Food & Drink

It seems almost cheap to pass judgment on Frasca, since praising it is like looking over a Monet watercolor, tasting a bottle of 1955 Petrus or listening to Charlie Parker play and saying, “Hey, that’s pretty good.” Of course Frasca is good. It’s so good as to be almost beyond words, having raised the bar to such a height that comparisons with other restaurants are pointless. Frasca exists in a place far removed from the usual definitions of success and failure, even those so nebulous they’re generally applied to love and art. The owners, chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson and master sommelier Bobby Stuckey, both come from the French Laundry — Mecca to modern foodies — and they’ve imprinted the genius of its chef, Thomas Keller, on everything they do here. The staff is flawless, the service more comforting, more personal and more subtly enveloping than any we’ve experienced before. The cooks in the kitchen operate at a level of perfection we would have previously thought unapproachable, serving up the cuisine of Friuli, a region in northern Italy. If there’s anything at all to complain about, it’s that the wait for a prime table at Frasca is now measured in months, not hours. But we’re fine eating at the bar, where seating is first come, first served. We’d eat standing up on the sidewalk if we had to. So, yes, Frasca is good. Frasca is without peer. It’s not just the best new restaurant of the year, but quite possibly where you’ll have the best meal of your life.

How great is it that Denver’s best new neighborhood restaurant is also Denver’s oldest restaurant neighborhood? Once the center of the city’s commercial district, by the ’60s all those great Victorian buildings in the 1400 block of Larimer Street had slid down to skid-row status, and only the intervention of Dana Crawford saved them from destruction. Still, for many years, Larimer Square served primarily as a tourist attraction that locals visited only for seasonal events, with restaurants like the Magic Pan feeding the masses. But no more. Today Larimer Square remains a must-stop for visitors to the city — but it really belongs to those of us who live here, as the heart of Denver’s eating and entertainment life. It holds some of the city’s best restaurants — Rioja, Bistro Vendome, Capital Grille — as well as great bars, happening clubs, cool shops and unbeatable patios, not to mention Ted Turner’s buffaloes. In addition to Crawford, we should also thank Jeff Hermanson and Larimer Square Management Corporation for figuring out how to make the city’s oldest block its best.

Twenty years is a long time to wait for a neighborhood to catch up with you. Since the day they opened their little storefront burrito joint in February 1984, the Aguirre family has worked to make the Highland neighborhood the very best it can be. They’ve fed the less fortunate at Thanksgiving and Christmas, sponsored charity events, spread the gospel of great green chile at fairs around town — and always kept the home fires burning in the back of their restaurant, which has grown along with the Aguirre kids. Today it’s oldest son Oscar who’s often behind the stove, cooking Mama Rosa Linda’s original recipes — and adding his own improvements. Happy birthday, Rosa Linda’s. Here’s to the best neighborhood restaurant — in a neighborhood you’ve helped make so much better.

When the Colorado Legislature lowered the official blood-alcohol-content level to .08 during its 2004 session, restaurateurs feared a financial fallout, worrying that DUI-wary diners would opt to go wineless. So the Colorado Restaurant Association successfully lobbied for a new law that allows diners to take their undrunk wine home with them, recorked and wrapped up, doggie-bag style (and then stashed in your trunk). Colorado is now one of only a handful of states in the nation that allow patrons to stick a cork in it; it’s a progressive variation on the whole leftovers thing we love so much. Now if only the lawmakers would let us take our own bottles into liquor-free eateries…

The All-Star Game may have been a bust for restaurants, but they scored — and scored big — ten days later, when Denver’s first Restaurant Week kicked off. This joint venture of the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau and, most important, a group of hardworking food-industry types had restaurants across town packed during what’s often the slowest week of the year. The 83 eateries that signed on for the experiment offered special $52.80 (for two) meal deals, giving locals a reason to try new places and a reminder to revisit the old. Please, sir, may we have some more?

The food here may not be haute, but it’s high-quality. And it isn’t dished up by culinary celebrities, but rather by a hardworking group of real service-industry sluggers training for the day when they might be the ones wearing the clean white jackets and the big chef’s hats. For the past eight years, Work Options for Woman has staffed the cafeteria at the Denver Department of Human Services with crews of low-income women struggling to come off welfare and find a place for themselves in the workforce. And under the direction of executive chef Jane Berryman and chef-instructor Wendy Vlach, the program has done just that, placing about thirty women per year in good-paying jobs in kitchens across the city. In terms of training, these women couldn’t be better prepared. Unlike students in those schoolboy Culinary Arts programs, these cooks serve 300 meals a day to city employees, bang out 800 additional meals a couple of times a week for the Food Bank of the Rockies, and in the process receive comprehensive instruction on kitchen safety, sanitation, menu planning, catering and station cooking. If only all rookie cooks were trained so well.

Table 6’s crew has taken everything that the city and the entire country (thanks to a nod from John Mariani in Esquire‘s list of the best new restaurants of 2004) could throw at them, and they’re still on their feet, still cooking, still doing the job. Under the direction of chef Aaron Whitcomb, Table 6 has remained vital, relevant and, more to the point, packed since the day it opened, with crowds and a nationwide buzz. And while this crew has struggled — falling occasionally from the peak of its talents, simply worn down by the never-ending grind of full houses night after night after night — it’s never been put down for the count. “Doing the job” is sometimes the best compliment that can be given to a kitchen operating under stress, meaning everyone there is still slugging it out, still giving every plate their whole heart and full attention. And that’s what Table 6 has done this year. Under pressure that would have made a lesser team crumble and flake, these guys are still in there, still turning out some of the best food the city has to offer.

Mizuna and Luca d’Italia, Frank Bonanno’s two (and counting) houses, exist today almost beyond the bounds of classification. They’re neither casual eateries nor necessarily fine dining. They’re each dedicated to their own style of cuisine — Italian for Luca, French-Mediterranean for Mizuna — but neither work from any kind of standardized canon, depending instead on improvisation and reworking classics into modern interpretations. The crews in both restaurants are fiercely talented and incredibly well trained, and they consistently knock out some of the best plates in the city, night after night, week after week. And at the center of all this is Bonanno, who — after years of working his ass off and paying his dues — is now coming into his own not just as Denver’s best chef, but as an artist, craftsman and businessperson who’s known and respected throughout the industry. For years, Bonanno spent every one of his rare vacations cooking stages (short apprenticeships) at some of the best houses in the country; now line dogs and galley kids from some of the best houses in the country are coming to him, asking for a week, two weeks, a month in his kitchen so that they might learn the tricks and techniques that make his restaurants so good. What’s more, a lot of these cooks are choosing to stay after their stints are complete, joining Bonanno’s crew permanently or asking him to help them find work at Denver’s other top addresses. So for all of this — for his personal talent behind the burners, his dedication to Denver’s ever-struggling scene and his vicious competitive streak, as well as for the way his restaurants have thrived, his reputation traveled, and his crews gone from merely great to a rarefied sort of brilliant smoothness over the past couple of years — Bonanno takes the prize.

For a serious steakhouse, Elway’s has a goofy streak a mile wide running through it. Milk and cookies for dessert, shrimp cocktail mounted over smoking dry ice and, for a real hit of comfort-food nostalgia, do-it-yourself s’mores. This plate is served as a warmed bowl of homemade, melted chocolate ganache, a half-dozen marshmallows, some graham crackers, a long fork and one of those Sterno-fired mini-grills that we’ve only seen used before as the centerpiece of Chinese-restaurant pu-pu platters. With just a few ingredients and implements, this dessert can make a mess unparalleled in the Denver white-tablecloth scene. We’re talking melted marshmallows stuck to the plates, welded onto the tines of the fondue forks and smeared all over the grill, as well as chocolate on the tablecloth and (more than likely) all over the customers. So, please, keep the poor dishwashers in mind when ordering this dessert — maybe kick ’em a couple bucks on the tip.

Okay, the Bugling Bull is not so much a restaurant as a gas station and general store offering canned goods, cold Cokes, fly kits, bug spray, ammunition, hunters’ cammies, radiator fluid and other esoteric sundries of a classic back-road pull-through. And, no, it doesn’t have all those conveniences that most restaurants do — things like tables, a cash register and menus. But every once in a while, when the weather is right and the fellas are feeling frisky, they pull out the box smoker and the big, backyard barbecue grills and spend the day turning out the best ribs, baby backs, burgers and brats any man could ever hope to find while driving around completely lost in the middle of nowhere.

Now safely past the one-year mark, Kabul Kabob still serves the best, cheapest, most amazing Afghan cuisine imaginable. Everything about this slightly ramshackle little neighborhood eatery is wonderful. A party of four can easily get a table any night of the week. The servers are brutally honest about what’s good and what’s not so good in the kitchen. And most of it is very good indeed: The kitchen turns an expert hand to dishes like bulanee kachalu and mantua dumplings filled with ground beef and onions. And your party of four can sample nearly everything on the menu and still get out for less than fifty bucks.

Little India’s particular take on Indian food is an odd mix of regional specialties, all cooked in the tradition of northern Indian cuisine by a Punjabi chef hired by the restaurant’s Punjabi owners, the Malhotra and Baidwan families. The regular menu is long and dignified, showcasing the curries and masalas that even casual eaters of Indian food would recognize, as well as seven kinds of saag; specialties of Madras, Danshak, Bombay and Punjab; and even colonial dishes like the vindaloos from Goa — their brutal heat and strange balance of spices a record of Portuguese occupation, British colonialism and unbroken Indian culinary tradition. For anyone looking for a whirlwind tour of everything available under the variegated blanket of Indian cuisine, Little India’s lunch buffet — with its multiple offerings and ever-changing lineup of spot-on Indian translations — can’t be beat. Here, everything from the most complicated vindaloo to the simplest chutney has the potential to transport a diner to utter bliss.

Here’s how good Denver Woodlands is: You could eat every meal here every day for a week and never realize it’s a vegetarian restaurant. That’s not a knock against the herbivores in the crowd, merely a measure of how superior cuisine can transcend all boundaries and prejudices, and remind even the most dedicated snob that when you’re eating great food, eating is just about eating and doesn’t have to have an agenda. The house specializes in dosa — giant lentil-flour crepes wrapped around a variety of savory ingredients — but the menu certainly doesn’t end there. Instead, it spreads out into a colorful, delectable culinary tour of modern Indian cuisine that draws from across the region, from Bengal to Madras to New Delhi to Bangalore. In addition to being highly authentic, totally vegetarian, very reasonably priced and absolutely delicious, the fare at Denver Woodlands is also certified kosher, making dinner here an honest-to-God sanctified religious experience.

The best love affairs start in the most surprising ways. A glance, a kiss or — in the case of India’s Restaurant — just one taste of the most delicious, beautiful, shocking boti masala. And from there, things only get better. The dining room, which is decorated as though the owners were determined to shoehorn a thousand years’ worth of proud culture onto the walls, is full of the warm smell of tandoori ovens, and the product of those ovens comes out in huge, heaping plates of meats stained deep red by the spices. Every bread is a comfort, every sauce a careful balance between heat and sweetness and cold. And because the menu is so deep, offering a wide array of the diverse regional cuisines of the subcontinent, your affair with India’s never has to end.

Every visit to Brooks Smokehouse is a two-for-one treat. Not only do Ronald and Louella Brooks serve some of the town’s best BBQ in their odd little spot, but they also dish up fried gator, good Frenchy frogs’ legs, fat boudin sausages and a stellar, tomato-heavy crawfish étouffée. The Brookses originally hail from Louisiana, the cradle of Cajun cooking; lucky for us, they didn’t leave any flavor behind when they brought that fiercely regional cuisine to the Mile High City.

Le Central gets knocked around a lot for things it doesn’t do wrong. People complain about the service, saying it’s snooty — when it’s actually just French. They grumble about long waits on lunch service when the house is full — which really means the place is popular. But the one thing nobody ever seems to complain about is the food: lovingly rendered classic French bistro cuisine. Through it all, the kitchen just keeps turning out giant bowls of mussels and never-ending frites, woody onion soups, fantastic lardon salads, haute classics like escargot and rustic masterpieces, all paired against a good vin ordinaire wine list and served in one of the most casually romantic dining rooms in town. Owner Robert Tournier has weathered a lot in the last couple of years — staff changes, a remodel, the abortive anti-French backlash of 2003 — but Le Central has survived it all and come back stronger than ever.

Since it moved into this stand-alone strip-mall space in 1993, Chez Thuy has been offering history lessons told in food. It’s a casually shabby clearinghouse with menus as thick as a world atlas, each outlining the story of the cuisine of Vietnam, which, in the historical record, reads like a murderous, ill-fated yet oddly fortuitous collision of cultures and a thousand spices. When the French first came to Indochina, they did so with guns, funny hats and an idea of colonial law absolutely antithetical to the Southeast Asian way of life. But their coming also marked one of those strange periods where complementary vectors of food and politics cross, because the French, being French, brought their chef’s knives along with their trench knives, which changed Vietnamese cooking forever. The Vietnamese took to French haute cuisine like nobody’s business, fusing it with their own already highly developed culinary tradition — and the rest is delicious history. Chez Thuy’s menu reflects the mingling of the French and Vietnamese obsessions with food in the best possible way.

When you order Vietnamese coffee at Pho 79, the waiter warns you that it’s strong. When he brings it to the table, he warns you again that the house makes it powerful, and to be careful. And after waiting for the peaceful drip-drip-drip of the tin filter to finish and the hot coffee to bleed down through the ice to the layer of sweetened, condensed milk on the bottom of the glass, you taste it and know that the waiter had only your best interests in mind. This stuff is like drinking sweet, coffee-flavored crack: It’s addictive, it’s cheap, and one glass will pin your eyelids back to the top of your head for twelve hours. So take your waiter’s advice and be careful: This stuff ain’t for amateurs.

Kim Ba’s menu is huge (and most of it in Vietnamese), listing a range of regional dishes that offer a whirlwind tour from the Highlands down to the Delta and back again. Even after many visits, we have yet to find a single thing that we wouldn’t eat again (and again and again). The fat shrimp wrapped in grilled flank steak are fantastic, as is the chicken in chile paste; the fat spring rolls are the best we’ve ever tasted. If the house specializes in anything, it’s marinated and grilled meats, turning out several dozen varieties a day. We’ve eaten Vietnamese food at every possible opportunity for decades and didn’t think we could be shocked by anything coming off the line, but Kim Ba has shown us that there’s a lot more to learn about food in general — and Asian food in particular.

Man cannot live on pig intestines alone. And on those nights when you crave something comfortingly familiar yet still vaguely ethnic, Imperial Chinese Restaurant fits the bill. Although the dining room here is red-dragon-and-white-tablecloth elegant, it attracts a casual crowd of diners looking for the kind of tame, sterile thrills that only Chinese food done Colorado-style can offer. Which means all of the American-Chinese favorites, executed in exemplary fashion: sesame chicken, sweet-and-sour shrimp, Peking duck and fried wontons (filled with ground pork, not eels or anything weird), and fortune cookies that deliver only good news.

For those addicted to searching out the true flavors of the mysterious East, JJ Chinese Restaurant is a wonderland of sights and smells and tastes — highly specific regional cooking featuring dishes native to chef/ owner Kevin Ho’s home province of Guangdong. For those who prefer something more along the lines of sesame chicken? Well, then JJ can be flat-out freaky, because Ho’s menu offers no fewer than a dozen things that most people don’t even consider food. Snakes, for example. Or capelin (a tiny fish, eaten whole), geoduck and pig intestines. But Ho is a man who cooks without fear, and he doesn’t worry what his non-Guangdongian clientele might think of a plate full of duck feet and spicy bean paste. A meal here is a real adventure in eating.

Tommy’s Thai straddles the border between what Thai cuisine truly is and what those who’ve never had the real thing think Thai cuisine ought to be. As a result, Tommy’s offerings can come off muted, those raw edges of ethnic flavor rubbed smooth by continued refinement for the neighborhood palate. But this dialing down works for the kitchen’s curries, which are irresistible and addictive. They’re still hot where they should be hot, still sweet where they should be sweet, and always milky-smooth with infused coconut milk, but they also have an unexpected depth of flavor. From plain greens to reds and yellows rich with lime leaves and boiled shrimp, to the excellent potato-studded massamun, Tommy’s curries take the crown.

There are those restaurants where you plan to eat — making reservations, picking out the right outfit, booking the babysitter — and those you go to when the urge strikes you. Spicy Basil is all about whim. This small Thai-fusion storefront is just the spot for a quick lunch when you’ve got Asian on the brain, a place that inspires an undeniable hunger for chicken curry and dumplings when you drive by. During the dinner rush, Spicy Basil probably does more take-out business than sit-down, but if you’ve got the time (and it doesn’t take much), the dining room is casual and sunny, the service quick, and the bright Thai flavors at their best and freshest the moment they hit the table.

You know you’ve found a great ethnic restaurant when nothing tastes like anything you’ve tasted before — and it all tastes good. You think you’ve had Thai food before? Not until you’ve had it at Yummy Yummy Tasty Thai, a great restaurant in an awful location. While the menu reads a lot like every other Thai menu in the city, it tastes like a culinary travelogue of chef-owner Pim Fitt’s native Thailand, full of true flavors and a real passion for the notion that to truly know a place, you must first know how its people eat.

There are Japanese restaurants in town that do great sushi, excellent yakitori, fine gyoza, wonderful ramen. But only at Domo do the disparate elements of Japanese cuisine come together in one perfect, country-style restaurant. And only at Domo could you enjoy this cuisine in such a zen-like setting, with beautiful service, tree-stump seats, a charmingly understated dining room and — for those in real need of unruffled tranquility — a Japanese meditation garden in the back. There’s also an Aikido dojo and Japanese cultural center and museum that you’re encouraged to visit while your meal is being prepared. But the wonderful farmhouse-style food, served with half a dozen exotic sides, is the real attraction at Domo.

Over the past twenty years, Sonoda’s has grown to four locations that serve big crowds. It’s clearly making money, and just as clearly pouring it back into buying more fish, since the dining rooms don’t look like they’ve been redecorated since the late ’80s. But as long as Sonoda’s keeps buying tuna, that’s okay with us. Anything you can imagine being done with these tractor-trailers of the deep, Sonoda’s does it: sashimi and tataki, hand rolls made from the collar, flank, belly, loin and tail. In one meal, you can come close to eating an entire fish. The best way to prepare for this nose-to-tail eating experience? With a bowl of the best Japanese soup in town, a powerful and salty broth made of — what else? — bonito.

At last count, Denver had something on the order of 17 billion sushi bars, with a new one opening every 45 seconds. There are strip malls that boast three sushi bars within a hundred paces, and in the ‘burbs, a man can’t chuck a side of bonito without it going straight through the window of a sushi bar that’s opening — or a sushi bar that’s closing to make way for another sushi bar. But unlike the profusion of Starbucks or Wal-Marts out in the hinterlands, the sushi-bar explosion is a positive thing. Particularly if you live in Aurora, near Kassai Sushi. At this pleasant spot, there’s always room for another body at the bar, always something interesting on the menu. And if the sushi chefs aren’t exactly talkative, they’re quick — able to knock out an order of tuna hand rolls faster than you can say “Tekka maki and a bowl of miso, please.” The buck-a-roll sushi happy hour is a killer deal, and the house even delivers. See? The suburbs aren’t entirely uncivilized.

Best o-toro in town, best sea urchin in town, best sushi bar in town, hands down. Sushi Tazu is the semi-subterranean sushi bar where everyone knows your name. If they were ever to make a Japanese version of Cheers, it would be set in a place like Tazu, staffed by a crew like the one that works behind the curving bar here, and filmed live before a studio audience of the sort of dedicated fish freaks who frequent Tazu. This is a sushi bar where you can get to know the guy rolling your fish — and sometimes even have a short conversation before the chef has to run off and wrap up an order of three dozen tekka maki for a bunch of half-drunk Creekers down the way. Unlike bartenders, these sushi chefs aren’t interested in helping you solve your personal problems or discussing last night’s box scores, but if you want to talk about the freshness of the ama ebi or the color of your uni, they’re all ears.

In its grasping quest toward food-town respectability, Denver is now home to several restaurants that have gone so far above and beyond the call, they’re not just the best of their category here, but can compete with restaurants across the country. Exhibit A: Sushi Den. There’s no other sushi restaurant in the Mile High City — and very few in the continental 48 — that can match a place that gets orders flown in daily from the fish markets of Japan, serving slices and hand rolls of fish that, in some cases, were swimming less than 24 hours before they arrived in Denver. Thanks to these deliveries, Sushi Den runs daily sets of specials featuring unusual critters (needlefish, baby tuna) rarely seen on other sushi menus, and even the plainest rolls are made from superior ingredients and by sushi chefs who’ve learned well the lesson that the chef is merely a mode of transport between coolers and customer. This is a kitchen operating without ego — which is amazing, because if anyone has bragging rights to its product, it’s Sushi Den.

The crab cakes at Go Fish Grille are big enough to be a meal. A very delicious meal. They come to the table straight out of the pan, decadently stuffed with quality back-fin crabmeat that’s been left in fat chunks rather than overworked into shreds, mixed lightly with breadcrumbs and not at all with bell peppers or onions or celery (heaven forbid), so the taste of good crab is all you get in every bite. Unless, of course, you order the cakes with one of the dozen-plus sauces listed on the menu, which offer crab fanatics the chance to try a different flavor every night until they’ve exhausted all pairing options and have to start over.

Mac-and-cheese may be the best survivor of the comfort-food trend that swept the food world a few years ago, then mercifully departed. And we’d like to keep Mizuna’s mac-and-cheese around for a long, long time. Butter-soft lobster-claw meat, perfectly poached, comes mounted on pasta robed in smooth mascarpone cheese that’s about as far from out-of-the-box-Kraft as you can get. Baby, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Somethin’ Else, Sean Kelly’s neighborhood tapas joint, takes the fancified crustacean from the rarefied level of special occasions and anniversaries and returns it to everyday eating, where it belongs. Here the lobster tail is served without fanfare alongside all the other great small plates — but at fifteen bucks, this perfectly prepared lobster is a big deal.

We know that Zengo is not so much a seafood restaurant as a restaurant that happens to serve seafood in addition to a lot of other things. But that doesn’t matter. When you’re after great fish, nobody handles the creatures of the briny deep quite like this kitchen — and with a Latino-Asian twist, at that. Whether you order an antojito of tuna cut into perfect slabs and served with a ponzu sauce, a crisp and bitingly fresh ceviche, an entree of whole grouper dusted in ancho chile powder or the best piece of black cod you’ve ever tasted, we guarantee that your meal will go swimmingly at Zengo.

Larry Herz and his crew at Go Fish Grille have created a seafood restaurant with zero pretension but a worthy goal: to fill its coolers and freezers with the finest product that can be wrangled out of suppliers who still think of Denver as a B-grade market (at best). We wouldn’t suggest this as a romantic destination — too many wooden fish sculptures and bright colors for that. And it’s probably not the spot to close a million-dollar business deal — unless the signatories have some sort of weird Finding Nemo fetish. But it’s a place to go with friends, lots of friends, because the one-from-column-A, two-from-column-B, Tom Colicchio-style choose-your-own-adventure menu is deep enough to please even the pickiest, fish-phobic of your friends. For those nights when you’re looking for a fun place to greet and eat, we guarantee that Go Fish Grille is quite a catch.

Everyone knows about the great seafood at McCormick’s: the daily airlifts of fresh fish, the weekly and seasonal specials, the talented kitchen that’s there to put everything together, the terrific dining room and bar spaces tucked into the corner of the classic Oxford Hotel. But one of the lesser-known winners on this decidedly fishy menu are the burgers, which are everything a meat-lovin’ man needs: a soft, chewy bun, fresh fixings and a good-sized patty that doesn’t turn to boot leather, even at medium-well. Making a good burger better yet is the price, if you happen to hit McCormick’s during one of its two daily happy hours. From 3 to 6 p.m. any day, and from 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 p.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday, the burger is offered as one of the dozen-plus items on the $1.95 bar menu.

Maybe it’s the wonderfully pretentious presentation of the lobster bisque, the bowl brought by a soft-footed server who laces the top of the soup with decanted sherry for a fine, sharp, smoky alcohol hit. Or maybe it’s the liquid velvet texture and strong lobster flavor of the bisque itself, an ideal balance between creamy richness and big buttery whacks of lobster that proves that the kitchen knows more than just how to grill a steak. We’re not sure why we love the lobster bisque at the Capital Grille. But we do know that we never miss a chance to order it.

There are some rooms where we like seeing everyone dressed to the nines, restaurants where dignity and formality and pomp feel right. And then there’s the Northwoods Inn. Here, the ragtime piano player wears arm garters and people throw their peanut shells on the floor and eat soup out of a communal pot. Here, the house can serve something on the order of 300 customers at a time, and does so three, sometimes four turns a night, every night. Here, families with kids, old folks, young couples on dates, businessmen, famous faces and absolute nobodies are treated the same — like the walking cash dispensers that they are. But no one ever walked away hungry from the Northwoods Inn. No one ever had anything less than a decent feed at fair prices. And no one even seems to complain about the wait — which can sometimes be upwards of two hours — because here, as at Disneyland, once the fun is over, no one remembers the lines.

No, Big John isn’t flipping tenderloins on the grills in the back, but he does show up every now and then — and he’s nothing but gracious when he does. And, no, the dining room isn’t filled with fat guys in Broncos jerseys and sweatpants. Actually, Elway’s draws the kind of crowd you see at every other high-tone address in Cherry Creek, as well as a good number of steakhouse converts who’ve been wooed away from some of the more established temples of meat. And while the place does have John Elway’s name everlastingly attached to it, it’s a restaurant first and foremost, with a pro team running a pro house where the comfort of their guests and the grub coming out of the galley is more important than anything else. Eateries opened by current and former celebrities have become something of a staple — and a joke — in this brave new post-Planet Hollywood world, but Elway’s is serious about what it does, and does it well.

From its home on Broadway, Club 404 has seen a lot of Denver history come and go — more than fifty years of it — and during all that time, there’s been one constant. And that would be Jerry Feld, 404’s owner. Sure, he’s now got family helping him with the day-to-day business of running the joint, but it’s a rare night that Feld himself isn’t somewhere on the premises, either pouring drinks, working the floor or knocking around in the kitchen, where his crew bangs out Denver’s best cheap steaks. How cheap? How about nine dollars for the 404 T-bone? This isn’t the most delicate of cuts, but it’s still a damned fine piece of meat, and it comes with a straight iceberg salad, dressings served in giant plastic jugs, sides of out-of-the-box mash and out-of-the-can gravy, and — if you’re lucky — a wink from a waitress who’s been working the room for nearly as long as Feld has owned it.

We don’t care how many newfangled steakhouses open in this burg, we’ll keep going to Bastien’s. We don’t care if one opens where the steaks are dipped in gold and served by waitresses booted from Hooters for being of too low a moral character, we’ll still keep going to Bastien’s. As a matter of fact, a steakhouse could open where naked women delivered filet mignons to us in the bathtub and then paid us to eat them, and we’d still find time to visit Bastien’s, because there’s simply no other place in Denver (or probably the world) that serves a great twenty-dollar sugar steak in an atmosphere as swingin’-’60s swank as this Colfax landmark.

In this decidedly steak-and-potatoes town, where steakhouses spring up faster than mushrooms after a soaking rain, Capital Grille remains a cut above the rest. We’ve eaten a lot of prime and put away a lot of baked potatoes at meat markets around the city, putting up with snooty servers and imperious hosts. And we’ve always come back to Capital Grille, where the service is superb — the staff in their ill-fitting butcher’s coats, the bartenders in their bow ties, the hostesses in their big smiles — and the solid, old-school decor brightened up just enough by the view across the back of the sleek, modern bar. The steaks are fantastic, of course, as is the rest of the food. In fact, everything about Capital Grille is just a little bit better, a little bit smoother, a little bit more polished than the competition. We’ll steak our lives on that.

No matter how much you eat or how long you stay at Frasca, you’ll always leave wanting more — and you’ll start planning your return as soon as possible. A month should be long enough to rebuild your bank account, although considering the quality of the food and the talent in the kitchen, the prices are pretty reasonable. And while the crowds are borderline fanatical at this point — filling the comfortable dining room from the minute the doors open until long after they should have closed, clogging up the reservation book three weeks in advance for anything approaching a prime-time seating — Frasca is one of the very few places in the country, not just Colorado, where this sort of fawning, zealous passion is entirely deserved. One visit is simply not enough.

A bottle of red, a bottle of white, a nice table looking out on the hustle and bustle of Cherry Creek on a Saturday night, and a date to meet there once a week at the same time — that’s all it takes to fall in love. Billy Joel understood that, and so does Greg Goldfogel, owner of Ristorante Amore. On any night of the week, maybe half of the customers are regulars who’ve been coming in once a week, sometimes more, since the night they discovered the place. But with all those regulars, things were beginning to get tight for everyone else. So Goldfogel expanded his twenty-seater into a space next door, opening up plenty of room for a new crop of customers to come in, discover the charms of Amore and fall in love.

Every neighborhood needs a neighborhood Italian joint, particularly one as good as Tonti’s. From the outside, there’s nothing special about this strip-mall spot, nothing that separates it from the hundreds of also-rans plugging away night after night. You could drive by it a hundred times and never give it a second look. But if you do happen to drop in, Tonti’s will quickly become your default choice for every lazy Tuesday, every family night with the kids, every quiet Friday when you don’t feel like cooking, but don’t feel like going anywhere that requires too much effort. Or any effort at all.

Frank Bonanno wants people to think of one thing when they hear his name: authenticity. He wants everything he touches, every plate that comes out of his kitchen, to be absolutely authentic, and that’s what he’s accomplished at the splendid Luca d’Italia. Although the dishes on the menu may seem unfamiliar, it takes just a bite to know you’re eating food that would be right at home back in Italy. Straightforward flavors, impeccable ingredients, perfectly executed stocks and sauces — Luca D’Italia has all the requisite pieces for a meal both surprising in its complexity and comforting in its apparent effortlessness. Whether you order a simple Bolognese, a three-way spread of deconstructed, truffled rabbit or just a small bowl of soup, this is Italian food made the way we wish all our grandmothers could make it.

It shouldn’t be tough to make a decent plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Matter of fact, it should be harder to mess it up than to do it right. And yet for the longest time, the good people of Denver have suffered through some of the worst Italian food served anywhere. But no more. Several good family-run Italian places have opened up over the past few years — and none feels quite so down-in-your-bones genuine as Vita Bella, which serves the town’s most genuine plate of spaghetti and meatballs. Forget Rocco and his mother slaving away in the basement kitchen, rolling meatballs all day. Forget all those chain food-e-terias where you pay more for the faux Little Italy decor than for the food. If you’re looking for the real thing — an East Coast red-sauce joint that serves the kind of food generally unavailable west of, say, Scranton — then you’ll have a ball at Vita Bella.

In a lot of ways, Rioja is a dream restaurant — the sort that chefs fantasize about, with a great location, a solid crew of experienced veterans and a menu that allows that crew to improvise upon favorite dishes night after night. For chef Jennifer Jasinski, that means doing pasta — lots of pasta. Lots of beautifully executed, expertly balanced plates of handmade pasta presented daily to a crowd that seems to love them all without reservation. From the fat, pot-bellied pansoti stuffed with cheese and roasted acorn squash to cannelloni in black-truffle sauce and the tiny duck raviolini in the kitchen’s wonderful consommé, Chef Jen has much to be proud of. And much work to do every day to fill the demand for the best pasta in Denver.

Although Parisi’s relocated and expanded restaurant is wonderful, it’s the fantastic Italian deli that gets us through the door. Italian deli meats and whole frozen Muscovy ducks, as well as fresh-made mozzarella, prepped-to-cook entrees, sides and frozen stocks and sauces from Parisi’s own kitchen are enough to make us love this place beyond all reason and good sense. But there are also shelves full of dry stock — imported Italian specialties, raw tomato pastes, artisan oils — that have everything you could possibly need for a proper Saint Joseph’s Day feast or just a family dinner straight out of GoodFellas. The friendly staff is incredibly knowledgeable about the most obscure culinary matters, and they never let you leave before you’re loaded down with more great Italian stuff than you could ever use.

While Armando’s pies are outstanding, particularly the deep-dish spinach Sicilian, this venerable pizzeria deserves a prize for another portion of its menu: the pastas. The kitchen does just about every classic neighborhood Italian starch you can think of, including admirable gnocchi, fat little ravioli, and a fresh capellini pomodoro with garlic, capers, white wine and cherry tomatoes. There’s also an excellent chicken Florentine, and a great Alfredo to pour over just about anything. If you’re torn between all the choices, Armando’s offers several mezzo e mezzo plates that should settle just about any split decision.

A great pizza folded in half is a great calzone. And what’s better than a great calzone? A great stromboli — essentially a pizza that’s been involved in a high-speed collision with a fast-moving Italian sandwich, with the resulting mess folded up like a calzone and baked. Tonti’s stromboli is a huge pocket of baked pizza dough, stuffed with deli meats and cheeses (including a good dose of mozzarella), then served with a side of excellent red sauce. Eating one isn’t quite as convenient as eating a sandwich or a slice — you’ll need a knife, fork and big boy’s appetite just to get through half — but it’s worth the extra effort.

Famous Pizza has a vibe that lets you know you’ve come to the right place. It could be the abraded tile, the wobbly tables, the decor that’s half Greek diner, half God knows what — but there’s definitely something in the collision between look, neighborhood and attitude that makes Famous the best spot for feeding that late-night jones for thin-crust perfection. The slices here are New York-style — meaning thin crust, small bone and greasy — and while they’re not the absolute best in town, they’re available until 3 a.m. on Friday and Saturday for the walk-in trade. And for that, Famous is rightly famous.

Until you’ve tasted what a French-trained, James Beard Award-nominated executive chef can do once he decides to open a dream neighborhood pizza place, you really haven’t tasted pizza’s potential. But since the debut of the Oven, Mark Tarbell’s wood-fired pie joint in Belmar, now you can. Here, every pizza is hand-tossed; topped with the best organic, locally produced and artisan ingredients Tarbell can find; draped with his signature homemade mozzarella (made fresh all day in the Oven’s kitchen) and smoked ricotta cheese; and cooked in one of two massive wood-fired ovens that Tarbell himself designed. The result is a lightly sauced pie, subtly woody in the crust. These aren’t just pizzas, they’re works of art — true masterpizzas.

Technically, what A La Tomate serves isn’t even a pizza. It’s a tarte à la tomate — a golden-brown, braided, buttery, pastry-shell tart filled with pizza-like toppings that comes straight from the cafes of Provence to Denver’s 17th Avenue. At first bite, the pie tastes…weird. The sauce is keyed to French tastes, kicked up with a strong dose of herbes de Provence, and the crust seems to be made from crushed-up Keebler butter crackers. But once you get past the initial shock of this being unlike any other pizza you’ve tasted, you quickly realize that different is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it’s a pretty good thing, especially when the kitchen brings all the skills of a pro pastry department to the construction of each shell.

New Yorkers agree that there are just two ways to do a pizza: the New York thin-crust way, and the wrong way. Lucky for us, that’s the way they feel at the New York Pizzeria, too, and that’s the way the kitchen has been making its pies since the day this pizzeria opened. With crusts that are thin but never crunchy, good-quality toppings that include real shredded mozzarella, and plenty of that magical orange grease that separates a real New Yorker from the legions of pale imitations, this pizza is as authentic as you’re going to get without changing zip codes.

Ben Guest had been talking about opening a pizza joint for fourteen years, ever since he moved to Denver from Chicago’s South Side. His friends were getting kinda sick of hearing about it. But he finally took the plunge, and his pizzas were worth waiting for. The Mile High City was badly in need of a decent stuffed pie, and Beniamino’s are beautiful: high-walled and golden-brown, filled with quality ingredients, sealed with a layer of soft dough, then topped with an herb-heavy sauce and cooked (for upwards of twenty minutes, so be prepared to wait) in authentic Chicago-style steel pans. Every one of these pies is a candidate for a Food Arts centerfold, and they taste just as good as they look.

The pizza at Proto’s Pizzeria Napoletana straddles that dangerous line between honest, wood-fired thin-crust excellence and faddish, overdone, cracker-crust nonsense. So far, though, Proto’s has stayed on the right side of that line, turning out wonderful, hand-tossed pies that are first-rate examples of the thin-crust form, even if they’re irregularly shaped, sometimes unevenly covered, and never consistent from one ‘za to the next. How does it manage this trick? By taking great care with every pie that goes through the ovens and never using anything but the best ingredients available, from the simplest cheese and pepperoni to fresh tomato and veggies. A pizzaman is only as good as his next pie — and you can count on that next pie here being very, very good.

If you think Denver barbecue takes a walk on the mild side, run to your computer and order up some Brick-Hot Bar-B-Que Sauce. Produced and packaged in Lakewood, this sauce has a smoky, dark and ever-present heat that runs right along that ragged edge between really friggin’ hot and just too hot, without becoming so forward that it kills any sense of flavor. Brick-Hot goes wonderfully with everything from ribs to brisket to those whole roasted chickens sold in most grocery stores. It worries us a little that one of the main ingredients is Liquid Smoke, but when the final product tastes this good, we’re willing to let it go.

Jim Walker — best known as “Dr. Daddio” — may be a smooth hand when it comes to dishing out the tunes on KUVO, but the man also knows his way around good barbecue. While this little restaurant counter on the left-hand side of a gas station out on Airport Boulevard may not be the prettiest or the best-stocked joint in town (it has a tendency to run out of nearly everything on a good day), it’s definitely the best place to get some ‘cue and peach cobbler as you’re gassing up the Hummer. Dr. Daddio’s sauce is an addictive, thin, sweet mop that his kitchen applies liberally to everything from ribs and chicken to brisket and hot links. And at just $11 for a full rib dinner with baked beans, bread, potato salad and a slice of lemon pound cake, you can fill your belly for a lot less green than it’ll take to fill your tank.

The space that holds Brooks Smokehouse Bar-B-Que — down a driveway and next to a nondescript house on Fairfax Street — isn’t really a garage, but it comes close enough. The Brookses have turned what was once a catering business into one of the best BBQ joints in the city, offering ribs, brisket, chicken, excellent country-style sides and Louella’s own fruit punch, all available for eating in or taking out. Spend any amount of time at one of the rickety tables in the back and Ronald will show you the heart of his operation: a line of grills, all kinked for slow wood smoking — a rarity in today’s slap-dash barbecue world. Every meat on the menu comes from these jury-rigged smokers, and every smoker is personally babysat by Ronald, starting very early in the morning and sometimes going very late into the night. That’s the kind of dedication it takes to be the best.

Come to Papa. This may look like just another strip-mall barbecue joint, but Big Papa’s makes a sublime rack of baby-back ribs, all charred and crusty ’round the edges, smooth and fatty and tender inside. Making them even better are Papa’s homemade sauces, four varieties from different regional traditions: Memphis, Kansas City, a mustard-spiked Carolina and a Deep South. Papa’s also does good link sausage and chicken, brisket sandwiches on po’boy rolls rather than plain white Wonder Bread, and authentic hush puppies, but the baby backs are what will bring you back.

Mack and Daisy Shead started out with a modest storefront; twenty years later, they have a million-dollar Five Points barbecue joint. But through the years, the essential core of any great BBQ operation has remained the same: the recipes. The Sheads’ knowledge stretches back generations, and that heritage flavors the ribs, the small ends, the chicken and the sides — even the homemade lemonade that’s served in Mason jars. Everything at M&D’s rings true, offering the best taste of Southern barbecue in town.

Wolfe’s Barbeque makes tasty pulled-pork sandwiches, and its barbecued tofu is legendary. But the true, can’t-miss item here is owner Louis Wolfe’s pecan pie. The crust is light and flaky, and the pecan filling has the texture of chiffon on the tongue. Not too dense or too sweet, it’s the perfect post-barbecue treat. Wolfe sells his homemade confection by the slice, but if you ask nicely, he may sell you the whole pie.

The salami sandwich may be the highest example of the sandwich-maker’s art, requiring a mastery of everything from ingredient selection to structural engineering. And Pat’s #1 passes the test with flying colors. There’s nothing peculiar to its salami sandwich, no weird secret ingredients or artisan bread. Instead, it boasts best-quality meat in good proportion to fresh lettuce and strong, funky provolone, just enough sandwich oil to get a little damp, and a dash of salt and pepper, all mounted on a chewy roll and wrapped in sandwich paper. There are restaurants that do more innovative cuisine, more worldly cuisine, certainly more expensive cuisine, but when it comes to the perfect salami sandwich, Pat’s is truly #1.

Bernadette O’Dell’s Zoot Sandwich is a frequent treat along Santa Fe Drive on First Fridays. Partly because the hot soppressata, roasted red pepper and mozzarella creation is so damned delicious, and partly because its namesake, Zoots by Suavecito’s, is located on Santa Fe. Craig Pea, Suavecito’s owner, frequented the deli so often that O’Dell finally named a sandwich after the gregarious haberdasher. Deli Italia is a New York-style treasure hidden in a suburban strip mall; you don’t need to be a celebrity to come in and pick up a sandwich to eat in or take out, or browse through the aisles of gourmet foods.

The menu at Mikey’s Italian Bistro is filled with well-executed Southern Italian dishes, from simple spaghetti and meatballs to calorie-laden lasagnas. But it’s an off-the-menu item that’s a must-have. Ask chef/owner Alaya Ouerfelli for a chicken-parm sandwich, and prepare to melt into food-coma delight. While too many chicken parms are made of old bird that’s been breaded and flash-fried, Mikey’s is tender and moist, with just the right amount of cheese and sauce poured on the fresh rolls. Menudo is touted as a hangover cure, but this sandwich always does the job for us.

Phil Collier, the owner of A La Tomate, is a man multiply obsessed. He and his kitchen do great pastries, decidedly Frog-ish pizzas that are both weird and wonderful, and also put out a sandwich board so full of high-class, high-quality ingredients that the only way to contain it is on a huge chalkboard hung behind the counter. Absolutely everything adorns this list, from snipped leaves of fresh basil, real chvre, Genoa salami and four different kinds of mustard to housemade olive-and-fig spread and French Brie so strong it tastes like your hands after a trip to a petting zoo (but in a good way), and while there are no prepared versions of sandwiches that you can order by name, the big board does offer maybe a dozen suggestions. Still, in the end it’s up to you — and with this much good stuff available, it would be hard not to come up with something wonderful.

At Chedd’s, Dirk and Wendy Bruley have elevated the humble grilled cheese sandwich to an art, doing it better, smarter and in more wondrous variety than anywhere else in town. Grilled cheese is just about all they do at Chedd’s, in a thousand different combinations that no one may have tried before. You want ham and limburger? Chedd’s can do that. Bacon-studded cheese and salami on potato bread, or three different kinds of cheddar on twelve-grain bread? Chedd’s can make those, too. With thirty cheeses, a dozen breads and innumerable meats, veggies, spreads and condiments available, Chedd’s is the place where cheeseheads realize their most fervent sandwich fantasies.

Three things are always true about the Bagel Deli. First, there’s inevitably someone in line ahead of us arguing with the counter help over how to assemble his sandwich, proving that not only does the staff take sandwich-making seriously, but so do the customers. Second, there will always be someone who — despite the big board listing all the available sandwiches and the glass-front deli cases showcasing every meat, fish, side, salad and knish in the joint — asks for a ham sandwich. Whoever is working behind the counter will then patiently explain (for the thousandth time, no doubt) that this is a kosher deli, and that means no pork products, but how ’bout a nice smoked turkey instead? Third, there will always be fresh potato knishes and warm six-packs of Dr. Brown’s Cel-Ray and black-cherry sodas available, and they’re absolute necessities for any proper Jewish deli lunch. And there’s none more proper than lunch at the Bagel Deli.

New York City is famous for lots of things. It’s got Broadway and the Empire State Building, the Rockettes, Donald Trump’s hair, more hookers per capita than any city outside of Southeast Asia, and the best restaurants anywhere in the world. Of those, some of the most universally recognizable are the delis that dot Midtown and the outer boroughs, and it was to these bastions of old-world sandwich craftsmanship that the owners of Deli Tech looked when seeking inspiration. As a result, in Denver you now can get a killer Reuben (literally — the sandwich is big enough to choke a donkey), a decent bowl of chicken-and-matzoh-ball soup, and a slice of real New York cheesecake imported straight from the cheesecake sweatshops of Park Slope. But if a true taste of the Big Apple is what you’re after, skip the preliminaries and go straight for the stacked pastrami and corned beef on rye. Assembled from ingredients brought in from some of those same New York delis and served with the best sandwich mustard in town, this monster is piled so high you’ve got to unhinge your jaw like a python just to get a bite. But once you do, you’ll never be satisfied by another sandwich.

The Philadelphia Filly was once a stationary restaurant, but then Sally Rock and Dale Goin decided to take their authentic Philly cheese-steaks on the road. They now serve their sandwiches at fairs and other annual events; during the Taste of Denver, for example, there are always huge lines snaking out from the Filly’s booth. But the rest of the time, they simply operate the best little cheesesteak carts in town — at 16th and Broadway during the lunch rush, and at 16th and Market late at night (when Rock’s son Willy takes over the grill). No matter what time of day you’re getting your Filly Philly, though, you can count on it being a huge, double-cheese monster capable of taking the edge off even the worst kind of hunger.

Taste of Philly is a little storefront operation that looks, feels and smells more like a real Philly joint than some places actually operating in sight of Independence Hall — from the cramped seating (six tables set nearly on top of each other) and counter that opens straight onto the tiny galley kitchen, to the Tastykakes by the register and the birch beer in the cooler by the door. The walls are hung with the requisite East Coast paraphernalia — Eagles pennants and framed posters of Rocky Balboa — and, most important, both the cheesesteaks and the hoagies are enough to send blue-state refugees into paroxysms of homesickness. With every sandwich made on an Amaroso roll (the gold standard of hoagie rolls), stacked thick and well dressed by the sandwich artists in the kitchen, a lunch here is exactly what the name promises: a Taste of Philly for those lonesome for the East Coast.

For reasons that have never been entirely clear, Denver — a city 2,000 miles removed from the front lines of the Pat’s-versus-Geno’s sandwich war — has always been a battleground fought over by rival cheesesteak operations. There’s east side versus west side, foothills against flatlands, and that competition is all good for cheesesteak consumers. But Pat’s #1 is the winner, edging out all comers with a sublime, authentic Philly cheesesteak that’s a perfect combination of shredded, flat-grilled beef gummed together with melted cheese and an easy dose of fried onions, all mounded up inside a soft, chewy bun that’s just dense enough to soak up the excess grease. Despite the obvious handicap of doing its best work half a continent away from the center of the cheesesteak universe — and for a crowd that still sometimes labors under the ridiculous delusion that a cheesesteak ain’t proper without green peppers and mushrooms — Pat’s stays true to its school.

The town’s chefs love the Cherry Cricket. Softball teams, musicians, barflies, night creatures and neighbors all love the Cricket. Why? Because the Cricket is a classic burger bar where the smoke is thick (unless you’re in the new non-smoking section), the company good, the coolers stocked and the burgers among the best in town. With its dark wood, chrome-edged tables and long history as Cherry Creek’s anti-Creeker hangout, it’s the kind of joint all those chain-burger outfits want to be and are trying their best to imitate. But the Cricket has something those places will never have: a soul.

Sometimes you just want a burger. Not a buffalo burger, not some coddled Kobe-beef monstrosity with butter lettuce, aioli and heirloom tomatoes. Just a burger: dead cow on bread. That’s when you head right for Jim’s Burger Haven, a car-cult joint whose origins can be traced to the glory days of ten-cent milkshakes and miniskirted carhops. The burgers date from that era, too. The kitchen makes big, thin patties of loose-packed meat, cooks them to order on the flat grill until they’re well-done and crispy around the edges, then serves them on big, squishy buns totally inadequate for maintaining the structural integrity of anything larger than a small single, the cheapskate burger that costs 89 cents. All burgers come loaded unless you ask for them otherwise, the meat becoming just another stratum of flavor and texture as the bun, burger, gooey cheese, mustard, ketchup, bright onion, sweet tomato, lettuce and pickle brine merge into a single, over-arching burger gestalt. In other words, this is a classic, old-fashioned burger.

Buffalo burgers, turkey burgers with sweet-potato purée, Maryland crab-boil burgers — Mirepoix offers them all. The kitchen makes no claims of authenticity or traditionalism, but instead takes the idea of the classic American burger and turns it back on itself, giving it a real regional flair. By using the best ingredients in an array of inspired fixings, mounting everything on great breads and turning all the skills of a fine dining crew toward the creation of the best burgers possible, Mirepoix successfully challenges the notion that any new take on an old American classic has to be fussy or fancy. In truth, all it has to be is good, and Mirepoix goes one step further by making its burgers great.

Hamburgers are like a religion. There’s pomp and ritual in their construction and delivery, a sacred compact between burger eater and burger maker that revolves around mutual respect and attention to a set of rules. And once a seeker of burger perfection has found a patty that speaks to him, nothing short of fanatical conversion can change his mind or sway him from his faith. So it’s only right that Bud’s Bar makes the area’s best burger. After all, for more than fifty years, this place has devoted itself to bringing glory to the humble beef sandwich. There’s nothing on Bud’s menu but burgers — singles and doubles, with cheese and without. Every burger comes with pickles and a bag of potato chips, to augment the bottles of ketchup and mustard set out on every table. There’s not much in the way of ambience, and service can be downright nasty when things get busy (and it’s almost always busy). Yet year after year, from across the state and around the country, the faithful keep coming back to Bud’s.

Saray, right number. Qwest isn’t having an easy time of it these days, but employees need only step outside their downtown headquarters building and walk over to a cart on the corner to find quick comfort. The Saray cart peddles a great 75-cent hot dog; double that, and you can get a lightly grilled Sabrett weiner that hangs off the bun at both ends. Polish sausage and a jumbo dog each run $1.50, and for just two bucks, you can get a BBQ brisket sandwich or a bratwurst that’s so big it’s embarrassing.

“A rather special hot dog” — that’s what owner Charlie Master calls Brix’s straight-up, gourmet-meets-white-trash weiner. It’s a Hebrew National all-beef frank, set on a good bun and topped with the kitchen’s sauerkraut, then served with homemade red-cabbage-and-red-onion coleslaw on the side. If one of these dogs, along with a couple of cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon, isn’t the best picnic-style dinner you’ve had in years, then, friend, you don’t know good eatin’.

Chefs get credit for lots of things. They get props for inventing a cuisine, for refining a cuisine, occasionally for ruining a cuisine. But at Table 6, Aaron Whitcomb gets the nod for stealing. Okay, maybe not stealing, exactly. To be more polite, let’s say he gets credit for introducing Denver diners to an addictive taste of the Gulf Coast with his wonderful, chocolate-filled beignets. Since all the food at Table 6 is so good, it’s sometimes easy to fill up and forget about dessert — but don’t make that mistake. Fried dough, dusted with sugar, magically injected with a smooth chocolate filling as hot as lava? It doesn’t get any better than that.

Pim Fitt does two unusual things at Yummy Yummy Tasty Thai. First, she’ll occasionally tour customers through her kitchen, showing how the dumplings are crimped, how the spring rolls are rolled. And second, with the exception of the pad thai, nothing her kitchen makes tastes like any Thai food you’ve tasted before. Odds are good she’ll have something knocking around the periphery of her menu that you’ve never even heard of before but that still belongs to the canon of authentic Thai cuisine. The batter-fried spinach leaves, for example, dipped in sweet Thai peanut sauce. We’d never heard of anyone deep-frying a spinach leaf. And yet here comes Fitt, deep-frying spinach leaves as if it were the most normal thing in the world. And after just one taste, we had to wonder why no one had thought of it before.

They’re simple little things, the soft-shell crabs at Chez Thuy — deep-fried whole, with a beautiful golden batter crisp out of the oil and just a little spicy, the shells inside chewy, yielding and full of juicy meat. The accompanying nuoc mam fish sauce is bright as acetylene, so sharp that a sniff of it is dizzying, like a toot of model-airplane glue. So you can be forgiven if you go a little nuts when the crabs (served two or three to an order) are brought to the table with a whole garden of sides: lettuce for wrapping, rice noodles, mint, basil, what-have-you. Dig in with your fingers and create the ideal bite: It just might be the best crab you’ll ever eat in your life.

Il Fornaio’s crostini di polenta should go down in culinary history as one of the last, best, most original things anyone has managed to do with polenta, the must-have ingredient of the last decade. Here an order brings pan-fried squares — like Italian finger sandwiches — of crisp polenta topped with Italian ham, simple mozzarella, zucchini sliced thin as paper, Gorgonzola, prosciutto or mushrooms kicked up with a lace of black-truffle oil.

Dylan Moore is one weird cat. He bailed on a promising career as a young chef, turning his back on the food world just when he, and California Cuisine, were at the height of their powers. But after more than a decade on the outside, he’s picked up right up where he left off. At Deluxe, the food sometimes seems like we’re still in 1991 in the L.A. Basin. This oddness is most pronounced in the masa-fried oyster shooters on Deluxe’s small-plates menu — an offering right out of the Jeremiah Tower playbook, with a half-dozen shellfish fried in masa and each served in pho spoons with a dot of salsa fresca and a blazing-hot smoked chile aioli. This dish may be on a time trip, but the destination is unbeatable. What comes around goes around.

The chicken wing took off in Buffalo, New York, so it’s no wonder that the best chicken wings in town are made by a man who spent most of his life steeped in the near-mythological upstate New York pizza-and-wing scene. Kris Ferreri, owner of Luciano’s Pizza and Wings, comes from a family whose Buffalo roots go back to the turn of the last century, and what he’s brought to the Mile High City is a pitch-perfect copy of the best chicken wings in the world — a fact that Ferreri never lets anyone forget. Available mild, medium or hot and served in multiples of ten with celery and blue-cheese sauce, just as God intended, Ferreri’s wings are fried long, served steaming hot, and so good that even the most jaded Buffalo ex-pats have to admit that he’s serving the real deal.

“Mother and child reunion” is the best description we’ve heard so far for the Rocky Chicken dish at Table 6. It’s a fried egg, done over-easy, on top of a fried chicken breast and leg that are mounted on a nest of fried potatoes and onions. The whole plate is very intellectual, very New American smartass, but also very tasty — a special trick that Table 6 has mastered, and one that saves the place from collapsing under the weight of over-thinking. Credit chef Aaron Whitcomb for pulling off a cerebral bit of deconstruction that still works in terms of flavor: a tender piece of fried chicken, perfectly cooked, and an egg that, when broken, serves as the sauce. No wonder the tables at Table 6 are some of the most sought-after in town.

Joseph’s Southern Food is the new mouth of the South. From their cramped, mostly carryout space, partners Joe Johnson and Rick Bousman serve up the very best of Deep South cuisine. They do grill-fired burgers, catfish sandwiches, root-beer floats, fried shrimp, coleslaw, collard greens and cold peach cobbler. But their very best dish is the house-special fried-chicken dinner. Although it takes a little time to prepare, it’s totally worth the wait: a three-piece, deep-fried chicken dinner done in a pot with the kind of thick and crispy crust that the Colonel could only dream about, with chunky mashed potatoes, good mac-and-cheese and a cup of sweet tea on ice included in the $8.49 price.

When you want fried cheese, you want a lot of fried cheese. And Maggiano’s Little Italy delivers. This giant Italian joint has the temerity, the cheek, the unabashed audacity to offer as an appetizer a brick of pure-white mozzarella, breaded, fried, and topped with…more cheese, then set afloat in a sea of marinara sauce like some cholesterol iceberg. Ahoy, cardiology clinic! More cheese, please!

An order of chili-cheese fries is not something you leave to an amateur, to someone uneducated in the tricky chemistry of the combination of potatoes, chili and cheese. You want to go to a pro, and that’s why you go to Sam’s No. 3, where the kitchen has been pumping out Coney Island-style fries slathered in beans-and-meat chili and melted generic yellow cheese product for decades. These guys know that the fries must be kept in the oil a little bit longer in order to give them a good caramelized crust that’s strong enough to withstand the weight and moisture of the chili. They understand that while sometimes less might be more, this isn’t one of those times, and so they smother the fries with their tasty chili and enough cheese that pretty soon you’re going to need a fork. This side dish is worth the center of the plate.

French fries, home fries, seasoned fries, steak fries, crinkle-cut, waffle-cut and pommes frites: There are as many different varieties of fried potatoes as there are varieties of potatoes themselves. And the shoestring fries at Devil’s Food Bakery put all others to shame. This haystack tangle of blanched and fried, super-thin-cut potato comes with the house’s steak-frite plate. While fantastic, salty and crunchy on their own, the shoestrings are even better paired with the great flatiron-cut steak, since that blood-thickened Dijon mustard sauce at the bottom of the plate is perfect for dipping.

At Bistro Vendome, chef Eric Roeder can run a good crew out of a cramped galley; bang out fifty plates of classical trout amandine and faux cassoulet a night with the first one tasting just as perfect as the last; and compete and thrive among some serious culinary contenders on Larimer Square — even though his space has zero street frontage and no visibility for foot traffic. But the most telling mark of his skills as a chef is in the little things Roeder does better than anyone else. And his frites, which come alongside any of the house’s three steak preparations, are by far the best in town.

At Mirepoix, Bryan Moscatello has assembled a roster of pitch-perfect New American dishes that range from jumped-up grilled-cheese finger sandwiches to one of the best high-end burgers in town, the latter coming with a side of the best french fries. The spuds are blanched first, then finished like frites to give the thick fries an excellent crunch, and finally crusted in Parmesan cheese for a flavor that’s so good, you might find yourself sticking around for a second helping.

The new, improved Colorado Convention Center looks fancy and all, but what if you’re planning a confabulation that’s a bit more humble? Then Blackberries is your site. Since the sprawling, scrupulously spotless space opened last year, it has hosted a bevy of events: charity fundraisers, writers’ workshops, art openings, film screenings and, of course, Denver’s perennial spoken-word gala, Cafe Nuba. But this isn’t just a great room: Blackberries also offers top-notch coffee and espresso, as well as its own luscious micro-batch ice cream. Add in its central location and convivial service, and you’ve got an ideal spot for those coffee klatches, power lunches and roundtable nights. Now get out there and meet and greet.

Where once lurked the Cutthroat Cafe, a gruesomely dubbed greasy spoon that took over from the equally gruesomely named Butcher’s Block, there now sits the altogether cuddly Monkey Bean, a neighborhood joint for the rapidly improving Ballpark neighborhood. In a city clogged with cafes, Monkey Bean apes no one: Everything from its huge menu to its vibrant decor is full of originality and soul. Ricotta-cheese pancakes? Peanut butter and jelly? Bubble tea laced with chewy pearls of tapioca? It’s all here. There are also shelves stocked with board games and an impressive array of books, not to mention free Internet, a cozy patio and virtuoso baristas. Whether you’re looking for a quiet, solo midweek break or Sunday brunch with the crew, this Monkey suits everyone.

Yorkshire native Jessica Avery has created a stark, sunny space that shines in contrast to the ambience of coffeehouses we’ve become so accustomed to in this town, where folks can find a dark spot to swill caffeine and palaver on nearly every street corner. Her House of Commons is a welcoming space where you chat in hushed tones, though not necessarily with your pinkie extended, as you sip an entirely different kind of caf — chosen from a variety of aromatic Taylor’s of Harrogate teas — in the descending light. Adding to the makings of a right proper afternoon are Avery’s food offerings — lovely scones with double Devon cream, tiny petit fours, cucumber sandwiches and Parkin, a Yorkshire specialty that involves baking spiced oatmeal with treacle into a chewy, crumbly, sticky, caramelly mess of perfect goodness. Brilliant!

If you find yourself at Kazmo’s at 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning, it’s a good bet you haven’t just come from church — or the comfort of your shower. No, more likely you’re a survivor of Saturday night’s continuing festivities and primed to re-engage. Victor Gomez, the Dominican-born proprietor of this windowless refuge, is happy to oblige, with a DJ who pumps up the volume to nuclear-detonation levels. With a dance floor inhabited by your fellow creatures of the dawn. With $5 pitchers of Bud. With 8-ball. And, yes, with a couple of couches on which to collapse and contemplate the music of the spheres. All in all, Kazmo’s offers a splendid nothing’s-enough-and-too-much-is-just-fine experience.

Celebrating its 35th anniversary this year, the Denver Triangle is one of the oldest leather bars in the country. But it didn’t reach that ripe old age without a few growing pains. Back in the day, old-guard leather bars were reserved strictly for men, and woe to any woman who dared cross their dark dungeon doorsteps. Those times are long gone, though, and today the Triangle is coed, cowhide-clad and customer-friendly, with special nights when granola-flavored, vegan-type folk are welcome. But the best day to visit the T is Sunday, for the $6 all-you-can-drink beer bust. Money raised during the busts benefits various LGBT organizations and charities, whose members put in their time as servers. So grab your Sunday-best leather vest (but don’t bother to saddle up), and take a walk on the wild side. If you’re lucky, you could get served by a certain green-wigged, glitter-bearded, triple-breasted drag queen!

Don’s Club Tavern may be Denver’s longest-surviving dive, as well as its most liquid asset. For decades, Don’s has been the no-frills saloon of choice for those with a streak of Charles Bukowski in them, who are serious about their drinking. And there’s no better way for a place that’s been around forever to remind us of how much we love it than to start a closing scare. In late 2004, rumors abounded that Don’s — whose founder died earlier in the year — was about to sell out, probably to one of the new kids with their small plates and fancy wines and fussy New American cuisine. So far, nothing has come of the rumors; still, there’s not a moment to lose. Dive into this classic dive, one of a dying breed in the New West, before it disappears altogether.

Sometimes you just need a place to drink. A place where you can go about the serious business of altering your blood chemistry undisturbed by flashing lights, pounding bass lines or a bunch of nineteen-year-olds passing fake IDs and horking up their Jägermeister on the dance floor. And when you’re in need of a place like this, you could do a lot worse than bellying up to the bar at Arap’s Old Gun Shop — where the beers are cold, the well booze is cheap, the bartenders are smooth and efficient, and the customers are mostly local, mostly friendly and mostly content to keep to themselves. There’s plenty of space at the bar or at the long tables arranged in front of it to be alone with your thoughts, and while the Barfly vibe can sometimes be overwhelming, it’s exactly that dead-end sense of last-call gloom and lost chances that makes Arap’s the genuine article.

This saloon’s name recalls both Bob Dylan and Dashiell Hammett, and its regulars are likely to be familiar with both. The Thin Man draws a funky sample of Capitol Hill’s creative population, including local musicians, artists and filmmakers; book clubs and art collectives come here to brainstorm or plan their Burning Man installations. A former auto garage, the Man packs them all in with signature cocktails (the pineapple vodka is a special treat), a nice selection of beer and wine, and a friendly, TV-free space. The walls host works by an ever-changing roster of local artists, and the white marble bar is a thing of beauty. An establishment as good as the Thin Man is hard to find.

Denver is suddenly inundated with Irish bars, but the Irish Snug led the way, in the process giving Colfax a stunning new storefront: This Dublin-style pub’s facade looks like it was built in another century. The vibe inside is slightly less well-worn, although a growing group of loyal customers are doing their best to break the place in. Opened on St. Patrick’s Day 2004, the Snug sticks to its theme, from the Guinness on tap to the corned beef on the menu. The bar’s snug — a private drinking booth imported from Ireland — is a unique, authentic feature, but it’s just as fun to enjoy the nightly beer specials on the large gated patio, or in a non-smoking room. Let’s raise a pint to the Snug.

Lots of local watering holes offer great happy-hour specials and fleeting drink deals on whatever rotgut they’ve got clogging up their back stock. But the Lounge doesn’t mess around. Instead, the barkeeps here serve one-buck cans of Old Style, all the time. The staple of a million Midwest union meetings and monster-truck rallies, Old Style is richer than Budweiser and less played out than Pabst. And the Lounge, with its amiable staff, hit-heavy jukebox, creative appetizers and chill atmosphere, is the perfect place to wash away those day-before-payday blues.

While the brewpub industry has fallen flat in recent years, the Bull & Bush proves that you can teach an old dog new tricks. Now more than thirty years old, the Bull was modeled after the 300-years-older Bull & Bush near London and spent its first few decades as a classic Glendale watering hole — which means the amount you drank (and who you drank it with) was sometimes more important than what you drank. But the introduction of a microbrewery three years ago poured new life into this animal. Today, the Bull & Bush pumps out award-winning brews that make an already good bar even better. Throw in the Bull’s live music and more than a hundred kinds of Scotch, and better becomes the best.

In a state rich with craft brews, it takes big flavor and muscle to stand out. Avery Brewing’s Hog Heaven does that and more. Rich with malt, gooey with hops and deep with alcohol, this beer hogs the spotlight, thrilling beer geeks and gourmands and scaring off swill-sippers. Avery Brewing rules the roost of local breweries, and Hog Heaven is the true king of beers.

Walking through the door of Falling Rock Taphouse is enough to make a beer fan fall in love all over again. This comfortable, casual saloon is serious about its brews, and it has over seventy of the world’s best beers on tap, as well as an impressive collection of bottles both rare and wonderful. And Denverites aren’t alone in their appreciation of Falling Rock: It’s got a national reputation as the best taphouse in the nation. God bless the USA.

Plunge into sake at Swimclub 32, which offers a straight-artisan, almost uncomfortably funky board of both old classics and newcomers. In some case the prices may seem high, but bear in mind that the house is doing a six-ounce wine pour on these bad boys. We don’t know of another place in town where you can sip a clean, pure, ultra-premium free-run Ginga Shizuku, chase it with a crisp hit of cheap Bishonen, then do a final round of super-artisan Ama no To “Heaven’s Door.”

Swimclub 32 owners Chris Golub and Grant Gingerich ought to know a little bit about the grape-juice game. Before opening their hipper-than-hip, Asian-inspired, fusion-bistro-slash-tapas bar in the Highland neighborhood, they were both laboring in the cellars of one of the world’s best-known wineries, Veuve Clicquot. The knowledge that they gained there certainly didn’t go to waste, because now it’s all for sale — by the glass and by the bottle — on Swimclub’s short, sweet and intriguing list full of bargain Spanish reds and deadly good whites. With vintages and varietals drawn from around the planet’s wine-producing regions, the fellas take particular pride in highlighting bottles from small, lesser-known wineries, listing them right up there with the big boys. And then they go the distance, making sure that every customer in the place gets, if not the glass he was looking for, then certainly the glass he needs.

There’s no doubt that Brian Klinginsmith knows his grapes. At Solera, he assembled a cellar that perfectly matched the simple, ingredient-driven menus assembled by chef Goose Sorenson, with a back stock of excellent bottles held out for special occasions or for those who’d come more for the booze than the grub. Although Klinginsmith has moved to California, his collectible legacy is resting easy in the hands of Tim Daughter, who has a wonderful stock to build on as he slowly starts to make the Solera cellars — and the Solera servers who’ve always been excellent guides through the house’s list — his own.

When it comes to a great wine list, there’s just no beating the selection at Adega. Not as long as the restaurant keeps stocking bottles like its ’98 Haut-Brion white Bordeaux, and those Spanish pinots, and those killer German and Austrian whites, and that bottle of ’93 Leroy Clos de La Roche, and that roster of Latours and Mouton-Rothschilds that’s surprising not because of the high end of $1,400 for a bottle of ’53 Mouton, but because of how many of those classic Bordeaux come in under $300.

Paris on the Platte has long reigned as one of the city’s funkiest and most popular coffee shops. Now there’s even more reason to like it: Platte’s owners recently expanded their empire by converting the shop’s adjoining bookstore into a classy, understated wine bar. With a well-chosen list of whites, reds and rosés, as well as a menu of grape-enhancing cheese and fruit plates, Paris Wine Bar feels like the grown-up version of its caffeinated sibling — stylish, understated and totally free of pretension. The staff is happy to talk vintage, whether you’re a novice or an enthusiast, and the bar’s tasting flights are a great, inexpensive way to begin searching for that one perfect bottle. Remember, Denver, we’ll always have Paris.

In honor of its 25th birthday last year, Morton’s made the best even better: It came up with a cure for the common cold. By pouring its already splendid martinis into stainless-steel martini glasses, Morton’s guaranteed that martini-lovers would be shaken, if not stirred. But the vessel surrounding your drink isn’t the only surrounding that’s important when you’re drinking a martini (and frankly, Morton’s martinis taste just fine out of regular glasses, too). You need an understanding bartender who’ll stuff olives with blue cheese at the drop of a cocktail napkin. You need a clubby, comfortable bar to enjoy the drink in. And you need to know that just outside that bar, a dining room is ready to serve you one of the best steaks in town.

One of our proudest possessions is a smeared napkin that survived a very long night at Monarck. In a space that once held a crunchy coffeehouse, Francois Safieddine put the smoothest of upscale clubs, whose specialty cocktails include the mojito. While the mojito has become so ubiquitous in recent years that there’s bound to be a Mojitos R Us store opening any day, Monarck does mojitos right. And we have scientific proof, tallied on a napkin as a cranky member of our crew went through Monarck’s half-dozen-strong — emphasis on strong — mojito list and emerged with a great love for everyone in the land. There’s magic in these mojitos…but might we suggest you limit yourself to no more than you can count on one hand?

Fine-dining restaurants and wine bars have sommeliers — the in-house experts and professional drinkers paid to know more than their customers about all things grape-ish. And while the character of sommeliers has changed somewhat in recent years (going from crepe-soled and tuxedoed experts on the elder vintages to young turks prouder of their cellar’s boutique bottles than some dusty old Lafite), so has the job. There are now whiskey experts, Scotch specialists and, at Mezcal, Pablo, the master of tequilas. With a sommelier’s expansive knowledge and the passion of a true believer, Pablo keeps tabs (and copious notes) on the bar’s sixty-some varieties of tequila. He can discuss soil composition and Mexican microclimatology like the most effete wine snob, tell you which villages produce which bottles and, in some cases, which families in those villages are in charge of the distilling, bottling and labeling. Mezcal may not have the broadest or the deepest tequila and mescal list — but it has the best tequila ambassador in Pablo.

Can’t afford a trip to Mexico this year? No problem. Aztec Sol is the next best thing to being there — and an evening at this bar is so cheap you’ll be able to drown your sorrows often. The brainchild of Jose Lara, whose family makes tequila back in the old country, Aztec Sol serves a grande selection of 200-plus tequilas, including wood-aged brands and boutique breeds, that will make you swear off Cuervo for good. Extra points for the authentic atmosphere — love the cement floors — and street-vendor-style food, including two kinds of “pork lining” tacos.

When the margarita was invented, it was an elegant drink — an exquisite combination of great tequila and native juices that was as refreshing as the breeze blowing off the Mexican coast. But when it headed north — no doubt brought back by those spring-breakers as a souvenir, like a social disease — it morphed into a grain-alcohol, apple-juice orgy, with ingredient combinations that made your teeth squeak and your head hurt. Over the last several years, though, bars and restaurants have started restoring the margarita to its rightful recipe and place in the drink pantheon. And nowhere does a margarita reach the heights that it does at Tamayo, where the house marg is made with El Jimador and fresh lime and lemon juices in a simple syrup made on site. When ordered on the rooftop patio, those heights include a terrific view of the mountains, but you’ll want to stick close to your bartender, who, when asked, will bring out fresh chips and two terrific salsas — a green tomatilla and a red cruda — sharing the same pewter bowl.

Mezcal’s kitchen turns out fantastic Tijuana street-corner shrimp cocktails with big, tail-on shrimp floating in a sweet-and-spicy tomato juice with diced chiles, onions and big slices of fresh avocado, served with Saltines (the best part of any great coctel de camarones). It makes sopes with meat, black beans, lettuce, tomatoes and all that good stuff packed inside a crisp, greasy fried shell. The house also runs a late-night happy hour that’s perfect for attracting the city’s party monsters: $1 tacos, a deal that beats the pants off any of those fast-food drive-thru dollar menus. Done in the style of borderlands Mexican vendors, these tacos come double-wrapped in corn tortillas, stuffed with fillings and topped with shredded cabbage. A half-dozen with a couple of cold Coronas? Short of lighting out for Tijuana, there’s simply no better way to end the day.

In many cases — okay, in every case — the most important thing influencing our appreciation of a Mexican joint’s chips and salsa is the environment in which they’re served. The best-tasting chips and salsa on the planet do nothing for us if they’re dished up, say, by the sample ladies at the local Sam’s Club. That’s why we’re such fans of Juanita’s. This Boulder institution is basically a chips-and-salsa kind of bar, the sort of place where you want to collapse into one of the tall-backed booths and stay for days. Making this perfect chips-and-salsa environment even better is the fact that Juanita’s happens to serve an excellent order of crisp, oily chips and a fine, fresh, thin salsa that’s the ideal accompaniment to a couple of cold ones.

The Bamboo Hut’s had a tough year, but it’s coming back strong. For more than twenty years, this oddly named Mexican joint has been one of the town’s best-kept secrets (no phone number, even), serving up great chicharrón burritos and searing green chile (made from peppers grown in Commerce City) to regulars willing to put up with the odd hours and minimal ambience. Then the Hut’s longtime cook left, and it looked like the joint might fall flat. But with new/old talent in the kitchen, the Hut is hot again, and enjoying new popularity with club-hoppers who frequent this end of Larimer. Those newcomers won’t know that while Gina’s cooking up some of the old standards, she’s also made a few changes — including the chips and hotter-than-hot salsa, both freshly made, that arrive on your table fast…and free! Ten-Hut!

Chef Jamey Fader’s menu changes with the seasons at Lola, his hot coastal-Mexican eatery. You can always count on several fish entrees as well as pork and beef, all boasting top-quality ingredients presented in fresh, and refreshing, ways. And now you can count on meaty surprises — barbecued beef! — inside the housemade tamales that are served up on Tamale Tuesdays. Just four bucks buys you a tamale that’s an entire meal, and shows the same care that Fader takes with his more involved items. He’s the masa of our universe.

Little Anita’s is an institution in New Mexico, where its locations spread across the state and its history stretches back thirty years. In the Land of Enchantment, foodies in the know generally consider it a destination of last resort; they respect its longevity yet think of it as a place to stop if you want to kill an afternoon making fun of tourists. But in Denver, where authentic New Mexican fare is harder to find than a virgin bride in Albuquerque, Little Anita’s is a must-stop for sloppy breakfast burritos slathered in either green or red chile. And there’s nothing more ‘Burque than this red chile, a serious, fiery, honey-sweetened red that’s tough to find north of Raton Pass.

Ravenous crowds from all over town flock to La Fiesta for their mid-day meals — and a chance to eat and party hearty. They’re drawn by the convivial vibe of the huge dining room (this was once a Safeway), the friendly family that runs the joint (weekday lunches only) and the huge portions of delectably cheesy, greasy, addictive Colorado-style Mexican food. Topping it off, of course, is a quintessential Colorado-style green chile, packed with pieces of pork, tomatoes, peppers…and heat.

As green chile made its way up from New Mexico to Denver, it became thicker by the mile. And it reached stew-like perfection at Brewery Bar II, a classic dive on Kalamath Street that’s renowned for its giant “Tiny” beers and crunchy chiles rellenos. But those rellenos wouldn’t be nearly as good without the thick layer of green chile that smothers them, a mean green so filled with chunks of tender pork (an ingredient that’s unheard of south of this state’s border) that a few bites are more than enough for a meal. Some like it hot — and Brewery Bar II is the place for them.

Chile importer turned restaurateur Jack Martinez has been verde, verde good to us. Jack-n-Grill turns out a green chile that’s a magical mix of heat and sweet and smoky charred flavor that goes perfectly with everything from burritos to breakfast cereal. This green definitely follows the New Mexican model of diced, whole pods turned into sauce with as little intermediary fussing as possible, eschewing any of those corrupting Colorado influences that turn a proper verde from a dressing into a stew. But while Martinez is a purist, he’s quickly making converts who fill his recently expanded restaurant and spill outside. During chile-roasting season, the house sets up tents and roasters there so that customers can see the start of that great green they’ll enjoy all year long.

El Taco de México doesn’t do much to attract customers. It doesn’t take credit cards. It doesn’t advertise. It doesn’t serve liquor. It doesn’t provide more than a scant few places to sit. And still the customers keep coming — because the one thing this taquería does do is offer the best taste of real Mexico available north of la frontera, served by a crew of ladies tougher and more serious about their business than an entire culinary-school graduating class put together. One of our particular faves (although not one of the house’s more authentic offerings) is the smothered chile-relleno burrito, which is downright addictive. You can’t stop eating it no matter how full you are, and you can’t stop yourself from ordering it again the next time you come in. And return you will.

Simplicity counts, and Mezcal’s kitchen re-creates the simplest of Mexican street fare with its tacos. Owner Jesse Morreale and Sean Yontz (who consults in the kitchen) don’t overreach, don’t try to make a taco anything more than what it should be: an edible envelope stuffed with meat and greens. But the components — soft corn tortillas, grilled meats, fresh salsas and shredded cabbage — are top-quality, and the atmosphere adds all the extra flavor you could want. Sometimes the best things are the most basic — and that rule was never truer than at Mezcal.

The Breakfast King is everything that a rust-belt boy, a trucker’s son, an aficionado of greasy spoons or anyone with a little blue in his collar could hope for in a diner. First and foremost, it’s open 24/7. Second, the waitresses know how to treat a regular and how to make those who aren’t regulars feel like one anyway. Third, the place is ugly in exactly the way you want it to be when sinking into a booth on a Friday at midnight or early on a Sunday morning. With its orange-on-orange color scheme, straight-’70s wood paneling and white-polyester Coffee Angel waitress uniforms, the King is a working-class Neverland for diner junkies — where time has been stopped for the last thirty years, and no one who doesn’t want to grow up ever has to.

You may be someone’s parents now, but you’re still entitled to grown-up good food — and the space to enjoy it. Hillcrest Grill is just the place for you. This neighborhood eatery not only has a decent kids’ menu, but a fabulous children’s play area — a virtual kid corral — where ankle-biters can go when they’re done gnawing on their chicken strips. And while they’re playing, you can get down to the serious work of eating the sort of adult entrees you deserve, everything from pastas and salads to steak and salmon — with big, stiff drinks.

Cafe Jordano doesn’t take reservations, because if it did, there’d never be an open table for the neighbors, the folks who arrive a half-hour before the start of dinner and count heads to make sure they’ll get a seat at that all-important first turn of the dining room. Over the years, we’ve learned the drill at Cafe Jordano and know that very nearly everything this strip-mall trattoria does — from the smallest touch of service to the most labor-intensive entree — is wonderful and well-considered. Perhaps the most surprising thing about the place is how it treats families. It doesn’t matter if you walk through the door at the head of a party of twelve just in from a family reunion or leading a herd of squalling, snot-nosed rugrats: There’s no customer, or group of customers, that the Jordano staff isn’t happy to see.

There’s this game cooks play when they get together. It doesn’t have a name or any rules, but the crux of it is this: You’re dying — fatal disease, on death row, whatever. There’s time for one last meal, anything under the sun. What’s it going to be? No one wants to waste his last night on a tasting menu, wrapped up in a jacket and tie in some murmuring tomb of a fine-dining restaurant. You want something fun, something memorable, something incredible and comforting at the same time. And for us, that’s Luca d’Italia, Frank Bonanno’s amazing Italian dream restaurant where everything is good and nothing is forgettable. Start with an insalata of house-cured meats, a little fresh mozz, some prosciutto, then move on to the pastas — the crab gnocchi, in particular — and meats, like the kitchen’s extraordinary “rabbit three ways.” A meal at Luca would send anyone to the great hereafter with a smile on his face and the smell of truffles on his breath.

The best thing about chef Terri Rippeto’s little restaurant, a longtime favorite of many of Denver’s better chefs, is that it never, ever disappoints. From the entirely seasonal, garden-driven menu — summers full of fruits, winters rich with root vegetables — to the comforting plain-plaster dining room and garden patio in the back, Potager can do no wrong. No matter how many times you’ve eaten here, every visit makes you feel like you’re about to discover something brand-new.

Don’t wait until your boss picks up the tab to try Adega. It’s expensive, but not prohibitively so, and Bryan Moscatello’s smart New American menu has something for just about every income — from small plates and TV dinners at the bar to fantastic tasting menus and a seasonal full menu on the floor. Still, if you happen to be dining on someone else’s card, you can do some real fiscal damage if you try. How about a $500 bottle of grape juice from the wine bible? Better yet, a $1,000 bottle (and Adega stocks a few). And that’s just for starters. Were you to order one of everything on the full menu here — in the process, tasting eighteen dishes that run the gamut from tile fish to antelope steak — the final tab would come in around $350, not counting a cheese course, desserts or wine. Or a tip.

You don’t want to look like you’re trying too hard, but you don’t want to look like you’re not trying hard enough. You want a place that’s swank, but not too swank, someplace that’s classic rather than trendy. Most important, you want a restaurant where you can whip out that brand-new Visa with the $300 limit and not have to worry about it being brought back to the table denied. For all these reasons and many more, you want to take your potential in-laws to Mel’s. Dinner here proves that you know quality when you see it, that you know when it’s right to show off and when it’s not. The service is excellent — personable but never intrusive — and the ambience is 100 percent old-school cool. And even if it turns out that your beloved’s parents can’t stand you, the ever-changing menu cooked nightly by chef Tyler Wiard and crew guarantees that you’ll all be well fed for that uncomfortable ride home.

Yeah, we all know what the third date means, you naughty little monkey. By now you’ve discovered that you like each other enough to spend a meal together without one of you trying to bury a cocktail fork in the other’s back, but you’ve run out of small talk, cute stories and one-liners, so if you don’t get your intended into the sack soon, the two of you are going to have nothing left to talk about. Vesta Dipping Grill is the perfect spot for all the social maneuvering involved in those critical hours leading up to the big moment. First, there’s no sexier dining room in town than the main floor here, with its dim lights, ranks of candles, cozy seating and profusion of iron, fire and leather. Second, Vesta offers plenty of conversational distractions — from making fun of the dateless hipsters slouching at the bar to discussing the innovative offerings of chef Matt Selby. And finally, since short of sharing bodily fluids there’s no more intimate activity than sharing food, Vesta’s grilled meats and dipping sauces are custom-made for getting cozy. So put on your lucky party drawers and make a reservation at Vesta. Because if you can’t get laid after a night here, your next call should be for a Russian mail-order bride.

Second dates are tricky. You’re comfortable enough in each other’s company to make it through an entire meal without lapsing into sulky silence or trying to exit out the bathroom window, but neither of you knows yet how far this thing could go. If you’re interested in going all the way, and you figure the other party is at least interested enough to give you a second chance, then Brix is the ideal setting for date number two. It’s loud and crowded on a good night (making a stealthy escape still a possibility), the service is personable and the food is decidedly lowbrow but excellent. Besides, if the date is a total washout, there are plenty of other prospects crowding the long bar, and nothing makes for a better icebreaker among a certain class of rebound girls (or guys) than a fresh wound from a broken heart and a face full of gin and tonic.

Dating is awkward enough — you might as well do it in a place that gives you the edge. If you’re a fella, what will impress the girl/guy of your dreams? Candles and soft music? Roofies and a prison tattoo? And if you’re of the female persuasion, will your date be confused by any place setting more complicated than a paper napkin and a spork? Deluxe answers all those questions. The vibe is cool and sultry without screaming end-of-date sex. The lights are dim, the seating intimate — but not so cozy that you’ll be on each other’s laps (unless you choose to be). And the retro-California menu provides enough variety — from salsa-spiked oysters to filet of beef — that anyone can find something suited to his or her tastes. Sure, there’s a risk that your date might end up liking the restaurant more than your date likes you (and there’s also a chance that among all the beautiful people gathered here, your date might find a better prospect while you’re hiding in the restroom), but if the relationship is meant to be, there’s no better place to get it started than over a plate of fusion dumplings and a couple of glasses of wine at Deluxe.

You want to celebrate. You want to break open a bottle of bubbly. But you don’t want to bust the bank. Head straight for Hooters, where a skimpily dressed waitress will serve up an order of twenty wings and a bottle of Dom Perignon for a mere $139. That’s a steal: A bottle of Dom alone sells for upwards of $160 at most liquor stores. This date may not be the most romantic, but the right person will appreciate its delightful tackiness.

You know what, Skippy? Mom’s not going to be impressed by your souvenir shot-glass collection or that autographed poster of the Coors Twins hanging over your futon. And while Dad might appreciate the engineering involved in turning your roommate’s fish tank into a giant six-hitter bong, you know he’s not going to like it when you serve him Beefaroni and nachos on paper plates. So if your parental units are coming for a visit and you want to show them how far their progeny has come, just suck it up and make reservations at the Fort. Owner Sam’l P. Arnold has been making his bones (marrow-filled) at this restaurant-cum-attraction of the Old West for forty years. The gorgeous views from the Foothills, the decor (the restaurant sits inside a replica of Bent’s Fort) and the food (bison tongue, bull testicles, gunpowder whiskey) provide more than enough diversion to keep the talk from straying too close to uncomfortable topics like how that philosophy degree they paid for still hasn’t gotten you out of your job selling popcorn and Goobers to the crowds at the local AMC.

Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse is a tower of power. There are diners who are physically powerful (a herd of Broncos, for example), diners who are financially powerful, and diners who are just powerfully hungry and want a huge whack of 100 percent American Midwestern corn-feed beef. And Del Frisco’s has just the right atmosphere for putting all that power into play. It’s decked out like some fantasy country club for high-tone power brokers, with its deep leather couches, gleaming wood paneling, stone fireplace and tuxedoed waiters working the floor. Big money moves through the room every night, sometimes colliding in unusual ways, and at the end of the evening, those chasing the green can retire to the lounge for a glass of port and fire up one of the house’s thirty brands of premium cigars.

Tapas and other small plates are becoming almost de rigueur, now that the Denver dining scene is catching on to the fact that less is sometimes more. And no one does the small-plate thing quite as well as Sean Kelly’s Somethin’ Else. Last year, Kelly dumped the fine-dining approach of Clair de Lune in favor of casual small plates, and since the amuses and appetizers were always the best courses at Clair, it’s no wonder that Somethin Else’s small plates are something special. Kelly and chef de cuisine Seth Black have put a decidedly Mediterranean spin on the original Spanish concept of wine-bar snacking, offering dishes like fried baby artichoke hearts in a thin, cold citric aioli; spicy patatas bravas with a double shot of hot and sweet paprika; and a spread of seafood plates presented so nakedly that every flavor has its chance to shine. These tapas are the tops.

L’Atelier chef/owner Radek Cerny is known for a lot of things. He was one of our biggest celebrity chefs in the days before the phrase “celebrity chef” became more of an insult than a tribute. His personal style of cuisine — the layered sauces, the potato tuilles, the strange juxtapositions of worldly ingredients in predominantly French preparations — was immediately recognizable to anyone who came within a hundred yards of one of his menus. And when things started going badly for him a couple of years ago, he burned out so brightly that the comet’s tail he trailed behind him was unmistakable. But then the man came back last year with L’Atelier and blew everyone out of the water with a board that was like Radek times ten. Every dish, every presentation, is a work of culinary art, and every one arrives on what has now become one of the chef’s new trademarks: the huge plate. Single dessert plates can take up half a table; entrees are served in the center of huge white porcelain canvases smeared with infused oils; tartare comes on what looks like a sheet of ice, feet long and inches wide. And while a lot of this is style for style’s sake, the food on the plates is as good as it gets.

Conventional wisdom says that fifty dollars is about the max Colorado diners are willing to spend on a non-destination dinner for two. Birthdays, anniversaries, Flag Day — at those times, people are willing to part with a little more green, and there are a lot of restaurants willing to take that cash. But say you’ve got a really special occasion on your hands, something deserving of an unparalleled blowout — like beating the rap on that corporate embezzlement charge, or being elected executor of your family’s offshore trust. Where to go then? Zengo, without a doubt, where it’s so easy to drop a couple hundred bucks on dinner, it’s dangerous. What with the antojitos, tiraditos (both fancy words for appetizers), ceviches, Latino-Asian sushi, big plates, little plates, killer desserts and family-style service — which means that every plate is going to be placed in the center of the table and fought over by all in attendance — the temptation to order big, and then to keep ordering, is nearly irresistible. We suggest you go with your instincts and burn through that gold card. If you’ve got the money to spend, there’s no place better to spend it than Zengo.

Chef Jennifer Jasinski has hit the triple bull with her powerhouse new eatery in Larimer Square. One, she’s got a great location — smack in the middle of the hottest restaurant neighborhood in town, which she’s made even hotter. Two, the space (some of which was once part of Josephina’s, some nonexistent) is a great upscale-casual dining room that’s fun to hang out in, no matter how much cash you’re dropping. And three, both the menu and the kitchen executing it are top-notch, turning out excellent handmade pastas, innovative Mediterranean-Italian big plates, and a peerless consommé with duck raviolini. On top of all that, chef Jen has managed to keep prices well within hollering distance of cheap, so that a party of two (provided they’re not drinking heavily) could easily get in and out of the joint for around fifty bucks. Sure, you could spend more if you wanted to (and odds are you will), but no matter how many dead presidents you’re dropping here, one thing’s guaranteed: You’ll leave knowing it was worth every dime.

Just about every fast-food joint in the country now has some kind of dollar menu. A buck for some nasty greaseball cheeseburger. A buck for a few French fries of highly questionable provenance. But true gastronauts have always known that for real dining deals, you head to Blank-town — Chinatown, Koreatown, any of those areas of the city where ethnic immigrants congregate and open restaurants that cater first and foremost to their own communities. In Denver, the best dollar-and-change dinner can be found in Little Russia, just off Leetsdale, where the oddly named California Bakery lays out a spread of traditional piroshkis that cost just $1.19 each. It’s essentially an Iron Curtain version of the Hot Pocket: fried dough, about the size and shape of a doughnut-shop Long John, stuffed with whatever the baker has on hand that day. And at the California Bakery, that stuffing always translates to something delicious.

L&L Hawaiian Barbecue is a Big Island phenomenon — a onetime Honolulu locals-only hangout that hit it big in the late ’80s by offering Hawaiian plate lunches and hatching a plan for franchise world domination. Today, with over ninety locations nationwide (but just one in Colorado), L&L caters to the Big Hungry Boy in all of us with its chicken katsu plate — a portion of panko-fried chicken so large it looks like an entire bird beaten flat, sliced, breaded and fried. Included in the $3.95 price are sides of sweet barbecue sauce, sticky sushi rice and backyard macaroni salad. The menu includes close to twenty more of these giant, picnic-style plate lunches — all fancy enough for dinner, and none of which crack the seven-dollar mark. Be there. Aloha.

The world as we know it can be comfortably broken down into several sets of categories. For example, there are diner people and there are coffeehouse people, crme-brlée people and chocolate-cake people, people who enjoy foie gras and people who would never consider eating the swollen liver of anything. And then there are people who like the Palm, and people who can’t figure out what anyone could possibly see in this chummy, new money/old boys’ club that seems to exist for no other reason than to give the few who still indulge in three-martini business lunches a place to do so, and more abstemious go-getters a place to cut deals around the sodden snoozers. All in all, though, a meal here is quite an event, with deals made on the side of every sirloin salad.

Tamayo may have the two best outdoor patios in the city — one right on Larimer Square, where you can see the dye jobs and hairpieces of pedestrians up close, the other raised up above the throngs, with a fabulous view of the mountains off in the distance. But Tamayo also has a great menu, which means you can spend a couple hours on those patios grazing through the high-end cuisine of Mexico. With three different ceviches (tuna, mahi-mahi and an ever-changing ceviche de la semana), tacos, sopes, Aztec calamari with blood-orange sauce, chips and guac, plus a dozen varieties of margarita and mojito available, it’s a wonder anyone would ever want to leave one of Tamayo’s tables.

When you’re eating out, nothing’s that cheap anymore — but at Jay’s Patio Cafe, you pay for what you get. And when you’re getting dishes with names like Wasabi Roast Beef and Tuna Nicoise, dishes that sound like they should be part of the smarmy spiel of some Cherry Creek garon, you expect to shell out a few euros. Not at Jay’s, though. A delicious bistro sandwich fancy enough to satisfy the most trophy of wives costs less than six bucks, and for a little extra change, you can get half a tasty jerk chicken or a Tuscan veggie panino and a cup of homemade seasonal soup. Patio patrons can even design their own salads for less than six bucks. Jay’s bills itself as a neighborhood bistro, and in this neighborhood, that means it draws both the construction workers working to gentrify it and the potential homeowners wishing they’d hurry up.

Unlike in this country, where ramen is the subsistence cuisine of slackers, potheads and college students, in Japan ramen is a proper meal, one served both on the street and in sit-down ramen restaurants. More than soba, more than udon, the humble ramen noodle is Japan’s most culturally identifiable food — its Big Mac, its mac-and-cheese. But here in Denver, we can enjoy ramen the way it’s meant to be eaten at Oshima Ramen, a small, virtually invisible spot that’s the only American outlet of a major Japanese chain. Seven bucks buys a huge, steaming bowl of ramen noodles (rolled and cut each morning) in pork, chicken or bonito broth made fresh to the exacting standards of Keiji Oshima, founder of the Tokyo-based company. Many of the ingredients come straight from Japan, and every bowl is made to order. For two dollars more, you can get a side of fierce-gingered pork gyoza dumplings with soy-daikon dipping sauce, making for a less-than-ten-dollar meal that should keep you full long past dinnertime.

When you can’t get away from your desk but just can’t stomach another vending-machine lunch, call the Lemon Sisters. For a $10 minimum order, owner Claire Griffin, aka Joy Lemon (there is no sister), will speed over with one of her fresh-made sandwiches, soups or salads. The sandwich menu is solid deli fare, and the soups — particularly the Thai Pumpkin — and salads are so special that they more than justify the cost. And if you can escape the office for an hour, a visit to Lemon Sisters is a refreshing break that lets you smell the scones, lemon bars and other treats baking in the oven and enjoy your lunch sitting at one of the tables in the sunny shop.

Saturday night may not have been all right, but Sunday brunch will make everything better — as long as you eat it at Lola. Seven nights a week, chef Jamey Fader serves up sublime coastal Mexican fare at this South Pearl hot spot, and the margaritas coming out of the bar only add fuel to the fire. But on Sunday, from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., Lola mellows out a bit, making it a great place to gather with friends or just gather strength for the week ahead. The fortification starts with a killer Bloody Mary or Maria, with an assortment of add-ins you choose off a dim sum-like menu. And talk about killer: The chicken-fried steak is amazing, a huge slab of tender meat deep-fried in a crispy batter, slathered with chorizo gravy and resting on a three-bean chile. This may also be the first house capable of making fusion French toast: The “Mexi-Toast” is a Nuevo Latino/Southwestern comfort-food collision of griddled bread stuffed with banana-canela cream cheese and fresh berries and topped with vanilla syrup. More delicate fare includes pork enchiladas, tacos and a simple plate of bacon and eggs. But in Lola’s festive, friendly environment, even that’s a reason to celebrate.

When you want to really tie one on with a little distinction, head for Ellyngton’s. This restaurant in the corner of the Brown Palace is all old-world swank, old-school class and jacket-and-tie top-hat dining, and the champagne brunch on Sundays is particularly glam. The linens are soft, the silverware comfortingly heavy, and the whole room seems to drip gold when things are in full swing. From the tiered champagnes (Domaine Chandon, Mot & Chandon and Dom Perignon) and seafood nestled in ice to the white-hats on the carving stations, this is a brunch like your parents and your grandparents would have saved for very special occasions: elegant, reserved, booze-soaked and, of course, expensive.

Power breakfasts — power anything, really — have become a cliche in this post-crash recession era that we’re struggling through. Gone are the days when businesspeople were flying so high on their own liquid assets and hubris that wasting an hour for breakfast meant wasting an hour that could’ve otherwise been used for making money. But that doesn’t mean the power breakfast has gone the way of the 2000 Nasdaq — just that the power has moved to other locations, and in the process redefined itself. These days, the real power breakfast is the Sunday brunch served at Ristorante Amore, Greg Goldfogel’s small bistro where Cherry Creek’s true elite — the survivors of today’s harsh business climate — meet to eat. Doctors, lawyers, restaurateurs, entrepreneurs and neighbors of every stripe crowd Amore, drawn by its casual ambience and high-grade grub served as though every table were occupied by a captain of industry or a close, personal friend of the house. And while no one is coming here to show off, Amore is the kind of place where business just happens — between friends and over some of the best eggs Benny in town.

The power brokers at Racines can be tough to spot, because they look just like everyone else. But they’re right there — elbows on the tables, with green chile on their khakis and their sleeves rolled up — having breakfast just like the neighbors, the college kids, the pols and the yuppies who surround them every morning at this funky, easygoing bastion of good taste and big plates. Racines offered the top power breakfast for decades until it had to leave its old home on Bannock; it’s amazing anything got done in this town during the many months it was gone. But last spring it came back with a powerful vengeance, in a spot that feels like the old space but looks ready for the next twenty years. When business gets done at Racines — and more serious business gets done here than at any other address in town, except, perhaps, for Dixons, its downtown sibling — it’s of the million-dollar-handshake variety. Casual and chummy, with futures decided over plates of huevos and contracts signed and sealed with coffee rings on the cover sheets.

You’re in Denver on business, and you know that your boss, Mr. Dipstick, is a hardass when it comes to expensing meals out. He doesn’t care what the circumstances are: If you’re not entertaining a client at a business dinner, then you ought to be staying close to your room and snacking off Tic Tacs and pocket lint. But how can he argue when you’re eating breakfast at the restaurant right inside your hotel? At Mirepoix, the fancy restaurant in the fancy new JW Marriott, you can order anything from a simple spread of breakfast pastries to beef-cheek hash with ginger-molasses ketchup topped by a single perfect duck’s egg, thanks to chef Bryan Moscatello, who brought his Adega sensibilities to Cherry Creek. And the Mirepoix kitchen delivers, which means you can have French toast, freshly squeezed orange juice and a couple cups of hot coffee brought up while you sit around in your underwear watching pay-per-view porn on TV. For foodies, though, there’s no better fantasy than thinking about sitting down to a Moscatello meal. Just don’t tell Mr. Dipstick.

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 stock, plus tripe, feet, knuckles, trotters or any other unattractive leftover cut of a cow requiring several hours (or days) of cooking to bring out its more subtle charms. El Taco de México — which serves menudo only on the weekends — knows exactly what it takes to make a pot powerful enough to cure any human ailment, hangovers included. Using a combination of smooth and honeycomb tripe, this menudo is strong and heavily flavored, not too greasy, and spicy enough that you’ll work up a good sweat. Use the limes, chiles and condiments that come in little black-footed bowls on the side to further doctor your cure.

Make no mistake: Devil’s Food is a dangerous place firmly dedicated to helping those with a weakness for the venal wrongs of gluttony to pave their way to hell with waffles. The house serves whipped sweet butter, real maple syrup — thin, nutty and sweet with raw sugars — and real whipped cream with its treacherous Belgians, working from a scratch mix that results in a perfect sweet-and-sour batter. But you’ve been warned: Owner Gerald Shorey is the devil’s own when it comes to pastry work, and even after you’ve finished off one of the kitchen’s huge, hot waffles (and maybe a side of the excellent, thick-cut, honey-cured bacon), you’ll have to walk by a row of bakery cases on your way to the door. It would take an iron-willed saint to not be tempted.

We’ve all seen the five o’clock news stories on Krispy Kreme franchise openings. The block-long lines, the goofy paper hats, that terrible, hypnotic “Hot Doughnuts Now” sign shining down from the windows. We’ve all laughed at the people willing to wait hours for their first dozen, fresh out of the oil at a new store, and vowed that we’d never do that ourselves. But there’s a reason the appearance of any Krispy Kreme outlet is met with the kind of pomp and boosterism usually reserved for presidential whistle-stops and visits by the pope. These are doughnuts the way doughnuts were meant to be, served hot and fresh, all sugar and ethereal lightness. Glossy, bulging jelly-filleds and too-perfect original glazed share space on the short-and-sweet menu with sugar-dusted apple-filleds and chocolate-glazed doughnuts stuffed with fluffy cream. Yes, Krispy Kreme is as bad as any Starbucks outlet, driving the little mom-and-pop neighborhood shops out of business and whatnot, but you know what? Life is tough. These doughnuts aren’t.

Everyone loves doughnuts. But no one loves doughnuts quite as much as Elliott Vigil, owner of Glazed and Confuzed. Vigil knew nothing about doughnuts (except that he loved them) and nothing about the restaurant industry when he opened his shop last year. But that didn’t slow him down. He found an industrial kitchen capable of producing 200 dozen a day, hired a team of expert bakers who could fill the gaps in his technical knowledge, and went to work creating the sort of doughnuts we’d all make if someone just gave us the keys to the factory. He sells eggnog doughnuts and doughnuts studded with crushed bits of candy cane over the holidays, doughnuts injected with caramel, banana fritters, huge glazed doughnuts filled with cherry and chocolate glaze, lemon-drop doughnut holes, and doughnuts made with espresso-shot dough and crusted with crushed espresso beans. Vigil may not know what he’s doing, but we know he’s doing it right.

Pho — that beef-broth-and-rice-noodle soup that’s the most ubiquitous offering in Vietnamese cuisine — is always eaten for breakfast. It’s always eaten for lunch, too, and dinner on the streets of Da Nang, and as a midnight snack by drunken scooter kids in Saigon trying to sober up for the long ride home. But as a breakfast dish, pho is unsurpassed, and no one in town does it better than Pho 79. With one broth and a million different combinations of meats, herbs, spices and noodles, breakfast at Pho 79 can be a never-ending journey through the flavors of the Far East. But by nine in the morning, the Aurora outlet, at least, can be so packed full of hungry neighbors coming from the Japanese-Korean-Viet-Thai neighborhoods surrounding Havana Street that there’s no space left for the casual culinary tourists.

When Bistro Vendome first opened, it tried to do three meals a day, every day. This ambitious plan was soon replaced by a dinner-only schedule that took a lot of pressure off the kitchen and chef Eric Roeder. Still, in a space like this — tucked behind the main street, with a patio that opens onto the only quiet, secluded bit of real estate in Larimer Square — it would have been a sin for Bistro Vendome not to do something while the sun was up. So Friday, Saturday and Sunday brunches were added, and that’s when things really took off. The in-house bakery staff started knocking out excellent pain perdu topped with citrus honey and panier baskets of excellent croissants, buttery brioche and thick-sliced breakfast breads. Coupled with big, French-press pots of black coffee, those pastries remain a great reason to rise and shine.

At A La Tomate — owner Phil Collier’s loving homage to the cuisine of Provence and Toulon — everything is good, but the croissants are the best. Made fresh every day, they are impossibly buttery, with crackly shells and insides like clouds. Each one is a cholesterol hand grenade just waiting to go off — doubly dangerous, since they’re so light, it’s easy to eat two or three. We eat them plain. We eat them with the horns dipped in chocolate. We eat them drizzled with honey or, for the ultimate culinary extreme-sport thrill, split open and smeared with even more butter. And every time we sit down in front of another, it’s as though we’re spitting in the Grim Reaper’s eye. Sure, we know that nothing that tastes this good could possibly be good for you, and there are probably teams of freelance cardiologists cruising up and down 17th Avenue just waiting for regulars to drop dead from pleasure ten steps from the door. But at least when we go out, it will be with smiles on our faces and crumbs on our lapels — evidence of our final meal at A La Tomate.

We brake for Johnson’s Corner. After fifty years, this truck stop got a remodel that made it a shiny examplar of chrome-plate efficiency. But while its look has been updated, this landmark continues to serve the kind of breakfasts that have kept truckers going, and going, for the past fifty years. Nothing the kitchen does is small. It turns out gigantic cinnamon rolls, huge portions of hash-brown potatoes, massive omelettes, enormous plates of corned beef hash and slabs of chicken-fried steak that weigh as much as a brick — meals that have made its diner food rightly famous around the world.

To qualify as a breakfast bar, a place must do one thing — serve breakfast — and do it within a limited time span. In the case of the 20th Street Cafe, that span runs from 6 a.m. until 2:30 p.m. weekdays (7 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Saturdays), and never a minute longer. But if the owners want to knock off just as the late rush is coming to an end, who are we to complain? At 20th Street has been dishing out working-class food for working-class people since 1946. The breakfasts are generous, the coffee always hot, and the chicken-fried steaks a real treat, but what sets this joint apart from all of the other early-morning contenders is the effect of history on this space. Over the years, everything about 20th Street has been worn in and streamlined toward a beautiful conservation of movement. It’s small, so the kitchen is never more than a dozen steps away. The waitresses hang dishrags from the coat tree for ease of access. And there’s nothing in the canon of American diner cuisine that this kitchen isn’t ready to do — and do better — than anyone else in town.

Breakfast is a very subjective thing. There are those who like to speed through the day’s first meal, wolfing down something from the drive-thru on their way to the office, others who prefer to linger over well-brewed tea and fine pastries. Cold pizza makes a good breakfast, as do a pound of hash browns, six eggs and a steak served up by some greasy-spoon hash-slinger. And for some people, there’s nothing finer than that rock-and-roll breakfast of champions: black coffee and cigarettes. But no one can quibble over breakfast at the Original Pancake House, which specializes in breakfast and nothing but. And what breakfasts! The kitchen uses sugar-cured, hickory-smoked ham steaks, 93-score high-fat sauté butter and real whipping cream. It turns out five-egg omelettes, huge mounds of homemade corned beef hash, and a dozen varieties of pancakes (including one studded with bacon). For those with a truly gargantuan appetite, there’s the famous Dutch Baby; for those of more frail constitutions, wonderful Kijafa crepes sauced with bitter Montmorency cherries. No matter what you order, breakfast at the Original Pancake House is a great way to start the day.

Without a doubt, the Mexican people’s greatest gift to their neighbors up north is the breakfast burrito. Forget your pottery, your Octavio Paz and the dulcet tones of the Tijuana Brass. Forget everything you ever knew about Menudo (the boy band, not the breakfast stew). Where would any of us be without the breakfast burrito? How would any of us make it to work without grabbing a breakfast burrito on our way, or make it through a morning of work without knowing there was a breakfast burrito waiting at lunch? Short of splitting the atom and the creation of cable television, no other invention, contrivance or contraption wrought by human hands deserves greater praise. And no breakfast burrito is more praiseworthy than the two-dollar, foil-wrapped walk-away version offered until 11 a.m. at Santiago’s, a homegrown Mexican chain that may soon conquer the world. And rightly so.

Burritos delivered to your door: Is Denver a great city or what? And there’s no better burrito vendor than Marisela Acevedo. “The nice thing is that Marisela is here all the time,” says Dan Hauser, who works in the Wellington E. Webb Municipal Office Building. “She knows who you are, she talks to you about your life. She’s not just selling burritos.” Although the city employees who queue up daily in anticipation of Acevedo’s arrival would no doubt riot if she were to show up without chorizo, chicharrón, and potato, egg and cheese burritos from Milagro, Hauser is on to something. In an increasingly corporate cubicle world, buying your daily burrito from a regular vendor is like talking with the milkman on the front porch. It’s reassuring. Life-affirming. And after you confirm your existence by conversing with Acevedo, her killer burritos will continue the discussion.

When you order oxtail at Caribbean Cuisine Plus, there’s no question what you’re eating. This is the southernmost edible portion of any animal, and with a little Tinker Toy ingenuity and some toothpicks, the big, rough-cut chunks sitting on your plate could probably be reassembled back into a semblance of a tail without too much difficulty. Served in a smoky, greasy, deeply flavorful black sauce powerful enough to dirty up a whole mountain of white rice, this oxtail is a wonderful example of the benefits of nose-to-tail eating. Spoiled Americans, we’ve become used to consuming nothing but the best of any animal used for food — which means we’ve missed out on the culinary joys of peasant eating. But we’ll let the culinary philosophers argue over the societal and spiritual payback of slumming it among the so-called peasant cuisines. If anyone wants our opinion on the matter, we’ll be down at Caribbean Cuisine Plus having a couple of meat pies, maybe a little curried goat, and some oxtail over rice.

When we talk about peasant cuisine these days, the conversations run toward comfort foods with a slightly musty past. No longer do we speak of such offal-centric dishes as French tête de veau or anything involving trotters or English lung pie. These days, peasant foods are more like a Disneyfied version of what we’d like to imagine our forebears having eaten, not so much what they actually did eat. But that’s not the case at Taquería Patzcuaro, where the tacos de cabeza are a straight-from-el-rancho original, involving calf cheek meat (never the most attractive cut) that’s lightly grilled, then set on fresh corn tortillas with a little pico de gallo, a little shredded lettuce, and nothing else. This is peasant food the way it’s supposed to be: something wonderful out of what would normally be waste.

They don’t look like snails when they come to the table. They look like something baked inside a pastry shell. And from the first bite, they don’t taste like you’d expect snails to taste. They taste more like a forestire of mushrooms, more like some dark fowl’s meat — turkey or duck, or something equally gamey. But snails they are, with three competing sauces painted onto the plate. Le Central’s escargots are an excellent introduction to the world of French cuisine, where everything that walks, crawls or slithers is fair game for the pot. And this plate — listed as feuilleté d’escargots on the menu — shows just how great snails can taste when a kitchen is operating straight out of the Michelin playbook of haute French cuisine.

Just staying open for more than three decades is an achievement for any restaurant. But staying open and staying relevant? That’s a real accomplishment. And that’s what Tante Louise — which opened in the old home of the even more venerable Normandy in 1973 — has managed to do. In a newly hot restaurant neighborhood in a town where fine-dining houses open and close so quickly that it’s hard to keep track of the failures, la grande dame of the white-tablecloth scene has the legs to keep up. Sure, Tante has occasionally stumbled. But owner Corky Douglass has always had a good nose for talent; a solid reputation for training tomorrow’s execs and restaurateurs; an understanding that new hands in the galley serve to keep things fresh, often taking even the most staid and traditional kitchens in surprising new directions; and the patience to let his chefs find their own voices. And today, Marlo Hix is speaking loud and clear with her cooking, bringing a little pan-Asian flavor to traditional French fare — and ensuring that Tante Louise can hold her own, running a marathon in a world full of sprinters.

Empress Seafood Restaurant is a classic dim sum joint. It’s huge, it’s entirely impersonal, and almost everything that goes on here happens in a different language. Every dim sum item available — from dumplings to tripe — is listed on one long paper menu, and no matter what you think you ordered, it’s impossible to reconcile that with what eventually makes its way to the table. The exception to this rule is the char siu bao, pork buns that arrive hot and steaming from the kitchen like giant, puffy white softballs filled with chunky, honey-sweetened barbecued pork. The house makes its bun dough once a day, using yesterday’s leftovers as a starter for the new batch, and the result is a light, airy breading, slightly sweet, always soft as eating a cloud. If you’re not up for fried pork intestines or chicken feet in black bean sauce, the Empress’s buns are a perfect choice for even the least adventurous diner.

For reasons we’ll never understand, some people out there are afraid of eating pork belly. Maybe it’s the name: The idea of eating anything’s belly could be a little disturbing. But still, everyone with a tastebud left in their heads should immediately swallow all prejudices against this noble butcher’s cut and get a taste of the wonderful pork-belly entree with smoked bacon, hedgehog mushrooms and apple chutney at Frasca. On a menu filled with nothing but winners by chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson, this plate is singularly amazing. The fat cap of each thick slab of pork belly is rendered in the pan, seared crisp just at the end, and then the beautifully tender meat is sliced and fanned over a pale white smear of horseradish sauce for a real treat by a wickedly talented kitchen. So if the civilians out there continue to eschew the potential wonders of pork belly, that’s fine with us. Frasca is a busy place, and that just means more belly for us.

It seems almost cheap to pass judgment on Frasca, since praising it is like looking over a Monet watercolor, tasting a bottle of 1955 Petrus or listening to Charlie Parker play and saying, “Hey, that’s pretty good.” Of course Frasca is good. It’s so good as to be almost beyond words, having raised the bar to such a height that comparisons with other restaurants are pointless. Frasca exists in a place far removed from the usual definitions of success and failure, even those so nebulous they’re generally applied to love and art. The owners, chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson and master sommelier Bobby Stuckey, both come from the French Laundry — Mecca to modern foodies — and they’ve imprinted the genius of its chef, Thomas Keller, on everything they do here. The staff is flawless, the service more comforting, more personal and more subtly enveloping than any we’ve experienced before. The cooks in the kitchen operate at a level of perfection we would have previously thought unapproachable, serving up the cuisine of Friuli, a region in northern Italy. If there’s anything at all to complain about, it’s that the wait for a prime table at Frasca is now measured in months, not hours. But we’re fine eating at the bar, where seating is first come, first served. We’d eat standing up on the sidewalk if we had to. So, yes, Frasca is good. Frasca is without peer. It’s not just the best new restaurant of the year, but quite possibly where you’ll have the best meal of your life.

How great is it that Denver’s best new neighborhood restaurant is also Denver’s oldest restaurant neighborhood? Once the center of the city’s commercial district, by the ’60s all those great Victorian buildings in the 1400 block of Larimer Street had slid down to skid-row status, and only the intervention of Dana Crawford saved them from destruction. Still, for many years, Larimer Square served primarily as a tourist attraction that locals visited only for seasonal events, with restaurants like the Magic Pan feeding the masses. But no more. Today Larimer Square remains a must-stop for visitors to the city — but it really belongs to those of us who live here, as the heart of Denver’s eating and entertainment life. It holds some of the city’s best restaurants — Rioja, Bistro Vendome, Capital Grille — as well as great bars, happening clubs, cool shops and unbeatable patios, not to mention Ted Turner’s buffaloes. In addition to Crawford, we should also thank Jeff Hermanson and Larimer Square Management Corporation for figuring out how to make the city’s oldest block its best.

Twenty years is a long time to wait for a neighborhood to catch up with you. Since the day they opened their little storefront burrito joint in February 1984, the Aguirre family has worked to make the Highland neighborhood the very best it can be. They’ve fed the less fortunate at Thanksgiving and Christmas, sponsored charity events, spread the gospel of great green chile at fairs around town — and always kept the home fires burning in the back of their restaurant, which has grown along with the Aguirre kids. Today it’s oldest son Oscar who’s often behind the stove, cooking Mama Rosa Linda’s original recipes — and adding his own improvements. Happy birthday, Rosa Linda’s. Here’s to the best neighborhood restaurant — in a neighborhood you’ve helped make so much better.

When the Colorado Legislature lowered the official blood-alcohol-content level to .08 during its 2004 session, restaurateurs feared a financial fallout, worrying that DUI-wary diners would opt to go wineless. So the Colorado Restaurant Association successfully lobbied for a new law that allows diners to take their undrunk wine home with them, recorked and wrapped up, doggie-bag style (and then stashed in your trunk). Colorado is now one of only a handful of states in the nation that allow patrons to stick a cork in it; it’s a progressive variation on the whole leftovers thing we love so much. Now if only the lawmakers would let us take our own bottles into liquor-free eateries…

The All-Star Game may have been a bust for restaurants, but they scored — and scored big — ten days later, when Denver’s first Restaurant Week kicked off. This joint venture of the Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau and, most important, a group of hardworking food-industry types had restaurants across town packed during what’s often the slowest week of the year. The 83 eateries that signed on for the experiment offered special $52.80 (for two) meal deals, giving locals a reason to try new places and a reminder to revisit the old. Please, sir, may we have some more?

The food here may not be haute, but it’s high-quality. And it isn’t dished up by culinary celebrities, but rather by a hardworking group of real service-industry sluggers training for the day when they might be the ones wearing the clean white jackets and the big chef’s hats. For the past eight years, Work Options for Woman has staffed the cafeteria at the Denver Department of Human Services with crews of low-income women struggling to come off welfare and find a place for themselves in the workforce. And under the direction of executive chef Jane Berryman and chef-instructor Wendy Vlach, the program has done just that, placing about thirty women per year in good-paying jobs in kitchens across the city. In terms of training, these women couldn’t be better prepared. Unlike students in those schoolboy Culinary Arts programs, these cooks serve 300 meals a day to city employees, bang out 800 additional meals a couple of times a week for the Food Bank of the Rockies, and in the process receive comprehensive instruction on kitchen safety, sanitation, menu planning, catering and station cooking. If only all rookie cooks were trained so well.

Table 6’s crew has taken everything that the city and the entire country (thanks to a nod from John Mariani in Esquire‘s list of the best new restaurants of 2004) could throw at them, and they’re still on their feet, still cooking, still doing the job. Under the direction of chef Aaron Whitcomb, Table 6 has remained vital, relevant and, more to the point, packed since the day it opened, with crowds and a nationwide buzz. And while this crew has struggled — falling occasionally from the peak of its talents, simply worn down by the never-ending grind of full houses night after night after night — it’s never been put down for the count. “Doing the job” is sometimes the best compliment that can be given to a kitchen operating under stress, meaning everyone there is still slugging it out, still giving every plate their whole heart and full attention. And that’s what Table 6 has done this year. Under pressure that would have made a lesser team crumble and flake, these guys are still in there, still turning out some of the best food the city has to offer.

Mizuna and Luca d’Italia, Frank Bonanno’s two (and counting) houses, exist today almost beyond the bounds of classification. They’re neither casual eateries nor necessarily fine dining. They’re each dedicated to their own style of cuisine — Italian for Luca, French-Mediterranean for Mizuna — but neither work from any kind of standardized canon, depending instead on improvisation and reworking classics into modern interpretations. The crews in both restaurants are fiercely talented and incredibly well trained, and they consistently knock out some of the best plates in the city, night after night, week after week. And at the center of all this is Bonanno, who — after years of working his ass off and paying his dues — is now coming into his own not just as Denver’s best chef, but as an artist, craftsman and businessperson who’s known and respected throughout the industry. For years, Bonanno spent every one of his rare vacations cooking stages (short apprenticeships) at some of the best houses in the country; now line dogs and galley kids from some of the best houses in the country are coming to him, asking for a week, two weeks, a month in his kitchen so that they might learn the tricks and techniques that make his restaurants so good. What’s more, a lot of these cooks are choosing to stay after their stints are complete, joining Bonanno’s crew permanently or asking him to help them find work at Denver’s other top addresses. So for all of this — for his personal talent behind the burners, his dedication to Denver’s ever-struggling scene and his vicious competitive streak, as well as for the way his restaurants have thrived, his reputation traveled, and his crews gone from merely great to a rarefied sort of brilliant smoothness over the past couple of years — Bonanno takes the prize.

For a serious steakhouse, Elway’s has a goofy streak a mile wide running through it. Milk and cookies for dessert, shrimp cocktail mounted over smoking dry ice and, for a real hit of comfort-food nostalgia, do-it-yourself s’mores. This plate is served as a warmed bowl of homemade, melted chocolate ganache, a half-dozen marshmallows, some graham crackers, a long fork and one of those Sterno-fired mini-grills that we’ve only seen used before as the centerpiece of Chinese-restaurant pu-pu platters. With just a few ingredients and implements, this dessert can make a mess unparalleled in the Denver white-tablecloth scene. We’re talking melted marshmallows stuck to the plates, welded onto the tines of the fondue forks and smeared all over the grill, as well as chocolate on the tablecloth and (more than likely) all over the customers. So, please, keep the poor dishwashers in mind when ordering this dessert — maybe kick ’em a couple bucks on the tip.

Okay, the Bugling Bull is not so much a restaurant as a gas station and general store offering canned goods, cold Cokes, fly kits, bug spray, ammunition, hunters’ cammies, radiator fluid and other esoteric sundries of a classic back-road pull-through. And, no, it doesn’t have all those conveniences that most restaurants do — things like tables, a cash register and menus. But every once in a while, when the weather is right and the fellas are feeling frisky, they pull out the box smoker and the big, backyard barbecue grills and spend the day turning out the best ribs, baby backs, burgers and brats any man could ever hope to find while driving around completely lost in the middle of nowhere.

Now safely past the one-year mark, Kabul Kabob still serves the best, cheapest, most amazing Afghan cuisine imaginable. Everything about this slightly ramshackle little neighborhood eatery is wonderful. A party of four can easily get a table any night of the week. The servers are brutally honest about what’s good and what’s not so good in the kitchen. And most of it is very good indeed: The kitchen turns an expert hand to dishes like bulanee kachalu and mantua dumplings filled with ground beef and onions. And your party of four can sample nearly everything on the menu and still get out for less than fifty bucks.

Little India’s particular take on Indian food is an odd mix of regional specialties, all cooked in the tradition of northern Indian cuisine by a Punjabi chef hired by the restaurant’s Punjabi owners, the Malhotra and Baidwan families. The regular menu is long and dignified, showcasing the curries and masalas that even casual eaters of Indian food would recognize, as well as seven kinds of saag; specialties of Madras, Danshak, Bombay and Punjab; and even colonial dishes like the vindaloos from Goa — their brutal heat and strange balance of spices a record of Portuguese occupation, British colonialism and unbroken Indian culinary tradition. For anyone looking for a whirlwind tour of everything available under the variegated blanket of Indian cuisine, Little India’s lunch buffet — with its multiple offerings and ever-changing lineup of spot-on Indian translations — can’t be beat. Here, everything from the most complicated vindaloo to the simplest chutney has the potential to transport a diner to utter bliss.

Here’s how good Denver Woodlands is: You could eat every meal here every day for a week and never realize it’s a vegetarian restaurant. That’s not a knock against the herbivores in the crowd, merely a measure of how superior cuisine can transcend all boundaries and prejudices, and remind even the most dedicated snob that when you’re eating great food, eating is just about eating and doesn’t have to have an agenda. The house specializes in dosa — giant lentil-flour crepes wrapped around a variety of savory ingredients — but the menu certainly doesn’t end there. Instead, it spreads out into a colorful, delectable culinary tour of modern Indian cuisine that draws from across the region, from Bengal to Madras to New Delhi to Bangalore. In addition to being highly authentic, totally vegetarian, very reasonably priced and absolutely delicious, the fare at Denver Woodlands is also certified kosher, making dinner here an honest-to-God sanctified religious experience.

Chef Jon Pell, the guiding force behind Sunflower, continues to put out the best vegetarian fare in the area — and he does it at a restaurant that serves meat. That’s because Sunflower isn’t really a vegetarian restaurant; it just happens to have an award-winning vegetarian chef and a kitchen capable of lavishing as much attention on a carrot stick, broccoli rabe or quivering lump of tofu as it does on the finest steaks and seafoods. The result is a restaurant where vegetarian food doesn’t taste like your standard sticks-and-berries cuisine so popular in the Republic of Boulder, but rather like perfect expressions of whatever vegetable happens to be on the plate. Pell and crew labor mightily to use nothing but the best in organic, free-range and artisanal ingredients — a noble effort that extends even to the organic vodka in the bar’s Bloody Marys.

The best love affairs start in the most surprising ways. A glance, a kiss or — in the case of India’s Restaurant — just one taste of the most delicious, beautiful, shocking boti masala. And from there, things only get better. The dining room, which is decorated as though the owners were determined to shoehorn a thousand years’ worth of proud culture onto the walls, is full of the warm smell of tandoori ovens, and the product of those ovens comes out in huge, heaping plates of meats stained deep red by the spices. Every bread is a comfort, every sauce a careful balance between heat and sweetness and cold. And because the menu is so deep, offering a wide array of the diverse regional cuisines of the subcontinent, your affair with India’s never has to end.

Every visit to Brooks Smokehouse is a two-for-one treat. Not only do Ronald and Louella Brooks serve some of the town’s best BBQ in their odd little spot, but they also dish up fried gator, good Frenchy frogs’ legs, fat boudin sausages and a stellar, tomato-heavy crawfish étouffée. The Brookses originally hail from Louisiana, the cradle of Cajun cooking; lucky for us, they didn’t leave any flavor behind when they brought that fiercely regional cuisine to the Mile High City.

Le Central gets knocked around a lot for things it doesn’t do wrong. People complain about the service, saying it’s snooty — when it’s actually just French. They grumble about long waits on lunch service when the house is full — which really means the place is popular. But the one thing nobody ever seems to complain about is the food: lovingly rendered classic French bistro cuisine. Through it all, the kitchen just keeps turning out giant bowls of mussels and never-ending frites, woody onion soups, fantastic lardon salads, haute classics like escargot and rustic masterpieces, all paired against a good vin ordinaire wine list and served in one of the most casually romantic dining rooms in town. Owner Robert Tournier has weathered a lot in the last couple of years — staff changes, a remodel, the abortive anti-French backlash of 2003 — but Le Central has survived it all and come back stronger than ever.

Since it moved into this stand-alone strip-mall space in 1993, Chez Thuy has been offering history lessons told in food. It’s a casually shabby clearinghouse with menus as thick as a world atlas, each outlining the story of the cuisine of Vietnam, which, in the historical record, reads like a murderous, ill-fated yet oddly fortuitous collision of cultures and a thousand spices. When the French first came to Indochina, they did so with guns, funny hats and an idea of colonial law absolutely antithetical to the Southeast Asian way of life. But their coming also marked one of those strange periods where complementary vectors of food and politics cross, because the French, being French, brought their chef’s knives along with their trench knives, which changed Vietnamese cooking forever. The Vietnamese took to French haute cuisine like nobody’s business, fusing it with their own already highly developed culinary tradition — and the rest is delicious history. Chez Thuy’s menu reflects the mingling of the French and Vietnamese obsessions with food in the best possible way.

When you order Vietnamese coffee at Pho 79, the waiter warns you that it’s strong. When he brings it to the table, he warns you again that the house makes it powerful, and to be careful. And after waiting for the peaceful drip-drip-drip of the tin filter to finish and the hot coffee to bleed down through the ice to the layer of sweetened, condensed milk on the bottom of the glass, you taste it and know that the waiter had only your best interests in mind. This stuff is like drinking sweet, coffee-flavored crack: It’s addictive, it’s cheap, and one glass will pin your eyelids back to the top of your head for twelve hours. So take your waiter’s advice and be careful: This stuff ain’t for amateurs.

Kim Ba’s menu is huge (and most of it in Vietnamese), listing a range of regional dishes that offer a whirlwind tour from the Highlands down to the Delta and back again. Even after many visits, we have yet to find a single thing that we wouldn’t eat again (and again and again). The fat shrimp wrapped in grilled flank steak are fantastic, as is the chicken in chile paste; the fat spring rolls are the best we’ve ever tasted. If the house specializes in anything, it’s marinated and grilled meats, turning out several dozen varieties a day. We’ve eaten Vietnamese food at every possible opportunity for decades and didn’t think we could be shocked by anything coming off the line, but Kim Ba has shown us that there’s a lot more to learn about food in general — and Asian food in particular.

Man cannot live on pig intestines alone. And on those nights when you crave something comfortingly familiar yet still vaguely ethnic, Imperial Chinese Restaurant fits the bill. Although the dining room here is red-dragon-and-white-tablecloth elegant, it attracts a casual crowd of diners looking for the kind of tame, sterile thrills that only Chinese food done Colorado-style can offer. Which means all of the American-Chinese favorites, executed in exemplary fashion: sesame chicken, sweet-and-sour shrimp, Peking duck, and fortune cookies that deliver only good news.

For those addicted to searching out the true flavors of the mysterious East, JJ Chinese Restaurant is a wonderland of sights and smells and tastes — highly specific regional cooking featuring dishes native to chef/ owner Kevin Ho’s home province of Guangdong. For those who prefer something more along the lines of sesame chicken? Well, then JJ can be flat-out freaky, because Ho’s menu offers no fewer than a dozen things that most people don’t even consider food. Snakes, for example. Or capelin (a tiny fish, eaten whole), geoduck and pig intestines. But Ho is a man who cooks without fear, and he doesn’t worry what his non-Guangdongian clientele might think of a plate full of duck feet and spicy bean paste. A meal here is a real adventure in eating.

Tommy’s Thai straddles the border between what Thai cuisine truly is and what those who’ve never had the real thing think Thai cuisine ought to be. As a result, Tommy’s offerings can come off muted, those raw edges of ethnic flavor rubbed smooth by continued refinement for the neighborhood palate. But this dialing down works for the kitchen’s curries, which are irresistible and addictive. They’re still hot where they should be hot, still sweet where they should be sweet, and always milky-smooth with infused coconut milk, but they also have an unexpected depth of flavor. From plain greens to reds and yellows rich with lime leaves and boiled shrimp, to the excellent potato-studded massamun, Tommy’s curries take the crown.

There are those restaurants where you plan to eat — making reservations, picking out the right outfit, booking the babysitter — and those you go to when the urge strikes you. Spicy Basil is all about whim. This small Thai-fusion storefront is just the spot for a quick lunch when you’ve got Asian on the brain, a place that inspires an undeniable hunger for chicken curry and dumplings when you drive by. During the dinner rush, Spicy Basil probably does more take-out business than sit-down, but if you’ve got the time (and it doesn’t take much), the dining room is casual and sunny, the service quick, and the bright Thai flavors at their best and freshest the moment they hit the table.

You know you’ve found a great ethnic restaurant when nothing tastes like anything you’ve tasted before — and it all tastes good. You think you’ve had Thai food before? Not until you’ve had it at Yummy Yummy Tasty Thai, a great restaurant in an awful location. While the menu reads a lot like every other Thai menu in the city, it tastes like a culinary travelogue of chef-owner Pim Fitt’s native Thailand, full of true flavors and a real passion for the notion that to truly know a place, you must first know how its people eat.

There are Japanese restaurants in town that do great sushi, excellent yakitori, fine gyoza, wonderful ramen. But only at Domo do the disparate elements of Japanese cuisine come together in one perfect, country-style restaurant. And only at Domo could you enjoy this cuisine in such a zen-like setting, with beautiful service, tree-stump seats, a charmingly understated dining room and — for those in real need of unruffled tranquility — a Japanese meditation garden in the back. There’s also an Aikido dojo and Japanese cultural center and museum that you’re encouraged to visit while your meal is being prepared. But the wonderful farmhouse-style food, served with half a dozen exotic sides, is the real attraction at Domo.

Over the past twenty years, Sonoda’s has grown to four locations that serve big crowds. It’s clearly making money, and just as clearly pouring it back into buying more fish, since the dining rooms don’t look like they’ve been redecorated since the late ’80s. But as long as Sonoda’s keeps buying tuna, that’s okay with us. Anything you can imagine being done with these tractor-trailers of the deep, Sonoda’s does it: sashimi and tataki, hand rolls made from the collar, flank, belly, loin and tail. In one meal, you can come close to eating an entire fish. The best way to prepare for this nose-to-tail eating experience? With a bowl of the best Japanese soup in town, a powerful and salty broth made of — what else? — bonito.

At last count, Denver had something on the order of 17 billion sushi bars, with a new one opening every 45 seconds. There are strip malls that boast three sushi bars within a hundred paces, and in the ‘burbs, a man can’t chuck a side of bonito without it going straight through the window of a sushi bar that’s opening — or a sushi bar that’s closing to make way for another sushi bar. But unlike the profusion of Starbucks or Wal-Marts out in the hinterlands, the sushi-bar explosion is a positive thing. Particularly if you live in Aurora, near Kassai Sushi. At this pleasant spot, there’s always room for another body at the bar, always something interesting on the menu. And if the sushi chefs aren’t exactly talkative, they’re quick — able to knock out an order of tuna hand rolls faster than you can say “Tekka maki and a bowl of miso, please.” The buck-a-roll sushi happy hour is a killer deal, and the house even delivers. See? The suburbs aren’t entirely uncivilized.

Best o-toro in town, best sea urchin in town, best sushi bar in town, hands down. Sushi Tazu is the semi-subterranean sushi bar where everyone knows your name. If they were ever to make a Japanese version of Cheers, it would be set in a place like Tazu, staffed by a crew like the one that works behind the curving bar here, and filmed live before a studio audience of the sort of dedicated fish freaks who frequent Tazu. This is a sushi bar where you can get to know the guy rolling your fish — and sometimes even have a short conversation before the chef has to run off and wrap up an order of three dozen tekka maki for a bunch of half-drunk Creekers down the way. Unlike bartenders, these sushi chefs aren’t interested in helping you solve your personal problems or discussing last night’s box scores, but if you want to talk about the freshness of the ama ebi or the color of your uni, they’re all ears.

In its grasping quest toward food-town respectability, Denver is now home to several restaurants that have gone so far above and beyond the call, they’re not just the best of their category here, but can compete with restaurants across the country. Exhibit A: Sushi Den. There’s no other sushi restaurant in the Mile High City — and very few in the continental 48 — that can match a place that gets orders flown in daily from the fish markets of Japan, serving slices and hand rolls of fish that, in some cases, were swimming less than 24 hours before they arrived in Denver. Thanks to these deliveries, Sushi Den runs daily sets of specials featuring unusual critters (needlefish, baby tuna) rarely seen on other sushi menus, and even the plainest rolls are made from superior ingredients and by sushi chefs who’ve learned well the lesson that the chef is merely a mode of transport between coolers and customer. This is a kitchen operating without ego — which is amazing, because if anyone has bragging rights to its product, it’s Sushi Den.

The crab cakes at Go Fish Grille are big enough to be a meal. A very delicious meal. They come to the table straight out of the pan, decadently stuffed with quality back-fin crabmeat that’s been left in fat chunks rather than overworked into shreds, mixed lightly with breadcrumbs and not at all with bell peppers or onions or celery (heaven forbid), so the taste of good crab is all you get in every bite. Unless, of course, you order the cakes with one of the dozen-plus sauces listed on the menu, which offer crab fanatics the chance to try a different flavor every night until they’ve exhausted all pairing options and have to start over.

Mac-and-cheese may be the best survivor of the comfort-food trend that swept the food world a few years ago, then mercifully departed. And we’d like to keep Mizuna’s mac-and-cheese around for a long, long time. Butter-soft lobster-claw meat, perfectly poached, comes mounted on pasta robed in smooth mascarpone cheese that’s about as far from out-of-the-box-Kraft as you can get. Baby, it doesn’t get any better than this.

Somethin’ Else, Sean Kelly’s neighborhood tapas joint, takes the fancified crustacean from the rarefied level of special occasions and anniversaries and returns it to everyday eating, where it belongs. Here the lobster tail is served without fanfare alongside all the other great small plates — but at fifteen bucks, this perfectly prepared lobster is a big deal.

We know that Zengo is not so much a seafood restaurant as a restaurant that happens to serve seafood in addition to a lot of other things. But that doesn’t matter. When you’re after great fish, nobody handles the creatures of the briny deep quite like this kitchen — and with a Latino-Asian twist, at that. Whether you order an antojito of tuna cut into perfect slabs and served with a ponzu sauce, a crisp and bitingly fresh ceviche, an entree of whole grouper dusted in ancho chile powder or the best piece of black cod you’ve ever tasted, we guarantee that your meal will go swimmingly at Zengo.

Larry Herz and his crew at Go Fish Grille have created a seafood restaurant with zero pretension but a worthy goal: to fill its coolers and freezers with the finest product that can be wrangled out of suppliers who still think of Denver as a B-grade market (at best). We wouldn’t suggest this as a romantic destination — too many wooden fish sculptures and bright colors for that. And it’s probably not the spot to close a million-dollar business deal — unless the signatories have some sort of weird Finding Nemo fetish. But it’s a place to go with friends, lots of friends, because the one-from-column-A, two-from-column-B, Tom Colicchio-style choose-your-own-adventure menu is deep enough to please even the pickiest, fish-phobic of your friends. For those nights when you’re looking for a fun place to greet and eat, we guarantee that Go Fish Grille is quite a catch.

Everyone knows about the great seafood at McCormick’s: the daily airlifts of fresh fish, the weekly and seasonal specials, the talented kitchen that’s there to put everything together, the terrific dining room and bar spaces tucked into the corner of the classic Oxford Hotel. But one of the lesser-known winners on this decidedly fishy menu are the burgers, which are everything a meat-lovin’ man needs: a soft, chewy bun, fresh fixings and a good-sized patty that doesn’t turn to boot leather, even at medium-well. Making a good burger better yet is the price, if you happen to hit McCormick’s during one of its two daily happy hours. From 3 to 6 p.m. any day, and from 9 to 11 p.m. Sunday through Thursday and 10 p.m. to midnight Friday and Saturday, the burger is offered as one of the dozen-plus items on the $1.95 bar menu.

Maybe it’s the wonderfully pretentious presentation of the lobster bisque, the bowl brought by a soft-footed server who laces the top of the soup with decanted sherry for a fine, sharp, smoky alcohol hit. Or maybe it’s the liquid velvet texture and strong lobster flavor of the bisque itself, an ideal balance between creamy richness and big buttery whacks of lobster that proves that the kitchen knows more than just how to grill a steak. We’re not sure why we love the lobster bisque at the Capital Grille. But we do know that we never miss a chance to order it.

There are some rooms where we like seeing everyone dressed to the nines, restaurants where dignity and formality and pomp feel right. And then there’s the Northwoods Inn. Here, the ragtime piano player wears arm garters and people throw their peanut shells on the floor and eat soup out of a communal pot. Here, the house can serve something on the order of 300 customers at a time, and does so three, sometimes four turns a night, every night. Here, families with kids, old folks, young couples on dates, businessmen, famous faces and absolute nobodies are treated the same — like the walking cash dispensers that they are. But no one ever walked away hungry from the Northwoods Inn. No one ever had anything less than a decent feed at fair prices. And no one even seems to complain about the wait — which can sometimes be upwards of two hours — because here, as at Disneyland, once the fun is over, no one remembers the lines.

No, Big John isn’t flipping tenderloins on the grills in the back, but he does show up every now and then — and he’s nothing but gracious when he does. And, no, the dining room isn’t filled with fat guys in Broncos jerseys and sweatpants. Actually, Elway’s draws the kind of crowd you see at every other high-tone address in Cherry Creek, as well as a good number of steakhouse converts who’ve been wooed away from some of the more established temples of meat. And while the place does have John Elway’s name everlastingly attached to it, it’s a restaurant first and foremost, with a pro team running a pro house where the comfort of their guests and the grub coming out of the galley is more important than anything else. Eateries opened by current and former celebrities have become something of a staple — and a joke — in this brave new post-Planet Hollywood world, but Elway’s is serious about what it does, and does it well.