste of chile as fruit. And the red is a smooth lava of heat mounting on heat, tempered in its upper reaches by a singing touch of honey. These are not just simple chile sauces, but artistic, well-balanced creations that — in the true style of the mothers — have been built up from a classic base into something related to, but wholly different from, that which gave them birth. But beyond all that — and most important — they’re delicious.

There are those who go for the cheap thrills — the quick, delicious burn that green chile makes when it reaches the sinuses. But red has its pleasures, too, and there’s no red chile more pleasant than the version that La Fiesta’s been dishing out for close to thirty years. This red chile has a fire all its own, a complex layering of flavors that speaks of much more than mere chile powder. But, of course, you’re not going to eat it on its own. You’re going to order it smothering an enchilada filled with gooey yellow cheese or drowning the best crispy chile relleno in town. This plate is hot!

At Brewery Bar II, there’s no element of Mexican cuisine that cannot be improved by the addition of melted cheese. No ingredient that can’t be wrapped in a tortilla or deep-fried, no weakness in flavor or texture that can’t be bullied up with a liberal dose of the house’s custom chile — a red-and-green blend that’s heavy on the pork, but so far from the pure heat and flavor of traditional verde that comparison is nearly impossible. If, like us, you’ve strayed a bit from your Hatch-purist prejudices, then you, too, can grow to love this biracial chile without reservation. Sweet, watery, hot without being numbing, it kicks the endorphins into overdrive, then throws in that killer jolt of chile flavor right at the end to make everything it touches taste better.

Jack Martinez is the green-chile king, and until someone comes along who knows his pods better and loves them more, Martinez’s Jack-n-Grill will wear the green-chile crown. At Jack-n-Grill, the Martinez family treats beautiful Socorro green chiles with the sort of reverence the Italians have for tomatoes or the French for cheese. They’re brought in by the truckload from deep in southern New Mexico, used whole, used chopped, used in sauces and on burritos, and — in season — roasted right on the premises in big, gas-fired tumblers and sold by the pound to chile-heads who sometimes line up down the block for their shot at a bag of Jack’s green gold. There’s nothing quite like the smoky-sweet smell of the place during roasting season, no sound more beloved among the faithful than the scratchy pop and afterburner roar of the roaster going full blast, and no place we know to get green done better than at Jack-n-Grill.

It’s papadum, not tortillas, and the salsa isn’t a cruda or a fresca, but a spicy-sweet tomato chutney. And it’s served in a Tibetan/Nepalese restaurant, not a storefront dive on Federal. Still, the chips and salsa at Sherpa’s Adventurers Restaurant are deserving of not only this prize, but many others. For starters, they’re free; there’s been a disturbing trend lately of some places charging for their chips and salsa, which, in our world, is tantamount to a dive bar charging for bowls of stale pretzels. Second, they’re good. The papadum are crisp, light and nutty, and the broken-up pieces fill a generous-sized basket; the salsa is smoky-hot, complex in flavor, and layered with an underlying sweetness that makes it absolutely addictive. And third, the world is changing. So let Sherpa’s award be the clarion call. Cuisines are no longer as distinct and insular as they once were, and those Mexican joints that used to be the sole purveyors of the chips, salsa and three-beer lunch are now in contention with comers from around the globe.

Long touted as mankind’s only guaranteed cure for the common hangover, menudo is a hearty, spicy, slow-cooked stew made from hominy, chiles and tripe, feet, knuckles or any other unattractive cut requiring several hours of cooking to bring out its more subtle charms. On weekends at El Taco de México, these lowly ingredients are brought together into something far greater than the sum of their parts in one fine menudo. The kitchen is wise enough to use honeycomb tripe (the darker, more strongly flavored muscular lining from the cow’s second stomach) along with the fattier first stomach, which gives the soup a strong, heavy flavor and reduces the greasiness you get from using only smooth tripe. The menudo is spicy enough that you’ll work up a good sweat, but it comes with tortillas to cut the heat and little bowls bearing limes and a red-chile sauce in case you feel up to tinkering with the flavor.

Things do not move fast at Jack-n-Grill. Actually, everything moves fast, but nothing happens quickly. Even with the expansion completed this winter, the wait for a table and the wait for your food can be extreme during peak hours. But should you find yourself in this situation, take a lesson from the regulars who sit with Zen-like indifference to the sweeping passage of the hands of the clock. Just wait, and you will be rewarded by something like the kitchen’s vaquero tacos, which are so good that you might never want to eat anything else again. Four tortillas, fried in butter on the flat-top, come laid open on the plate like a taco autopsy, with all of their insides showing. Each one holds a dollop of tender, shredded beef soaked in an incredible smoky-sweet barbecue sauce so dark it’s almost black; a sprinkling of diced tomatoes that pair up against the sweetness of the barbecue sauce better than peanut butter does with jelly; just enough melted cheese to weld everything together; and a dainty little curl of sour cream to top things off. It’s taco perfection, and if you haven’t tried one yet, you don’t know Jack.

Down in Texas, right on the border between El Paso and Juarez, there’s a stand — really nothing more than a shack –that sells the best tamales in the known universe. They’re made by the hundreds every day, wrapped, then left in bowls inside this tin-roof tamale stand where they have all day to get good and funky. If they don’t kill you, they are the best tamales you’ll ever eat. And they’re only slightly better than the much safer, significantly more hygienic, green-chile tamales sold every day at La Popular. These fat rolls of masa, chicken and whole chunks of fiery chile come freshly steamed and still wrapped in their husks for easy eating on the run.

There are three things we love about the little, often-overlooked Jalapeño Mexican Grill that squats on Leetsdale amid all the paint stores and mechanics. We love the patio, which is the ugliest patio in the city, with the worst view in the state. We love the fish tacos, which are basic, pedestrian and the closest thing to the real Juarez article you’ll find off Federal Boulevard. And we love the La Jolla fish burrito — as thick as a grown man’s forearm and stuffed full, a California take on coastal-Mexican cuisine but much more complex than the simple fillet-salsa-tortilla wraps served on those Mexican beaches devoid of tourists. The La Jolla features the same fish as Jalapeño’s tacos — a firm-fleshed, mild whitefish sealed inside its chewy armor, rich enough to leak grease over everything — along with rice, beans and a sweet pico de gallo that’s much better than Jalapeño’s weak salsa. Go with black beans over pinto; they’re slightly firm, never gooey, and have a clean, almost meaty taste that lends extra bulk and flavor.

A truly great breakfast burrito must be three things: It must be big, it must be messy, and it must be capable of curing anything from a simple hangover to Patagonian skull fever in just one serving. At Pete’s, the kitchen makes a breakfast burrito that accomplishes all three admirably. First, this burrito is huge — a big tortilla, liberally stuffed with potatoes and a simple omelet of meat (bacon, sausage or ham) and two eggs, large enough to fill an entire platter end to end. Second, it’s plenty messy, because the cook takes this big-ass burrito, hits it with a fistful of traffic-cone-orange shredded cheese, then glops up the whole thing with pork-spiked and spicy Colorado verde. And third, you can forget your grandmother’s chicken soup; there’s no malady known to man that can stand up to one of Pete’s massive burritos. So no matter what ails you, if you have the strength to stagger up to the counter to order one of these monsters, we guarantee you’ll be feeling better by the time you leave.

It’s such a simple thing, the burrito. Take some rice and beans, some meat, a little salsa, spread it on a soft tortilla, fold and go. It’s the ultimate convenience food, was in the vanguard of the Mexican-cuisine invasion that changed the way our entire country eats, and still stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the dumpling, the cheeseburger, foie gras and cassoulet in the pantheon of mankind’s great food innovations. Although the burrito is now served in wondrous variety at hundreds of restaurants across the city, Chipotle takes the prize for its constant improvement of what started life as the best burrito in town and now has become the best burrito on the planet. From free-range Niman Ranch meats to organic beans, fluffy rice that’s perfect no matter what hour you arrive, chewy tortillas heated to order, three distinct salsas and great guac made fresh all day, this Denver creation born out of the newfangled ideas and dedication of hometown boy and former line cook Steve Ells does everything right. True, Chipotle is now a McDonald’s brand. And yes, what began as a simple University of Denver-area taquería has been transformed into one of the fastest-growing, most pervasive chains in the country. But you know what? Sometimes success comes to those who actually deserve it.

There’s so much to love about Parisi, beginning with the restaurant and ending with the deli, which is what dedicated foodies hope heaven will look like when they die — from the frozen Muscovy ducks to all the homemade stocks for the home cook. But the best thing at the deli, and one of the reasons the food in the restaurant section is so good, is the big basket of baseball-sized rounds of handmade, fresh-milk mozzarella. Depending on when you arrive and how the kitchen is operating, you can have a taste of cheese made just moments before you walked in the door, and you’re never going to get cheese more than a few hours old, because this stuff sells fast. Smooth, silky, milky and mild, Parisi’s mozz is a cheese whiz.

“It’s the best macaroni and cheese you’ll ever have,” our server told us, and in his eye was the gleam of the fanatic. Eat out enough, and you’ll hear that kind of thing a thousand times — that blank is the best blank you’ll ever have — and it always comes from servers who are adamant in their convictions and usually wrong. But at Le Chantecler, our waiter was absolutely right. The kitchen’s lumache pasta with hard Spanish mahón cow’s-milk cheese is not just the best mac-n-cheese around, but better by leaps and bounds than its closest competitor. It’s cheesy, gooey, warm and satisfying, perfectly colored, perfectly cooked. And Le Chantecler gets bonus points, because this mac-n-cheese isn’t even a main course, but comes cuddled on the side of an excellent spread of roasted pork medallions in a ham-hock jus.

Forget your jumped-up truffled mashers, your milk-and-cookie menus, your comfort food in all its gummy incarnations. That fad is played out, and good riddance. What’s replaced it is a focus on those uncomplicated culinary pleasures that — when done well and treated with respect, rather than tongue-in-cheek smart-assitude — can bring more actual comfort than a hundred gallons of gussied-up beans and weenies. The best among them? The grilled cheese sandwich. At Chedd’s, owners Dirk and Wendy Bruley have made this modest sandwich an object of gustatory worship. Grilled cheese is all they do at Chedd’s, in about 17 billion combinations. On the chalkboard behind the counter, they’ve listed twelve kinds of bread, over thirty kinds of cheese, eight meats, a dozen varieties of vegetables and spreads, and assorted condiments, which you can mix and match for the grilled cheese sandwich of your dreams.

The founder of Taste of Philly, a six-seater joint, came from Yeadon, Pennsylvania, and its new owners are from South Jersey — but that’s okay, because Jersey is a lot closer to Philly than, say, Littleton or Lyons. The space is decorated in East Coast-refugee style, with a bunch of Philadelphia paraphernalia tacked up on the limited wall space, including the requisite framed print of Rocky Balboa. More important, Taste of Philly’s Philly delivers the true taste of a Philadelphia cheesesteak — an ex-pat restaurant’s only real duty. Tender meat, chopped rough, is cooked perfectly on the grill, with provolone melted all through the meat, and the delicious result — along with thin, stringy fried onions — is then packed into an Amaroso roll (recognized as the Philly cheesesteak standard the world over). All in all, Taste of Philly puts together a memorable sandwich, the kind that people would drive across time zones for. But aren’t you glad you don’t have to?

The panini at Vincenza’s, a revitalized bakery in the old home of the Wheat Ridge Dairy, start with great fresh breads. Case in point: the sausage sandwich, a chewy baguette stuffed with peppers, onions, provolone and a hungry-guy-sized portion of well-seasoned sausage. If Ralphie hadn’t been decapitated during the fourth season of The Sopranos, he’d lose his head over this one.

Ironic, isn’t it? Not only does Anthony’s put out the best white pizza in town, but it also has the best red sauce in a field crowded with contenders. A mild, slightly sweet sauce, neither too thick nor too watery and with good depth of flavor, Anthony’s red is put to use not just on its pies, but also on a short roster of serviceable pastas and a solid board of pizzeria-style heroes and parm sandwiches. To west-of-the-Mississippi palates tuned into the heat of capsicum in all its chile incarnations, this sauce may seem too weak, too blah. But for those of us who remember that tomatoes are a fruit whose best essence is translated by long, slow cooking and an easy hand with the spices, Anthony’s red is the tops.

Making a great white pizza is a delicate business, because one of the three primary ingredients of your standard pizza — the sauce — is no longer in play. Without that red to wed the texture of the crust to the flavors of the toppings, things can very easily get out of whack. Some pizzerias’ whites are too dry, others overcompensate by loading on the cheese. Anthony’s avoids all of these common pitfalls by topping an already excellent crust — stiff but not crunchy, with a solid backbone of flavor — with a perfectly balanced ricotta cheese sauce. The result is a mellow, mild white on a chewy, thin-boned crust that tastes great fresh out of the ovens…and even better cold for breakfast the next morning.

Step through the doors of New York Pizzeria and you’re stepping into a true New York pizzeria. The smell of hot ovens, sweating dough, sweet tomatoes and charred baking flour is as unmistakable as it is universal, and while the decor isn’t much to speak of — call it Brooklyn street-corner chic, with a black-and-white linoleum floor, a dozen scattered tables and booths, and the ubiquitous New York skyline prints — we’d like the place less if it were any different. Linen cloths and real table settings have no place in a proper pizzeria; the slices here come on paper plates already going limp from the magic orange grease leaking all over everything. The sauce is mild, the crusts are thin and limber, the ingredients are fresh, and every pie is proof that this kitchen knows every trick, every taste and everything that a kitchen in Denver can about making a New York pie New York right.

Some things never change, and the thick-crust, Sicilian-style deep-dish pizza served up by the Sarlo clan is one of those things. The pizza has been made the same way through three generations of this family, most recently by Anthony Sarlo and his crew at Vita Bella, the Italian eatery they opened

in suburbia two years ago. This pie is assembled from the best ingredients — fresh spinach, stemmed by hand, astringent black olives, Pecorino romano, fresh mozzarella, garlic, garlic and more garlic — that are sealed up inside a thick double crust like a true pie, then baked just the right amount in one of Vita Bella’s big ovens. If you’re thinking of ordering one of these monsters, you’d better be prepared to wait; even under the best of circumstances, they can take upwards of forty minutes to finish. But once you lift out that first slice? It’s like Disneyland: You never remember the wait.

Really, Parisi makes the best pizza, period. End of contest. It just happens to be on a thin crust. The cooks laboring before the blast-furnace heat of Parisi’s stone ovens could put their pizzas together on cardboard, spread sauce and melt cheese over Wonder bread, assemble the ingredients for a Margherita, Rustica or caper-and-anchovy Napoli on top of old Pinto seat covers, and we’d still die for these pies, because at Parisi, what goes on top matters so much more than what’s underneath. That’s not to say the crust isn’t good; it is. But the handmade mozzarella, speck, scamorza, artichoke hearts and prosciutto are what really set these pizzas apart. For their new, expanded location, owners Simone and Christine Parisi have assembled a list of two dozen pies — enough to satisfy even the most esoteric tastes — and every one we’ve tried has been exemplary.

That benchmark of Asian food, that great equalizer of world cuisine, that humblest, most savory of bites. Ladies and gentlemen, we give youŠthe dumpling. In a town chock-full of restaurants churning out thousands of dumplings of every conceivable nationality seven days a week, Little Ollie’s is the place that does them best. Plump little pillows, pan-fried, stuffed with a smooth paste of pork, herbs and spices, these dumplings are best when dipped in a side of the warm, gingered soy sauce served with every order. This Cherry Creek landmark has been dishing up Americanized Asian fusion cuisine for years, and the dumplings never fail to please.

At more raucous dim sum restaurants, you order your meal by shouting and pointing at a favored plate on a passing cart. At Mee Yee Lin — a bright and busy little dim sum restaurant in the same neighborhood as its more cavernous competitors — the service works sushi-bar style, with every table getting a paper menu and pencil so that diners can pick precisely what they want and how much of it they’d like. And while that eliminates some of the adventure, it also guarantees that you have no one but yourself to blame if you wind up with chicken feet. Our advice: Concentrate on meats that come from above the ankles, as well as the many variations on buns and dumplings.

Other people eat this. Just keep telling yourself that other people eat this every day and enjoy it a lot. They must, because otherwise why would fried intestine be on Mee Yee Lin’s 75-item-strong dim sum menu? So be brave. Be resolute in your desire to sample the true cuisines of other lands. Now taste. See? It’s not as bad as it sounds. Mee Yee Lin’s fried intestine is crisp and crunchy and tastes something like pork rinds, something like the meat in menudo. In fact, it tastes exactly like fried intestine. Like how you’d think that something’s guts, cooked until crunchy, would taste.

Radek Cerny — chef, owner and sole motivating force behind the unbelievable L’Atelier — never does anything small, never does anything simply. His restaurant is a riot of strangeness and color, and his giant plates would be a joke if it weren’t for the fantastic stuff that comes on them. Of particular note are his sweetbreads, which arrive in a classic Cerny potato-starch tuile, floored with whipped Yukon Golds, on a plate done up like a Nagel print from the ’80’s — triangles of black and white with doodles of pale green and hot-pink infused oils. The centerpieces of all this artifice are the delicious glands, perfectly cooked, tender and swimming in a dark sugarcane sauce that gives them a well-balanced, high, humming sweetness.

Marilyn Megenity can’t stand cars. Most days, she walks to the Mercury Cafe, the restaurant/cafe/community hub she’s owned for more than two decades in an assortment of locations, most recently in this comfy two-story building on the edge of downtown. But even this dedicated piéd-ophile has to hit the road now and then. And when Megenity gets motoring, she drives her Peacemobile, a 1982 Mercedes sedan that’s fueled by waste, not gas. Megenity uses a fuel hybrid that’s processed from reconstituted cooking oil, vegetable products, even fry grease. Painted in bright colors, with banners advertising its eco-friendliness, the Peacemobile is usually parked in front of the restaurant it has come to symbolize. Megenity makes a gas-free life seem easy, practical and worthy of a test drive.

Last year’s winner of the Best Fried Twinkie award makes it into the record books again for continuing to milk a fad that never really made it big. Even so, Derrol Moorhead, owner of Wingin’ It, just couldn’t stop with Twinkies, so this year he’s added to his offerings battered and fried candy bars — everything from Snickers to Milky Way — as well as deep-fried bananas and even that county-fair fave, funnel cake. No more do you have to wait for that creepy carny in the paper hat to serve you funnel cake on a limp paper plate from the back of a converted Airstream. Instead, you can get the real thing anytime you want from Moorhead and his maniac fryer crew. Oh, and while you’re there, remember that Wingin’ It fries up excellent chicken wings, too.

The brand-spanking-new Zengo is so big, so opulent, that we’ve just started to take it all in — from the retro-hip decor to the exotic cocktails to the extra-squishy bar stools from which you can appreciate those cocktails. The menu is expansive, so yin-and-yangy that it demands study. Meditation, even. So we’ve started small, dropping by for a quick meal of sake and the best unexpected fried rice in town. As with everything else about the restaurant, care has been taken with each little tidbit in the dish, so that every bite provides a burst of fresh, tantalizing flavors. You’ll leave wanting more. More food, more sake, more Zengo.

Food fads come and food fads go, but our love for Little Shanghai remains eternal. This Chinese restaurant has been a Denver institution for close to thirty years, drawing big stars — the Rolling Stones are reputed fans — and small-fry alike. Everyone has their favorite dishes at Little Shanghai, but we’re partial to its take on fried rice. Its very, very rich take. An order of Rich Man’s Fried Rice brings an elegant yellow half-globe to the table, with a shell of egg covering the treasure of scallops, shrimp, broccoli and rice. One bite of this, and baby, you’re a rich man, too.

The chicken-fried steak at Lola comes as a double surprise. First, who’d even imagine that this upscale coastal-Mexican restaurant would be open for Sunday brunch? Given how packed the place is on weekend nights, you’d think that the staff would want to sleep in — while their customers sleep it off. Instead, Lola opens its doors at 10 a.m. on Sundays, and while the Bloody Mary cart services the walking wounded, the kitchen cooks up a half-dozen brunch items, from exotic omelets to Mexican-style French toast to an incredibly good chicken-fried steak. Chef Jamey Fader pounds the hell out of a New York strip, coats it in a lightly spiced batter, fries it up and then smothers the whole thing with a sausage gravy made even better because it’s based on Lola’s homemade chorizo. Rise and shine!

Breakfast King is where we go when we need to commune with the food gods of our forefathers. We come here to be reminded of a simpler time when there was fine dining only on special days and diners for all the others. We come for the chicken-fried steak. At the King, the steak is crisp and wrinkly on the outside, like an old man left out in the sun too long, and tender within from a good pounding with the tenderizing mallet and a soaking in milk; its thick crust holds up even under the weight of a thick, peppery, artery-choking, Southern-style white sausage gravy. And while the chicken-fried steak is undeniably the star of this plate, it comes dotingly attended by two eggs and fresh home fries in munificent proportions.

Caribbean Cuisine Plus, a relatively new storefront restaurant tucked back among the butchers and barbers and motor-vehicle offices in Aurora’s suburban sprawl, does a lot of things remarkably well. Its friendly staff handles the large crowds with zero stress, takes orders smoothly, and turns out excellent cornbread, curried goat and Jamaican meat pies. And it does them all from a space that seems tiny enough to fold up and put in your pocket. But what Caribbean Cuisine Plus does best is jerk chicken — that staple of Caribbean restaurants the world over. In this version, the meat is soft, perfectly spiced with onion, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg and black pepper, and served over steamed white rice. The dish looks and tastes so simple, but remember: Making it seem easy is what the best restaurants all try to do. At Caribbean Cuisine Plus, the easiest thing about this chicken is enjoying it.

When you want fried chicken done right, you have to go to the source. You have to fall back on tradition — when it was done best, first and with the most love. Yup, we’re talking soul food, and in Denver, soul food really means just one place: Pierre’s Supper Club. Although this longtime institution recently changed hands, new owner John Lewis doesn’t plan to make any changes to what’s been coming out of the kitchen for decades. And that would be the best catfish in town, great cornbread, good ribs, deep-green and flavorful collard greens, and — most important — perfect, crispy, peppery fried chicken. The breading is stiff and crunchy, the meat steaming-hot and tender, and when accessorized by a few shakes from the bottle of Pierre’s Hot Sauce (one of the great bottled sauces of our time) sitting on each table, this chicken flies beyond the realm of backyard-picnic fare into something divine. There’s a reason they call this stuff soul food, folks. And after a couple of pieces of Pierre’s fried chicken, we think you’ll know why.

Caro’s Corner can be tough to find if you don’t know what you’re looking for, and even once you do find it, you won’t see the niceties that some people find necessary for their dining enjoyment. Little things like tables, a menu, waitresses, regular hours, a phone. But if you can get past all that, you’ll realize you’re in a place where the grillman’s art is still being practiced with a purity and simplicity that’s all too rare these days. Owner Jeffrey Patterson does nothing but burgers. Hamburgers, cheeseburgers, doubles of either, and that’s it. There’s a chalkboard on the wall that lists fries, and catfish nuggets on Friday, but forget those. At Caro’s, the meat is what matters, and Patterson makes a beast of a burger, big as a dinner plate and as fresh as you’ll get anywhere — because nothing is done until you come through the door and ask for it. Yes, this means you’ll have to wait a while, but know that in the end, the wait, the drive, everything, will all be worth it.

It’s Friday night on Old South Pearl, and you forgot to make dinner reservations. Have no fear: There’s always room for you at Hanson’s. This idealized, college-town neighborhood bar comes complete with a great crowd, plenty of history (it used to be the legendary Oak Alley Inn) and the best bar burger in town. Ten ounces of grilled ground chuck, a soft kaiser roll and a side of the kitchen’s zucchini fries are just the beginning, because what truly makes Hanson’s special are the high-end toppings available on any burger. There are five kinds of cheese on the board, not counting the jalapeño-cream variety. Artichoke hearts, guacamole, garlic or lemon aioli, grilled pineapple, green chiles and prosciutto are all yours for the asking, as are the standard toppings. At Hanson’s, everything is fresh, everything is well-handled, and the guys on the grills really know medium from medium-rare — ten degrees of difference that make all the difference in the world.

From the outside, Burgers-n-Sports could easily be mistaken for just another strip-mall burger joint. From the inside, it looks more like the dugout of a very well-off parks-and-rec ballfield after a tragic collision with a fast-moving gift shop. But out of this mess of green chain-link, cement, commemorative photos and baseball hats comes a burger worth bragging about. Burgers-n-Sports uses good-quality American prime for its patties, tops them with simple but immaculately fresh ingredients that adhere strictly to the burger-maker’s canon of whole onions (rings, not diced), fresh tomato slices, crisp lettuce, pickles and secret sauce, in that order, then squeezes everything together between two halves of a soft, chewy roll. The resulting masterpiece is wrapped in an envelope of waxed paper for easy travel, because burgers are made for eating on the run. If you can wait until you get home before sinking your teeth into one of the doubles, you’re made of stronger stuff than we are. Goose Gossage’s place knocks it out of the park every time.

Something about the Cherry Creek Grill 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 restaurant fits so well into its corner in Cherry Creek, it’s hard to believe that it’s part of a chain — and that’s even harder to believe once you take a bite of the burger. This kitchen turns out a monster cheeseburger, made with excellent beef that stays juicy even when ordered well-done, set on a good roll and stacked with enough fresh accoutrements (lettuce, pickles, relish, huge slices of tomato, onions, etc.) that you almost have to unhinge your jaw like a python just to get a bite. Good burgers are a dime a dozen these days, and great ones come along maybe once in every dozen. But the best burgers hang with you a long time, and though we’ve tried many, many burgers this year, Cherry Creek Grill’s is still the one to beat.

Over the years, the almost claustrophobically cluttered India’s has gained a very loyal following with its Mughlai Indian cuisine, a gentler and beautifully complex culinary counterpart to the wholesome simplicity of Haryanvi and the richness of Bengali seafood. Whether you’re after an adventure, an education, just lunch or a little of all three, the best way to begin is with the tandoori offerings — and, in particular, the tandoori chicken, the hallmark of Mughlai food, cooked on the bone and stained brick red by spices and tradition. Watch the cooks pull fresh orders out of the smoking tandoor on long metal skewers: This is what it means to barbecue in the mysterious East. India’s chicken is sweet and smoky, served in big chunks, bones and all, dressed only with raw slivered onions and lemon quarters — and that’s all it needs. An Indian restaurant may not be what you think of when you’re hankering for barbecued chicken, but India’s is always our first stop.

If you must avoid sugar, barbecue sauce is typically a no-no — especially here in the West, where we like our sauces sweeter. Old West BBQ to the rescue. Its line of exceptional sauces includes a flavor-rich, sugar-free version that provides sweet relief for diabetic ‘cue fans. Splenda is just one of the secrets to this splendid sauce.

The house barbecue sauce from brothers Nick and Chris Sullivan is something of a sibling rivalry in a bottle. The city’s best meat paint pairs the charm of old-school Kansas City sauce with hints of Memphis tang and Texas sweetness. The result is a sauce that hits home with brothers and sisters from all parts and goes great on barbecued ribs, pork and chicken.

Juicier, fattier and more tender than racked ribs, the taste not quite as intense but better wedded to the flavors of smoke and sauce, small ends are the filet mignon of the rib kingdom. And M&D’s small ends rule. After the meat and smoke, of course, the most important key to ‘cue is the sauce. And you can forget the sweet tar of a Kansas City mop or the thin vinegar juice used in the Carolinas’ tidewater shacks: M&D’s offers a Southern-style pepper sauce in mild, medium and hot for which the Shead family has become justifiably famous.