Best Of Denver® 2006 Winners
Food & Drink
"New American" has come to mean many things. The words are applied to cuisines as varied as the obsessive food geekery of Thomas Keller at the French Laundry, the chem-lab weirdness of molecular gastronomy, and the burgers-and-beer rosters of a thousand neighborhood taverns daring enough to use leaf lettuce rather than iceberg. But what New American really means is a menu written by a chef informed by all of this but not constrained by it; a chef who understands the influences of French and Asian and Mexican and Italian immigrant flavors on American cookery, but is not limited by canonical recitation. New American means America as it is today, not yesterday, not tomorrow. And in Denver, the best definition of New American is offered by Tyler Wiard at Mel's. His ever-changing menu is a season-by-season accounting of what America tastes like and America's tastes.
The very name "Chocolove" sounds like the title of a bad '70s blaxploitation flick. This chocolate is embarrassing to buy, tough to develop a taste for, and every bar comes wrapped with a love poem that's almost unforgivably cheesy. But still, we've got nothing but love for what's coming off the small-batch production line at this Boulder-based company, which reflects founder Tom Moley's dedication to sourcing the best international cocoa and combining it in surprising ways. It may not have been love at first bite, but it was close -- and now we're committed to Chocolove's dark chocolate and candied ginger bar.
Big John doesn't cook at Elway's. Although this Cherry Creek steakhouse boasts Elway's larger-than-life name over its larger-than-life doors, John isn't flipping your burgers, grilling your steaks, assembling your s'mores or bringing your order to the table. Those tasks fall to the excellent kitchen crew and floor staff overseen by manager extraordinaire Tom Moxcey, who works hard to translate Elway's vision for the masses. And while Elway may sign a few autographs when he stops in for a drink, the real draw here is the food: In a city constantly struggling to slough off its meat-and-potatoes reputation, Elway's has not only returned some value to our classic cowtown image, but it's also made the steakhouse model fun again. Score!
There was a time when the West was a new frontier where anything was possible and everything was for sale. It was a time of risk-taking and big gambles, of catastrophe and payoff. And though venture capitalists have taken the place of cowboys, and captains of industry now live where cattle barons once kept their herds, that Wild West spirit is still alive at Vesta Dipping Grill, where chef Matt Selby keeps showing that any damn fool idea can work, and that sometimes, any damn fool idea will. The "dipping grill" concept (prepared meats and seafoods, served with a choice of thirty or more sauces) was both innovative and brilliant when he and Josh Wolkon launched Vesta a decade ago, and both descriptions still apply. The concept (often copied, almost never well) has been kept fresh by constant tinkering with both menu and preparation, and rewarded by a posse of wildly loyal fans.
Over the past seventy-odd years, few modern influences have slipped into Bonnie Brae Tavern to mess up the place. Since they opened the onetime roadhouse right across the street from the headquarters of the Denver Temperance League in 1934, members of the Dire family may have slapped on a few coats of paint and changed some menu items, but otherwise they've left well enough alone. And so today the restaurant is like a culinary time capsule under the submarine glow of lights that have been shining down on the same tables and turquoise vinyl booths, the same beer signs and aging regulars, for generations. The food is American Classic -- pot roasts and T-bones, mac-and-cheese and burgers and fries -- but with a twist: Bonnie Brae was one of the first spots in town to offer pizza, back when the dish was still an exotic novelty rather than a trite American mainstay. Don't mess with success.
Founded by the same guys -- Angelo and Jim Karagas -- who gave us My Brother's Bar, and now part of the Wynkoop family of restaurants, the Wazee Supper Club has been a favorite destination for Denver's night owls since 1974. The space is classically art-deco, with black-and-white tile floors and a beautiful long bar that's served as a second home for many of Denver's booziest movers, shakers and downtown makers. And while the menu is mostly bar food and American standards (wings, artichoke dip, homemade chili, burgers, sandwiches, stromboli and no fewer than seven salads), it has two standout features. One, the kitchen serves that food until 1 a.m. six days a week, shutting down early (at 11 p.m.) on Sundays. And two, the Wazee makes some of Denver's best pizzas, and makes them late.
Sometimes you really want ricotta pancakes at three in the morning. Sometimes you need a panini-pressed breakfast burrito and a strong cup of coffee. And sometimes all that's required is a plate of cocktail wieners and a Rice Krispies treat. No matter what you're hungering for, there's a good chance that owners Monique Costello and Amy Rosewater will have exactly that -- or something even better -- at Monkey Bean. While the 4 a.m. breakfast is generally the province of the all-night diner or the dismal greasy spoon, Monkey Bean offers quality culinary options for putting a cap on a good night -- or for keeping a bad one from getting worse.
Give and take, back and forth, yin and yang -- Zengo's menu, concept and even its design are structured around the idea of taking something good and pairing it, topping it or mashing it together with something even better. Technically, Zengo bills itself as a Latino-Asian fusion restaurant -- which is strange enough -- but what it really does is take the entire fusion gestalt and push it to its logical conclusion. There's sushi on this menu, but the sushi is a fusion of classical Japanese and nouvelle styles. There are chiles and mother sauces, sesame seeds and hoisin. And each category on the menu -- from the tiraditos, antojitos and dim sum to the noodles, mains and desserts -- is meant for sharing over drinks and good conversation. At its best, Zengo's notion of fusion infuses everything from food to service to seating arrangements. In a crowded field, Zengo is great because it never saw any reason to stop at being just good enough.
A "family-style" restaurant is almost always synonymous with a very, very bad restaurant. Not so with Carmine's on Penn, where gigantic plates and pastas served by the pound receive all the care and attention normally seen only at very fussy, regular-size-plate restaurants. Here, tables groan under deep bowls of linguine with white clam sauce and gigantic platters of pasta Montana with chicken and asparagus drenched in gallons of cream sauce. Carmine's is so popular that there's usually a line and service can suffer, but if you come with a big appetite and are willing to wait, dinner here can be a very fulfilling experience.
In adopting -- and adapting -- the theme of drunken, lazy, artistic Spanish dining, the 9th Door has deliberately painted itself into a very good culinary corner, forcing the kitchen to stay true to the influences of Spanish cuisine and the bar to the ideal of fully tanked Spanish drinking habits. The menu was designed by consulting chef Michel Wahaltere, but after he left last summer, the crew took his concept and ran with it, offering real tapas in a city already awash in small plates. The menu is broken in half -- cold plates on one side, hot ones on the other -- and includes such wonders as cold Spanish potato salad with asparagus and egg; roasted piquillo peppers stuffed with goat cheese, rosemary and Serrano ham; albondigas in tomato gravy; pork brochettes and grilled shrimp marinated in olive oil, garlic and chile piquin. For small plates, these are the tapas the town.
Omakase. That's the magic word at Sushi Sasa: Cook for me. When you say this at the sushi bar, you free chef Wayne Conwell or a member of his talented crew to assemble a unique, adventurous, individual feast (priced at $60, $80 or $120, depending on the number of courses). And once the food arrives, there's no doubt that you're in the hands of a master displaying both classical chops and a wild flood of creativity. Dinner one night could be a pyramid of inside-out and right-side-in maki accented by delicate slips of chile, the best noodle soup you will ever taste, a fan of seared Kobe beef and dried mushroom, fried shrimp heads exploding like a flower from the center of the plate, or one perfect uni hand roll like a sea-urchin ice cream cone. And the next night, the offerings will be completely different -- but just as astounding.
Nine75 -- the original Nine75, soon to be joined by at least two sibling restaurants -- has had some ups and downs since it opened in the former home of Moda. There was a period when the house was struggling to find its niche, a longer period where it was trying to get found by the kind of customers who'd be charmed by chef Troy Guard's smart, freaky, arrogant, sideways Asian-American-European menu of jumped-up comfort foods and straight-genius small plates. And then the customers started coming. Lunches were added, and people grew accustomed to the tragically backward arrangement of the space. And now, finally, Nine75 is in an upswing, with Guard having suddenly crossed from struggling artist to certified success story. With a triumphant James Beard dinner behind him and a lineup of new openings on the horizon, he's taken his rightful place as one of the smartest and most innovative chefs in the city. The only question now is, what comes next?
Viva Burrito Company has zero decor, zero ambience (unless you're really turned on by cement) and is basically just a little red box with a kitchen, but the food coming out of that kitchen is fantastic. Not white-tablecloth fantastic; plastic-silverware-and-paper-napkin fantastic, with a serious "Gimme twenty bucks and I'll show you the real Mexico" vibe. The show starts with Viva's excellent breakfast burrito, which the joint starts serving very early on weekend mornings, when the line at the drive-thru starts winding out into the street and the crowds spill into the parking lot. It's breakfast-burrito pandemonium, a friggin' Benetton ad for Denver's booziest middle demographic. You want fast? There are plenty of Taco Bells open until the wee hours. You want the best? Get in line at Viva.
No wi-fi, no cappuccino, no dress code and no service past 2:30 in the afternoon. That's what makes the 20th Street Cafe our favorite breakfast bar. But the prices -- which top out under the ten-dollar mark -- also make it the best place in Denver for breakfast on the cheap. The venerable cafe isn't fancy, and it doesn't have the most convenient parking in the world, but it does have a good chicken-fried steak, huge omelets, good diner-style coffee with fast refills and a menu that mixes up the best of classic Americana with an interesting take on the Colorado immigrant experience, including fried rice and noodle bowls that call to mind the Japanese war brides who once settled in the area.
Come on, give us one good reason why some cheapjack McBreakfast thing bought from a creepy clown is your favorite way to start the day. Done? Good. Now ditch the drive-thru and get yourself down to Emogene for the breakfast sandwich -- a perfect blend of three scrambled eggs, muenster cheese, frisee and fleur de sel on brioche, all for just $4.25. It's a little more (but totally worth it) to add thick-cut smoked bacon and a cup of cafe au lait to your order, but trust us: One bite of this sandwich and you'll never talk to that stupid clown again.
Soup is good food -- especially for breakfast -- and there's no better place to start slurping than Pho 79. There are three local links in this short Vietnamese chain, and any of them is an ideal spot for an eye-opening bowl of hot pho and a cool glass of coffee that delivers like a fix of crystal meth. Our favorite outlet, though, is Aurora's Pho 79, which is cramped, bunkerish and full at nearly all hours with neighbors and wanderers, Vietnamese families and solo adventurers. At the start of each day, servers prepare dozens, maybe hundreds of coffee setups on sheet trays that are kept in a service area just off the kitchen, then devote the rest of their energy to making wonderful pho, the only other thing the restaurant serves, in all its variations, from squeaky meatball bo vien to the more esoteric tripe and tendon options.
Sure, we make fun of the French. We have to, because the French, unlike us Americans, really know how to live. Take breakfast, for example. Here, we're constantly bombarded by ads and doctors telling us to eat our twigs and berries and take our vitamins and make sure to balance our intake of carbs and proteins. Meanwhile, in Paris they just say merde to all that and go ahead and eat cake. Yeah, they call it pastry, but really it's cake. They eat chocolate-dipped croissants and drink tall cafes au lait and smoke their stinking cigarettes, and they laugh at everyone here in the States -- even though we can't hear them as we crunch miserably away on our Grape-Nuts. But at Katherine's, we all can eat like the French, enjoying huge almond croissants dusted with powdered sugar and big spiky things made of meringue, as well as coffee and even real meals -- quiche and omelets and sandwiches and salads. Life is hard and short enough without adding the cruelty of Grape-Nuts.
Brunch at Prima runs from 11 a.m. until 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays, and the very first item on the menu is "Unlimited Prosecco, $8." Seriously, eight bucks. Seriously, unlimited. You walk into this Kevin Taylor restaurant tucked into Hotel Teatro, you sit down (these days, probably only with a reservation), you open your menu, and you demand all the Prosecco you can drink. And when you're done, you hand over eight dollars (for the drinks, at least). That's it. No strings, no hidden charges, no thirty-dollar "glass-handling charge" or anything weird like that. This is the single-best booze deal in the city, and it happens to be offered at a restaurant where you can also get yellowfin tuna crudo, prosciutto with poached eggs and parmesan-roasted asparagus, and Tuaca-spiked French toast to soften the blow of all that bubbly wine.
The Bagel Store sits in a quiet strip mall in the heart of Leetsdale's Little Russia, tucked away in the back tier next to a baby-supply store. It doesn't take plastic, is staffed by young guys who look like the Beastie Boys circa 1986, when License to Ill was first flying off the shelves, and has limited hours, from 6 a.m. until 2 p.m. on the dot. But you'll want to go early, anyway, when you can look right through the doors to the huge bakery in the back and see vats of bagels steaming in their water and guys with big arms and flour in their hair working the dough. You can smell the place doing things right. And you can pick up not only a passable version of an East Coast egg bagel (glossy and yellow on the outside, with a thick-chewy skin and pillowy dough inside), but a half-dozen fantastic salt bagels for less than four bucks. The Bagel Store is as honest they come, and it goes to show that there's no regional specialty you can't find in Denver -- if you look hard enough.
BEST CINNAMON ROLLS
Johnson's Corner I-25 at exit 254 1-970-667-2069
It's comforting to know that some things in the world never change. The sun will rise, the sun will set, and now and forever, Johnson's Corner will make the best cinnamon rolls known to man. Since 1952, this family-owned and -operated truck stop has been serving down-home, King of the Road cuisine to hungry truckers, travelers and wanderers of every description. And while a recent overhaul has rendered it nearly unrecognizable from the Johnson's Corner that generations of road people came to love, the cinnamon rolls -- first prepared by local celebrity Ida May in her home kitchen, and today whipped up from her original recipe by the hundreds every day -- have not changed a bit. They're still fat and sticky, topped with a glaze of sweet-sweet icing, and they still require a fork, a big appetite and several napkins to get through. Keep on rolling.
Frasca's red-pepper jelly, which serves as a condiment on its cheese plates, is amazing. It has a haunting flavor -- sweet, peppery, sharp, astringent and salty all at the same time, tasting vaguely like the egg roll sauce at a good Chinese restaurant, a little like expensive port-wine jelly, and solidly of red bell peppers. Once you start eating it, it's difficult to stop; you want it for breakfast, lunch and dinner, forever. As a kid, chef Lachlan MacKinnon-Patterson ate it on everything from cheese to turkey. He later got the recipe from his grandmother, Betty Mackinnon, and the jelly appeared on the menu the day that Bobby Stuckey and Mackinnon-Patterson opened Frasca last year. And now you can eat it anytime, too, because Frasca sells Grandma's jelly, for $9.95 a jar. That may sound a little steep for nine ounces, but it's not. We'd pay double for just one spoonful.
If your situation is dire, skip the menu and go straight to the bar at Mezcal for a tall glass of the house sangrita mix (a spicy tomato juice, used for making its bloody Mary and other such health-food drinks) and two cans of Pacifico off the short, sweet Mexican beer list. After that, you may actually be recovered enough to appreciate the good pancakes and the huevos divorciados, a rare red-and-green "Christmas" mix of chiles sure to tickle the fancy of any ex-pat New Mexican. There's something magic in that speed-pourer full of sangrita that Mezcal keeps behind the bar, and without it, lazy Sunday mornings in Denver would seem awfully bleak for those of us who haven't seen our own beds since Friday.
Thank God for Fletcher Richards, who, in his wisdom, decided that what the world really needed was another outlet of Lucile's, his insanely popular Boulder breakfast joint. And thank God twice that he decided to open it in Denver. The space he picked is perfect, with lots of floor space, an upstairs lounge, a next-door waiting area and a second-floor balcony that makes the place look like it was lifted right out of the Big Easy and dropped down on Logan Street. The food is all Louisiana-style brunch fare, with killer eggs Benny, chicory coffee, split sausages, thick-cut bacon and beignets dusted with heaps of powdered sugar. Though the new Lucile's has been up and running for just a few months (compared with the decades of history at the original location), you can expect a wait during peak hours. But a Bloody Mary or two will help pass the time until you get a table. And then, it's laissez les bon temps rouler -- until 2 p.m., when the kitchen shuts down for the day.
Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, the Breakfast King is here for you. You, the night owl, the club kid, the insomniac or vampire; you who've never understood how anyone can sleep before the sun comes up. And over all those long nights, the Breakfast King has never forgotten that the first duty of any all-night diner is to sling the hash with no questions asked, keep the coffee coming, and serve the best lemon meringue pie in the city. There are nights here that look like a cattle call for the next Quentin Tarantino flick, others that look like something straight out of Bukowski or Wolfe. But no matter the night and no matter the crowd, the King's kitchen reigns supreme as Denver's late-night breakfast pusher.
Don't get us wrong: Chef Eric Roeder also does a great dinner at Bistro Vendome. He's got that whole hidden-French-bistro thing down, and when Larimer Square gets to looking like the run up to a well-dressed soccer riot on weekend nights, you'd be advised to duck down the little alley that leads to Vendome for a glass of wine and some quiet. But this restaurant is really at its best on the morning after -- any morning after, really --- because that's when Roeder and his crew serve up a truly French French toast called pain perdu, as well as killer breakfast pastries, duck confit and salmon, and big pots of black, French-press coffee. And if a little hair of the chien is required? Vendome is the perfect spot to sip a top-shelf mimosa while trying to remember exactly what you did the night before to deserve a brunch like this.
Everyone at Diana's knows that time is of the essence for the downtown lunch bunch, and they work like champs to deliver. One minute from order to plate -- that seems to be the average since Vic and Diana Katopodis took over the Economy Greek Market four years ago and made it entirely their own. Everything here is short-order, counter-served and available to eat in or take out. Whether you go for a cold sandwich, a double chili cheeseburger, a fantastic gyros sandwich with tzatziki, a chicken-fried steak, the best Greek breakfast burrito in the city (called a breakfast pita here, and served only until 11 a.m.) or just a terrific bowl of avgolemono, this tiny deli turns out a great quick lunch.
In Japan, ramen is a proper meal, eaten sitting down or standing up, on the street and in regular ramen restaurants decorated with big-eyed laughing cartoon children and Day-Glo pandas. More than soba, more than udon, the humble ramen noodle is Japan's most culturally identifiable food -- its Big Mac, its mac-and-cheese. And here in Denver, we're lucky to have the sole American outpost of Oshima Ramen, one of Japan's well-known ramen franchises. The two basic broths -- a blond soy shoyu and a coffee-dark and cloudy miso -- are made every day with fresh pork bone, chicken and bonito stock, the fresh noodles are rolled and cut every morning, and every bowl is made to order. Factor in ingredients imported from Japanese markets, and about twenty soups are available -- everything from a simple Original Ramen to a veggie, tofu and bamboo-shoot ramen, to a seafood ramen, to a double-up super original Oshima Ramen with chaisu, boiled egg and corn. And for an extra two bucks, a plate of "tasty chicken bits" will add a little muscle to any soup in the joint.
Lunch at the Capital Grille doesn't have to be that expensive, but since you're already here, why not whip out that platinum card and make something of your day? Forget the iced tea and have the bar pour you a couple of top-shelf martinis instead. Screw the value-shopper cheeseburger (it can be gotten better and cheaper elsewhere) and go for the serious dry-aged sirloin or sliced filet. Why? Because life is short. Because most days, you eat a sandwich at your desk. Because the Capital Grille makes it worth your while to blow the budget on the excellent lobster bisque with an artistic lace of aged sherry, the wedge salad and maybe even dessert. Invest in the Capital, and we guarantee you'll get in touch with your inner millionaire.
Le Central has always been our escape hatch, our parachute, our emergency exit from the daily grind. And while the art of extended lunching has been largely forgotten in this era of eighty-hour work weeks and over-scheduled everything, it isn't completely lost. Yet. And while you can get in and out of Le Central in a hurry -- bolting down a croque monsieur and chugging a piping-hot bowl of soup a l'oignon, chasing it with a glass of cheap merlot and running for the door before the stains have even dried on your tie -- this bistro is better suited to a long, lingering meal, a romantic departure from the everyday, a lazy afternoon playing hooky while the boss thinks you're in a meeting. Bring a newspaper or some friends, order an extra glass of wine, and enjoy life in the slow lane, loitering over that rabbit served on the bone with coarse mustard, a perfect lardons salad and a bowl of moules au safran. Then prepare to waste the day away.
When the sun is out and the skies are clear, there's no better place to get a taste of the city than the patio outside Cafe Star. First, it's right on Colfax, and Colfax is the heart of Denver, at the center of the eternal battle between retail and residential. The streets are full of neighbors and street creatures, friends and freaks. Meanwhile, in the Star kitchen, chef Rebecca Weitzman is turning out the most beautiful comfort food in the city, a cuisine that both describes the current flavor of Denver and marks its territory in the wider world. From simple sandwiches and salads, to duck and fig pizzettas, to the most decadent chocolate pot de creme anywhere, Cafe Star has elevated the notion of the patio lunch to new heights in the Mile High City.
One day Tom Bird realized that no one in Denver had combined the booming fast-casual restaurant model with the fresh, healthy benefits of Vietnamese cuisine. And so he started Pho Fusion, which serves not just pho, but spring rolls and lettuce wraps, a decent cup of Vietnamese coffee and a spread of popular mutt-Asian entrees. But the four pho offerings are what Pho Fusion does best, and they are what may make Bird's idea take flight. Sitting down for a meal at his creation is like going back in time to the original Chipotle, or even the first McDonald's. Except the food tastes better -- and is better for you.
Grandpa's Burger Haven is a hole-in-the-wall in the truest sense, a spot where you shout your order through an actual hole in the wall. Originally, this was all there was to Grandpa's -- just a little white-and-chrome box with a kitchen inside and a window to shout your order through. Today there's a kind of enclosed solarium where customers can stand out of the wind and rain while they wait -- but there are still no tables, no waiters or waitresses, no plates. Orders are written on the white bags that eventually hold your old-school burgers. There was a time when all hamburger stands were like this; now, almost no hamburger stands are. That's why Grandpa's is such a treasure.
How to put this delicately... There's this one seat on the patio at West End Tavern that some might consider the best seat in the house. At first glance, however, it looks like the worst seat in the house -- closest to the door between the patio and the stairs, closest to the waitress station, on a corner that everyone has to pass on their way anywhere -- but it has a killer view of the waitress trying to serve the table just above. And because the uniforms worn by the West End's coterie of lovely (and smart, strong and empowered, no doubt) servers consist of black tank tops or T-shirts and short khaki skirts, well...you get the picture, right? There aren't many views more impressive than the Flatirons as seen from a Boulder rooftop, but this one comes close.
On a clear day, you can see forever -- or at least to the Continental Divide, stretching out sixty, seventy, a hundred miles away to the north and southwest. From Peaks Lounge, tucked into the 27th floor of the Hyatt Regency Denver, the views are as stunning as the setup of the hotel itself. Grab a table by the window -- if you can get a table at all -- and settle in to watch the traffic fleeing town, the lights coming on in the foothills (and also showing just how far sprawl has gone) and the sunset turning downtown to gold and the mountains to pink. The drinks aren't cheap, but the scenery's worth it.
Last year, Mickey's moved from its decades-old home to a brand-spanking-new spot across the parking lot. And while the joint lost a little bit of historic funk in the process, it didn't lose any of the sirloin that makes it a top cheap-dining destination -- not the cows pictured on the walls, and not those served on the plate. Although the lunch menu offers some solid Italian and Mexican fare, dinner is pretty much all about beef, offered as sirloin smothered in onions and mushrooms, chops, flanks, or a New York strip that clocks in at around $10.95 for choice grade. And that includes a baked potato on the side mounded up with sour cream and a ball of butter, plus an iceberg salad. While the food here isn't the fanciest, no one comes to Mickey's looking for fancy: They come to eat dinner, not to dine.
BEST MOTHERF*&$ING EXPENSIVE DINNER
Opus Restaurant 2575 W. Main St., Littleton 303-703-6787
Chef Michael Long is a genius. Not the stuffy, pocket-protector kind, but more the mad scientist sort. And his laboratory is Opus, where every night he brings his smart, bent vision of New American cuisine to bear on the ever-changing menu. There are lobster chops and gingered chicken, pumpkin flan from the attached patisserie, innovative appetizers, beautiful desserts. And it's amazing what this man can do with peanut butter. This stuff isn't cheap -- but not everything is about low prices and double coupons. And at Opus, you get what you pay for. If you want excellent food, beautifully executed in an environment that puts great cuisine up on the stage where it belongs, make a reservation at Opus and taste the kind of masterpieces that are possible when a kitchen is under the direction of a genius like Long.
BEST MOTHERF*&$ING EXPENSIVE WAY TO END A DINNER
Frasca 1738 Pearl St.
By the time they've made their way through the rest of Frasca's rich menu, diners probably don't notice the hefty price tag attached to the chocolate platter, a "selection of housemade chocolates" tucked among the tarts and cheeses. An excessive and decadent bank-breaking offering of a dozen or so handcrafted candies featuring Valrhona chocolate and every trick in the chocolatier's canon, the chocolate platter costs three times as much as the other desserts. But this one arrives bearing an elegant selection of perfect truffles and filled chocolates, simple molds, and foil-wrapped confections that would look more at home in a jewel box than on a plate. Sitting here in this understated dining room, licking your fingers and eating something as opulent as artisan chocolates, it's easy to forget that you're on Pearl Street, in the heart of the People's Republic of Boulder. But sometimes it's no sin to be bourgeois, and this is one of those times. Is an order worth the price? In a word, yes -- but then, the best of anything almost always is.
Seem weird that a restaurant would offer both the best expensive dessert in the area and the best dinner deal? Well, maybe it would be weird if the restaurant were anyplace but Frasca. This spot is all about juxtaposition, and nowhere is that more clear than on the community nights that Frasca celebrates every Monday, offering a multi-course, prix fixe dinner to everyone who manages to cram inside. The dinners fill up quick, but that's no surprise when just $35 buys you a meal at one of the best restaurants in the country, featuring such largesse as the house's stellar pork belly and glazed carrots, Yukon potato agnolotti with maitake mushrooms, and vanilla ice cream with poached tart cherries. Sign up fast -- and count yourself fortunate that partners Bobby Stuckey and chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson are rare top-tier food celebrities who've never forgotten that their primary duty is to feed the people, not their own egos or bank accounts.
Spam is a funny thing. So maligned, so wrongly identified with trailer parks and camping trips gone horribly wrong, this pink and quivering loaf of tinned meat has taken some serious hits over the years. And yet like sweetened condensed milk and processed rice pudding, it's also become inextricably linked with certain cuisines where its existence sometimes made the difference between life and death for those living in places geographically cut off from traditional supply lines. In Hawaii today, Spam is a perfectly integrated element of the food culture -- an indispensable, easily stored source of protein that reaches its peak in musubi: a slab of pan-fried Spam laid over a fist-sized ball of sticky sushi rice and tied in place with an artful ribbon of black nori. And thanks to the recent sprouting of the Palm Tree Grill in Aurora, you, too, can now cram some Spam on this section of the mainland.
Rioja is not a cheap restaurant, by any means, but it offers two of the best meals in the city for under twenty bucks each. The first is the Rioja picnic. Just $14.50 buys you a big plate filled with everything necessary to make an antipasto freak smile: Spanish chorizo; shaved, dried duck breast; speck; a little goat cheese; a little gorgonzola; olives and nuts; a bit of truffled fennel salad -- as well as really good bread (you can choose from three kinds, and if you ask nicely, the server will let you try them all). That leaves enough cash for the cheapest glass of wine on the menu, a 2004 Louis Latour Chardonnay d'Ardeche, and a well-deserved tip. The second meal is more complicated: Start with a small plate of the bar's garlic- and citrus-marinated olives, then move on to the baked, housemade mozzarella, wrapped in prosciutto and served on toasted bread with oven-dried tomatoes and olive spread. Finally, ask for a half portion of the artichoke tortelloni, one of the best pasta dishes in the city. Now, hope that you have a little change left from parking, because your tab actually comes out to $21 before tax and tip -- and you'll want to be generous there, because a meal this good is worth much, more more.
Last year, Sam's #3 opened in pretty much the same spot where the original Sam's closed almost fifty years before, and ever since, culture vultures have had a surefire option for gulping a fast dinner before taking in a show at the Denver Performing Arts Complex a block away. Even though the menu is incredibly extensive, offering everything from fried chicken and cheeseburgers to catfish and Sam's original chili, the guys in the kitchen know how to turn and burn their way through a rush, how to get you in and out fast. So the next time you've got tickets for Norma and not much time before the lights go down, give Sam's a try. It's quick, it's close, it's cheap, and the portions are big enough that you'll have enough in your belly to keep you in your seat until the fat lady sings. How do you think she got fat in the first place?
The biggest difference between the original Coral Room in the Highland neighborhood and this new, improved model at Stapleton is how it accommodates that one indispensable accessory of the 21st-century nuclear unit: children. Kids can be the fine-dining kiss of death, so it makes sense that a restaurant designed expressly for upwardly mobile thirty-something families would include space for pint-sized patrons. At the Coral Room, it's an entire room -- almost a third of the total real estate -- separated from the main dining floor and bar by a sliding Japanese-style screen and set with grownup tables all facing a padded, carpeted, vaguely piscine-themed play area called (annoyingly) "The Little Reef," filled with savaged books, broken toys, smudgy kid-sized furnishings and, most important, a TV. Everything about the place -- from the kids' room to the movie nights, the Asian-influenced, nouvelle-inspired cuisine to the everything-by-the-glass wine list, fashionable cocktails and Metropolitan Home decor -- guarantees that both junior and the folks will have a good time without driving the restaurant's other, childless patrons out into the night.
If French is the language of love, then French food is the cuisine of lust -- an entire canon of recipes and preparations that, when done well, can make a lady's panties leap from her body and a gentleman's thoughts turn to committing impure acts of passion in the street. And Z Cuisine does things so very, very well that the menu ought to come with some kind of warning sticker. Even the most socially inept can't help but feel like a man (or woman) of taste and sophistication here. From the chalkboard menu and seriously French wine list to the beautiful, intimate space and wonderfully comforting farmhouse French cuisine done by chef/owner Patrick Dupays, there's no more romantic restaurant in town. Voulez vous couchez avec moi ce soir?
Dad wants steak. Mom wants chicken. Your little sister is on some kind of freaky, fish-only, zero-tolerance diet. And you just want enough whiskey to get you through a meal without strangling anyone or being forced to have another talk about your impending court date. So head to the hills -- specifically, The Fort. Housed in a replica of the original Bent's Fort and offering an unparalleled view of the mountains and the sky, Sam Arnold's cowboys-and-Indians paean to the culinary life of frontiersmen is guaranteed to satisfy everyone's needs. For Dad, there's more meat than at a butcher's counter, including flesh from a variety of unusual animals (or unusual parts of fairly common animals). For Mom, there's a Kit Carson-authentic bowl of chicken soup. For you, there's the house's home-brew whiskey (made with real gunpowder!), and plenty of conversational topics that have nothing to do with Mexico, the police, or exactly what number of prescription back pills constitutes possession with intent. As for your sister? Tell her that Rocky Mountain oysters are actually a kind of shellfish, then try not to laugh when she takes her first bite of balls.
Sex and food are powerful motivators, and no restaurant combines these two things better than Deluxe. There are high-backed banquettes in front, cozy two-tops in the back, leopard-print carpets, dim lights and cool jazz drooling from hidden speakers, all of which combine to showcase chef Dylan Moore's beautiful and overwhelmingly sensuous take on the California Cuisine revolution of the mid-'80s. Presented with a modernist's flair, the menu is arranged by small plates and entrees, with everything meant for sharing, including masa-fried oysters set in individual pho spoons, dabbed with tomato-lime salsa and napped with jalapeno aioli, and spareribs coated in a Chinese five-spice hoisin sauce that will have you licking your fingers -- as well as your date's. And while Deluxe can get crowded, it does take reservations -- which means you and your date can skip the waiting-line chitchat and get down to the serious business of eating. And whatever else comes next.
BEST DINNER DESTINATION
FOR IMPRESSING A BLIND DATE
FOR IMPRESSING A BLIND DATE
Buenos Aires Pizzeria
Mizuna is a restaurant you can love for a lifetime. Ever-changing, impeccably serviced by a thoroughly professional floor staff and as comforting as dinner in your favorite uncle's kitchen, it's a neighborhood place that draws in crowds (and these days, cooks) from across the country, all of them coming to taste the first, best expression of Frank Bonanno's hard work, ingredient obsessiveness and singular talent. Bonanno's crew are less cooks than disciples, banging out brilliant plates with mimeograph precision. From apple beignets like tiny Dolly Madison fruit pies after a semester at charm school, to foie gras, sweetbreads, perfect lamb chops and ungodly rich, buttery and beautiful lobster mac-and-cheese, a meal at Mizuna is always worth the price -- regardless of the final tab.
Maybe you've never tried sea-urchin roe -- a delicacy among the Japanese, a pricey indulgence for hard-core fish-heads here in Denver. Maybe you've never tried toro, the fatty belly of massive tuna that can fetch a higher price than its weight in cocaine on the blood-slick floors of Japanese fish markets. Needlefish? Raw shrimp? Tempura crab in blueberry ponzu sauce? All of that and more is available at Sushi Den -- some of it is available nowhere but Sushi Den -- so this is precisely the place to eat on someone else's platinum card. Why? Because you might not like sea-urchin roe or tuna belly or needlefish, and then you'll want to try something else. Lots of something elses. At Sushi Den, you can order big, order wild and satisfy your curiosity -- and, ultimately, your hunger.
No matter where you find yourself sitting -- at the bar, in the brick-faced dining room, pressed up against the pass rail or lurking in one of the corners -- a solo dinner at Duo is a truly transporting experience. This neighborhood bistro boasts two of Denver's best chefs (John Broening in the kitchen and Yasmin Lozada-Hissom on pastries), but the vibe is informal and convivial, with community tables filled with people actually from the community (the newly hot edge-of-Highland neighborhood) and even a table for one never feeling the least bit lonely. The staff is committed to giving each and every guest an exemplary dining experience, and the delicate mingling of flavors on the artful plates -- from a simple duck leg or slice of venison to a slab of sticky toffee pudding set on a glossy slick of butter-rum sauce -- swells, expanding until it demands, and deserves, all of your concentration. With food this good, service this attentive and a glass of wine off of Duo's approachable list, you'll never feel lonely again.
When you want the best green chile, go to a green-chile expert. And when you're looking for a green-chile expert, Jack-n-Grill's Jack Martinez is your man. Before starting this solidly New Mexican restaurant, Martinez was a chile importer -- a guy who lived and breathed chiles and who has opinions on all of them. For example: "Colorado-style" green chile, with its pasty consistency and chunks of pork, is a poseur. At his restaurant, Martinez serves real New Mexican green chile, a pure distillation of the chile's heat and sweetness, and he serves the stuff with everything -- burritos, enchiladas, tacos, whatever. Hell, bring in a bowl of Wheaties, and Jack (or some member of his extended family) will happily pour some great green chile right over the top -- though you'd probably be better off going with a green-chile breakfast burrito and calling it a day.
Green chile has cult status in this state, and there's no better place to worship the peculiar concoction that is Colorado-style green chile than at CityGrille. Colorado verde is thicker and gooier than New Mexico green, and the fat chunks of pork give it more muscle and depth. While this hometown version might be considered blasphemy in Hatch country, at least CityGrille's kitchen is blaspheming with gusto, turning out a green chile that's roundly flavored, hot, sweet, almost creamy and totally porkerific. Poured over an order of fries, this verde reaches addictive levels that border on narcotic. It just goes to show that nothing in the culinary world was ever harmed by the addition of pork.
Only in Denver will you find an Italian restaurant doing something interesting with New Mexican chiles, and only at Gaetano's will you find "Tasty Treats." This bizarrely Southwestern take on Italian stuffed peppers puts green chiles and ground sausage inside a pastry shell, and gross as that may sound, it's actually quite a tasty treat indeed. When the Wynkoop family of restaurants bought this venerable restaurant from the Smaldone family, the new owners were wise to keep the Tasty Treats, as well as most of the rest of the menu -- and the bulletproof front doors, just in case.
BEST PLACE TO SMELL THE CHILES ROASTING
Nick's Garden Center 2001 S. Chambers Rd., Aurora 303-696-6657
Smell, they say, is the most powerful of all the senses. A smell can trigger memory, inflame passions, evoke emotion and transport us more quickly than any other sense in our biological arsenal. And if there's any smell more indicative of life in the American Southwest than the odor of green chiles roasting in an outdoor drum, we don't know what it is. At Nick's, chile season is greeted each fall with the after-burner roar and the hissing, popping sizzle of bushels of pods going round and round in the big drums, by the creaking of the metal and the deep, rich, spicy, earthy smell of chiles being roasted off fresh in the sunlight. While the roasting here may not be quite the event that it is at some of the stands on Federal, the mingling of that chile smell with the overwhelming odor of all the growing things inside the garden center make Nick's a very easy place to be green.
Once a slew of relatives worked the Mexican joints up and down Larimer Street, turning out the same great, greasy tacos with cookie-cutter efficiency. But family members split off, others moved on, and finally the last, best repository of the secret taco formula is El Toro, a modest joint tucked into an industrial area off of Colorado Boulevard. But there's nothing modest about these tacos. Small corn tortillas are topped with chopped, grilled steak (or chicken or ground beef) and yellow cheese, then fried until everything melds together into one delicious mess. The kitchen adds big slices of avocado, then brings the tacos to the table -- where you just need to add a squirt of homemade hot sauce. So greasy, and so good.
The deep-fried taco is a rarity these days. But Viva Burrito offers them 24/7/365 -- and you don't even have to get out of your car. Order a taco plate at the window, and you get two wholly inauthentic tacos, the corn tortillas fried, wrapped like a fist around lumps of shredded beef that's tender and chewy at the center, crisp and burnt and delicious around the edges. Each taco is greasy, hot, crunchy and stringy all at the same time, cooled by the sides of rice, beans and lettuce that come with every plate.
If something as naturally good as a taco has to get all gussied up, then Troy Guard is the guy you want to do the job. He starts by tearing out the taco's guts, turning it into a wonton, opening it up and stuffing it with white rice and flash-seared ahi tuna and bright chunks of mango -- but he doesn't stop there. No, he warps his inspiration right back to Mexico and mounts four of these little bite-sized masterpieces on a long plate with bright gobs of tomatillo guacamole, then gives them the truly ridiculous name of "#1 ORIGINAL wonton tuna tacos." Sure, they're goofy. Sure, they're derivative and fusioned up the wazoo. But they might also be the best tacos you taste all year.
Big burritos have become big business, the stuff of nationwide chains and wild IPOs. Today you can get your burrito filled with pork from hand-fed pigs and guaranteed-gasless beans, topped with your choice of six exotic salsas and soy sour cream. When a simple burro becomes that complicated, though, it's time to get back to basics. And there's nothing more basic than La Casa de Manual, the second incarnation of a modest Mexican eatery that's been serving Denverites for three generations. Order your wet burrito with beans, order it with beef or order it with both; you'll get a toothsome tortilla folded around refried beans so good that you don't care if you get gas, or tender shredded cow, or both, smothered in a very thin green chile studded with pork. When we say this burrito is the best, we're not kidding: We love it so much that we're willing to forgive Manual's lack of a liquor license.
For generations, the tamal was the humblest expression of Mexican comfort food. But in recent years, with the popularity of all things Mexi-culinary exploding, tamales have been brought out of the cocinas and into the limelight, subjected to all manner of torturous revisions that have done nothing whatsoever to improve on their essential perfection. A bit of meat, a bit of sauce, a corn husk and a masa jacket -- that's all a proper tamal needs. And at Villa Cafe, the tamales -- which are handmade daily -- are just that and nothing more. The masa is soft and flavorful, the tiniest bit sweetly sour, and rolled thin so as not to overwhelm the shredded beef inside, which is braised until tender. The tamal is then topped with its perfect match -- an unusual orange chile that adds tomatoes to a Colorado-style green. This is one kitchen that doesn't feel the need to improve on what's already the best.
Although Frank Bonanno is still tinkering with many things at Milagro, the tortilla soup is already perfect -- a silky puree of fried tortillas and chicken stock, garlic, onions, a hint of tomato so light it barely changes the soup's lovely nut-brown color, and a lace of huitlacoche (Mexico's answer to truffles, which are Bonanno's answer to everything) that gives every other ingredient a solid base to stand on. All told, there are six ingredients, each of them absolutely necessary and working in pure harmony. This soup bowls us over.
It's always a pleasant surprise to find a chain restaurant doing something well -- particularly when it's a local chain like Qdoba, which has long been overshadowed by the success of Chipotle. Using its basic fixings, Qdoba recently added a tortilla soup to its takeout repertoire that's flat-out delicious -- a thick, hearty soup that's essentially a deconstructed taco soaked in a spicy broth. And once the soup has been tailored to your taste, you get to take it home and eat it while sitting on your own couch, in the privacy of your own living room.
It should come as no surprise that Sabor Latino makes the best chips and salsa in town. After all, tortilla chips are the french fries, the bar peanuts, the potato chips of the Southwestern world, and Sabor Latino is Denver's best bulk purveyor of all things Central and South American. This comfortable, quaint neighborhood restaurant does excellent arepas, it does wonderful fish ceviche, it does commendable burritos and tamales and Caribbean platters that you won't find anywhere else. But when we settle into one of the intimate booths, the first thing we look for is the great plate of fresh chips served with a thin, dark, spicy salsa that's more like tomato water and black-bean puree than a standard salsa, but also incredibly addictive.
With excellent, fresh, crispy chips and three fantastic salsas: That's how every meal at Chama begins, and it's how your meal can end, as well, if you politely ask the house to pack a little extra to go. The trio of salsas are perfect in their own right, covering the full spectrum of heat and flavor. There's a cool, green tomatillo that's thin and watery and almost sweet; a thick and blazing-hot habanero that delivers a lot of flavor before the punishing spiciness hits you; and right in the middle, a sweet-hot smoked-chipotle salsa shot with honey that says volumes about the expert control of flavors in the kitchen. And it's all free -- which just goes to show that sometimes the best things in life really are.
The amuse-bouche, though overdone in some places and simply ridiculous in others, is always a sight to behold at Luca d'Italia. Here, Frank Bonanno and his crew use flavors that will no doubt repeat in the coming meal to construct a one-bite masterpiece perfect for putting guests in the proper frame of mind to appreciate the brilliant, complicated simplicity of Luca's wonderful Italian cuisine. Truffled egg salad, slips of marinated octopus -- each one is a tiny jewel-box presentation meant for calibrating the tastebuds and offering a free preview of how Luca works.
We're not sure who concocted the first margarita -- there are various accounts, none conclusive -- but we know that person was a genius. Combine fresh lime juice with a good, 100 percent agave tequila and triple sec, and eureka! Sadly, over the years that original formula has been bastardized, with sweet-and-sour replacing lime juice, and peaches, strawberries and even mangoes getting spun into Slurpee versions. But Chama takes the margarita back to basics, using fresh lime juice (squeezed every day, never frozen), prime tequila and high-quality triple sec that makes for the best house marg we've found in Colorado. And for a few extra coins, the Chama Silver Coin is heaven in a glass.
The classic martini is a thing of beauty, an expression of elegance distilled into a glass bucket of gin and two olives. At the Avenue Grill, the bartenders know exactly what a proper martini is about, and they pour them untainted by modernity or nouvelle gimmicks. Gin, gin, gin and olives is the right formula, with just a kiss of dry vermouth for complexity, poured over ice into a shaker, then stirred or gently swirled (never shaken) before being doled out into an iced martini glass. These days, when it seems that every restaurant in the world is involved in a massive conspiracy to drown the flawlessness of the classic martini in a flood of flavored vodkas, chocolate, fruit juice and Tang, we take comfort in the fact that some bars and bartenders understand that perfection is fucked with only at the peril of the fuckee.
Because there will always be those who can't leave well enough alone, there will always be one place that does wrong better than anyone else. This year, that place is Parallel Seventeen, with its wrongheaded but very right-tasting Vietnamese Coffee Martini. Made of chilled Vietnamese coffee, vanilla Stoli, Kahla and a single dot of sweetened condensed milk lurking in the hollow where stem meets glass, this amazing concoction has become our preferred non-traditional drink for all occasions, both social and professional -- although frankly, after two of these, any occasion becomes social, and after three, it might as well be a slumber party.
There are few experiences more genteel than enjoying cocktails in the Brown Palace Atrium: The space is casual, yet has a well-heeled charm augmented by the tinkling piano, super-comfy seating and a fabulous ceiling eight stories above, complete with skylights and chandeliers. And then the martini cart, covered with elite liqueurs and elegant silver shakers, drifts tableside to mix up a little something for you. The Brown offers cart service during the cocktail hour nightly except on Sunday, with later hours on Fridays and Saturdays, and it's a swell way to start off an evening on the town -- in every sense of the word "swell."
The West End Tavern has that whole notion of backyard-picnic comfort food down. But perhaps its greatest contribution to that laziest of cuisines comes not from the kitchen, but from the bar -- where the tenders will adulterate all your memories of happy summer afternoons by whipping up a killer root beer float using Thomas Kemper small-batch artisan root beer and vanilla ice cream, then hitting it with a long shot of bourbon from off the dozens-deep list. Our favorite? Bulleit, a young, artisan bourbon currently going through something of a renaissance as a craft-brewed liquor. Bulleit carries just enough dirty chocolate flavor to match the spice of Kemper's root beer, and the West End has just the right kind of vibe for kicking back and getting plastered on dessert.
Of all the beer joints in all the towns in all the world, we walked into the Falling Rock Tap House -- and it's a miracle we were ever able to leave. Because this is not just the best beer joint in Denver, but maybe the world. And not just because Falling Rock has at least seventy beers on tap, all "craft brewed, no contract brews or megaswill." And not just because Falling Rock has even more beers in the bottle, ranging from such Colorado brews as Great Divide Wild Raspberry Ale to Belgium's chimay Grand Reserve. No, the reason Falling Rock tops every beer fan's list is because this bar doesn't just care about beer; it cares about the community of beer-lovers, especially in Colorado. And it keeps pouring on the love with special events, including Marty Jones's monthly nights of local music (complete with beer songs). We raise our glasses!
Although Falling Rock can -- and does -- stock beers from around the world, it devotes a good part of its on-tap real estate to Colorado microbrews, showcasing an industry that could be this state's most liquid asset. The lineup changes often and usually includes such noteworthy brews as Avery IPA, Cheshire Cat Arrogant Brit and Left Hand Black Jack Porter. Think globally, drink locally.
What's a brewpub made of? Well, brew and a pub. And Wynkoop wins on both counts. It makes -- and sells on site -- more beer than any other Denver-area brewpub. And there's no question that it's pubbier than the rest. Warm, woody, comfortable and friendly, with a menu full of good food (get the vegetarian chili and have the kitchen add chicken). Plus, it does a lot of things with and for beer. For example, it was one of the few brewpubs in the region that duplicated the kind of beer made in Ben Franklin's time, in honor of his 300th birthday earlier this year; it also has interesting brewers' dinners that match beer with various kinds of food. The Wynkoop was Colorado's first brewpub -- and it remains its best.
We raise our glass to Chama -- technically, Chama Cocina Mexicana y Tequileria -- which takes the last word in its lengthy name seriously. Chama stocks more than 200 varieties of tequila -- some of which we'd never seen north of the Mexican border before -- and its bartenders are happy to instruct you in all the nuances of this agave-based alcohol. Pour it on, Chama.
For three years, Ryan Halbert served up some of the town's best margaritas at Lola, and he was always a font of agave education. He'd take diners on liquid tours of Mexico at Lola's many tequila-tasting dinners, guiding them through the differences between silver, blanco, reposado and anejo styles of 100 percent agave tequila, and making sure that they were still standing at the end of the trip. Lola shut its doors on South Pearl at the end of February and will reopen in Highland in April -- with Ryan once again behind the bar. Mr. Ambassador, we can't wait.
For a few years, Adega -- with its wine wall and booze bible -- always won the battle of the bottles. This year the title goes to Frasca. First, of course, there's the wine list: the canonical roster of bottles and producers and vintages lorded over by sommelier Bobby Stuckey. But a wine list is about more than labels; it's about being able to get the right booze onto the right tables at the right time, and this is where Frasca truly shines. With not one, but two certified master sommeliers on staff (both Stuckey and Nate Ready have gotten their credentials, making Frasca one of only two restaurants in the country with two CMSs in the house), Frasca is a wine-lover's paradise. Don't know what a white Burgundy is? They do. Don't know what grape to pair with a profumato or a plate of frico? They're ready to help. And finally, a winning list is about accessibility, and with Frasca's policy of pouring tajuts (half-glasses) from dozens of wonderful bottles, anyone can access the list again and again without having to take out a second mortgage.
Z Cuisine has two wine lists. The first is a standard roster sketched in looping, handwritten script full of appellations and Chateau de blah-blahs that will defeat anyone without an extensive knowledge of wine and region, not to mention the ability to read French. The second is a chalkboard hung beside the list of the night's fare, showing by-the-glass wine specials and allowing customers (like us) who are embarrassed by our clumsy, ugly butchery of the French language to simply point, grunt and say, "I'll take that one." Using this method, we've had some wonderful Beaujolais nouveaus, as well as some unpronounceable reds and whites from regions we've only ever seen on the Travel Channel. Chef Patrick Dupays never has to worry about pairing wines with his menu, because Z Cuisine is so obsessively Francophilic and bistro-chic that everything matches with everything.
One of the things that makes Brix so charming to certain people -- and perhaps disconcerting to those expecting less nonchalance -- is that the place is so laid-back that it can be hard to tell who's an employee, who's a partner, who's a delivery guy and who's a customer. Brix has a lot of friends-of-the-house, and people just sort of wander in and out from behind the bar, between the tables. And yet if you need anything, there's always someone there. Even a non-snooty server who can explain the inexpensive wine list. No bottle costs more than thirty bucks, but they are all very good bottles -- every label carefully chosen, every glass lovingly poured. Brix styles itself as Cherry Creek's "anti-bistro," a kind of punk-rock middle finger to all that is upper-crust, white-collared and pretentious about the Creek. And we'll drink to that -- while we wait to see if maturity blunts a little of Brix's edge.
Gene Tang loves wine, and if you get a restaurateur who loves wine, odds are you're going to get a restaurant shaped -- and sometimes defined -- by its wine list. But Tang has managed to check some of his more extreme vinous impulses, and over the past few years he's been studying the sommelier's handbook, slowly integrating his wine offerings into the overall gestalt of his restaurant. In the process, 1515 has evolved into an excellent restaurant that just happens to have an award-winning wine list, with many of the best, oldest and most classic bottles kept on the premises, in the new wine room that Tang built upstairs.
For five years, the trailer sitting in the parking lot was the home of Hog Heaven. Owner and pit man Rod Ashby -- a former truck-drivin' man who got his taste for 'cue on the road -- has had the standing location in Bailey for another six. So that's eleven years of cooking barbecue, and in that time, Ashby has learned a thing or two. His barbecue is done in a mutt, Kansas-gone-Southern style with a coastal twist. The ribs are big, deeply smoked, almost black at the edges and pink at the bone; the beef brisket is sliced and served wet; and the chopped pork shoulder is excellent. But the real stars at this shack are the fresh-cut sweet-potato fries, which are crispy, salty and incredibly delicious. One bite and you'll know you're in Hog Heaven.
The kitchen at 240 Union depends heavily on the smarts of its cooks and its mesquite grills -- grills that were a symbol of the California Cuisine "revolution" of the mid-'80s -- and that's appropriate, because a lot of 240 Union's menu reflects both a fierce, sometimes funny intelligence and the slow, natural tempering of the Californian ideals of seasonality, center-plate proteins and locals-only bravado. So on the one hand, you have Colorado lamb chops glazed in apricot mustard, an excellent cioppino, farfalle with bacon and sundried tomatoes, and, occasionally, the world's greatest corndog made out of lobster chunks. And on the other hand, you'll find the most amazing piece of French toast ever, which serves as the base for 240's seared duck breast in peppercorn sauce and sour-cherry jus. It's a simple thing, just a long spear of battered and grilled bread stuffed with goat cheese so that the sweetness and the sourness combine with the sauces to make a flavor so much greater than the sum of their parts. But it's fabulous. French toast: It's not just for breakfast anymore.
How frite it is: At Bistro Vendome, chef Eric Roeder offers three kinds of steak frites -- a classique, an au poivre and a Roquefort. His galley bangs out dozens of orders every night, cutting the spuds, blanching the frites, leaving the thin strips to rest, then dropping them into oil for a fast fry that gives them the ideal hot, crisp exterior. After that, it's just salt and a little dusting of greenery, then straight to the plate for the best frites in town.
There's nothing more soothing than a huge bowl of fresh mussels, perfectly cooked, surrounded by hedgerows of frites fresh from the fryer. Moules et frites is comfort food for the terminally overserved, for those who eat more meals out than they do at home and can appreciate both the vigorous innovation of today's young chefs and the beautiful classicism of certain dishes. In Denver, there's no better place to get a serving of this calming, consoling French masterpiece than at Le Central. Here the moules come in a dozen varieties -- from the simplest beurre blanc to more worldly curry- and saffron-scented styles -- in huge, heaping portions, and accompanied by an endless supply of crispy frites for dunking in the puddle of broth that's left after you've devoured the shellfish.
The small plates at the 9th Door have a lot of big tastes -- and the biggest may be the fried cheese. While we like a nice plate of white-trash mozzarella and canned marinara as much as the next guy, the 9th Door offers a much classier take: deep-fried balls of goat cheese topped with a drizzle of spiced honey. The sweetness of the honey, the earthy funk of the goat, the fact that the cheese has been turned into white lava by its dip in the Fryolator -- it all makes for some damn fine eating. And during happy hour, a plate of the town's best fried cheese runs only two bucks.
We're consistently amazed by the lengths to which some restaurants will go to find the weirdest, funkiest, most hyper-regional cheeses to fill out their boards. There have been cheeses produced only in one tiny region of Italy or France, at one monastery, or by a blind, six-toed virgin who takes her cheese-making directions directly from God. But Duo brings the cheese plate back to basics, relying on six small pieces of perfectly preserved and presented cheeses that never forgo taste for adventurous culinary one-upmanship. The cheeses are balanced like a color wheel, going from mildest to most powerful, and have some common strains that make the arrangement sensible rather than haphazard. On one night a washed cow's-milk cheese will be followed by a goat's-milk of the same variety; on another, three goat cheeses from different producing areas offer three very different goatish flavors. Duo's cheese plate is a perfect end to a perfect meal.
Real pan-fried chicken is a rarity. Making it is labor-intensive, time-consuming, messy and ties up a godawful amount of stove-top real estate in a busy galley. Good pan-fried chicken is even rarer, because there just isn't that much call for it in this part of the country -- and unless you were raised way down south or in Kansas City, you probably don't know good from bad from mediocre, anyway. But take our word for it: The pan-fried chicken served at Castle Cafe is a damn fine version of the classic, skillet-cooked masterpieces that have kept country folk and city slickers with country-fried tastes fat and happy for generations. Castle Cafe serves its bird on the bone, deconstructed into breasts, legs and thighs, on huge platters alongside good mashed potatoes, gravy, corn and bread (but not cornbread). The crust is crackly and peppery, soaked with grease (in a good way) and absolutely delicious in that way that only something done right can be.
Believe it or not, in this age of diet plans and weight-loss drugs, of liposuction and tummy tucks, we still hear from people desperate to know where they can get a good chicken-fried steak. And every time, we tell them to go to the Breakfast King. At any hour of the day or night, the King is ready to whip up an order of the city's best guilty pleasure -- a tough steak, pounded thin, breaded, fried just right, then served hot and slathered in white, peppered country gravy. Potatoes or fries, toast and eggs or mixed vegetables -- none of the stuff on the side matters. What does is that the King's chicken-fried steak stands as a singular example of everything that's great about everything that's bad for you.
The "Hanoi Delights" plate at Sapa is the Vietnamese equivalent of the Chinese pupu platter: a huge sampling of appetizers arranged on one dish and meant for sharing. But like the archetypal pupu platter with its sole pork rib, this plate also features one item destined to inspire bitter rivalries between friends trying to divvy up the bounty. In Sapa's version, this single "fried shrimp" is actually shrimp paste wrapped in a crisp, flaky pastry shell, fried whole like a chimichanga, then cut into pieces. We've seen good friends nearly come to blows over the remaining piece on the plate, and otherwise reasonable people trying to hoard more than their share. The best solution is to order two Hanoi Delights so that everyone can have enough.
Denver is full of dumplings. And not just Chinese pot stickers, but gyoza and shumai, pierogi and momo and samosas and every other ethnic dumpling derivative you can think of. But the best dumplings in town are hidden away in a Lakewood strip mall at Szechuan Chinese. These dumplings are huge and crisp-skinned, stuffed with excellent, slightly gingery pork paste and served six to an order alongside a salty, spicy soy sauce that perfectly complements the plump packages without overwhelming their surprisingly delicate and complex flavor.
Granted, shumai are not technically dumplings -- at least, not by China's definition. But then, Spicy Basil isn't a Chinese restaurant. It's a Thai restaurant that takes a few worldly departures on the menu, one of them leading to the town's best shumai. The kitchen makes these shrimp-and-pork dumplings to order, steaming them off and serving them hot off the line while the skins are still soft and slightly rubbery -- the best way to get them. They're small, no more than a single bite apiece, but these could be the best bites you'll have all year.
The Coral Room is firmly rooted in Asian-urban minimalism -- but it goes over the top with its coconut tempura banana. This dessert is an absolutely deadly fusion of Japanese, Indonesian, French and Caribbean flavors that's so good we had to order a second, just to make sure that our first banana wasn't some kind of freakish mistake. It wasn't. The kitchen takes a banana, dips it in sweetened coconut tempura batter, deep-fries it and then serves it with coconut gelato in a smear of chocolate ganache. The dessert is so damnably habit-forming that it really ought to be classified as a narcotic, and it's certainly the best thing to come out of any restaurant's fryer since that guy who first decided to drop in a Twinkie.
An ad on craigslist brought pastry chef Yasmin Lozada-Hissom to Duo's door. After that, everything has been magic -- including the dessert list. This short, sweet board of intelligent choices draws raves from anyone with a sweet tooth (or any teeth at all) and has made loyal fans willing to wait in long lines for a taste of Lozada-Hissom's beautiful apple tart or her oddly subtle and admirably restrained pistachio nougat shot through with bits of candied nuts and wrapped in a sweet cookie tuille. Lozada-Hissom trained among the best patissieres in the business, and came to Denver with a set of double three-star epaulets given by Ruth Reichl at the New York Times. It's not like they sell those things on the street; you gotta earn 'em. And every day at Duo, Lozada-Hissom proves she's worthy.
The Old Fashioned has held down this corner of West Littleton Boulevard through two generations, beginning with Tom Panzarella and continuing today with Tom and his boy Dave working the counter side by side. When you step inside, every day of those two decades folds around you like a blanket of history. The place does not hide its years, but that patina of age and hard use comes from long service to the community. The Panzarellas have made a lot of pizzas, a lot of daily specials, but the best thing they offer are honest-to-God, authentic, Buffalo-style Sahlen's hot dogs with shaved onions, Weber mustard and a spicy, relish-spiked, red-pepper hot-dog sauce that Tom cooks himself, one pot at a time, in imitation of the sauce used at Ted's Jumbo Red Hots back home in Buffalo, where he grew up.
BEST HOT DOG CART
Biker Jim's Gourmet Dogs 16th and Arapahoe streets
"Biker Jim's Gourmet Dogs": That's the sign hanging from the cart, complete with a laughing, bandanna-wrapped skull that gives the name a little outlaw flavor. The cart is a beauty, too: lots of stainless steel and polished aluminum, twin umbrellas and a full grill. Biker Jim (aka Jim Pittenger) works with his radio playing, surrounded by coolers full of soda and cute, fluffy animals all turned into sausage links. He works in the sun and in the cold. He shows up early and stays late. He gives away free samples to passersby who stop, stunned, when they catch a glimpse of his menu of woodland critters. As far as we know, Pittenger is Denver's only purveyor of authentic Alaskan reindeer sausage. And German white-veal brats. And wild-pheasant sausage. And boar. And while several real restaurants in town sling the occasional buffalo sausage, we're certain that no one else is serving that sausage studded with jalapenos and slicked down with Sriracha sauce, as Jim does at his cart.
When it comes to burgers, Bud's Bar is the winner and still the chomp. It's not much to look at -- a modest country joint catering to neighbors and weekend bikers down from the big city for a little road time. But its burgers are a sight to behold. That's because back in the kitchen, they've spent decades cooking nothing but hamburgers, cheeseburgers and doubles of each, focusing on them until the process became secondary and the product took on dimensions of greatness reaching far beyond simple mastery. Bud's burgers are tender and juicy, served on plain rolls with a minimum of embellishment, and at their best when covered with nothing but cheese and given nothing but your undivided attention.
BEST GREEN-CHILE CHEESEBURGER
Cherry Cricket 2641 E. 2nd Ave. 303-322-7666
The Cherry Cricket makes not only the best green-chile cheeseburger in Denver, but one of the best in the country. Granted, that part of the country where people care about great green-chile cheeseburgers -- or who even know what a green chile is -- is fairly small. But the green-chile cheeseburger is big in the pantheon of immigrant America's most wonderful culinary inventions. At the Cricket, the chiles are properly roasted and cut into long strips that are then laid over the top of melted white cheddar, which is already lying on top of a burger that's pretty good just plain. When ordered mid-rare, the burger arrives bloody and warm, the beefy, salty juices working in concert with the cheese and chile to provide a burger experience unparalleled anywhere outside of New Mexico.
Barbecue is complicated. You've got your Southern-style and your coastal, your K.C. classic with its smoky-sweet sauce and your vinegary Carolina tidewater; there's Texas barbecue that's mostly beef, Midwestern chicken and deep-South hot links. Everyone has a favorite style and a favorite place. But you find the very best barbecue -- from rub to sauce to meat and heat -- in the least likely locations. At the newly legal Bugling Bull Trading Post, for example, a hillbilly, white-trash barbecue brought to us by pit man Mike Frislie. He does chicken and hot dogs, he does baby-backs and country ribs with a pepper-heavy rub, smoke all the way to the bone, and a sauce that's sweet-hot, a little spicy and tasty as hell. He does whatever occurs to him to do that day by the side of Highway 67, working with three box smokers and one drum cooker in the dust-and-gravel parking lot, offering his brilliance for prices so low that it almost feels like stealing when you drive away with the best barbecue around.
BEST BBQ IN A NON-BBQ RESTAURANT
Cuba Libre Bistro and Wine Bar 12684 W. Indore Pl., Littleton 303-904-3707
While there aren't many authentically Cuban dishes at Cuba Libre, the few traditional items made by chef John Daly are dead-on in terms of gut-level flavor and texture. The ropa vieja -- which is also available in a nueva variety -- is made from slow-roasted brisket deeply flavored with smoke, then doused with a thin tomato demi that both mellows and sweetens the brisket, almost like an excellent, watered-down, Deep South 'cue sauce. Because there's no rub, Cuba Libre's barbecue is missing that tanginess and jagged, peppery bass line common to most good American barbecue, but that lack is more than made up for by the standout, peasant quality of the ropa. We're sure that most Cubans have never had lobster ceviche or honey-glazed yucca churros like Daly makes, but one taste of this ropa and they'll feel right at home.
We didn't go looking for barbecue sauce at the new Whole Foods on East Hampden-- but once we found it at the Paradise Barbecue counter, we were hooked. The sauce is haunting, smoky, spicy and sweet all at the same time, just barely thick enough to cling to the meat being dipped in it but never so watery that it becomes a wash. The brick-red color is lovely, the smell intoxicating and stinging, and it's gotten to the point that we'll beg the person working the counter to give us a few little to-go cups so that we can stock our fridge for when we need a fix.
The big draw at Forbidden City is volume. Volume and easy access. Volume, easy access and seriously cheap booze. The bar sells three-buck glasses of chardonnay, margaritas and -- because the crowds always include a lot of first- and second-generation Russian and Eastern European immigrants -- entire bottles of vodka. But even with the hundreds of square feet of food and all the liquor, we come for the golden buns -- those deep-fried, sugar-crusted doughnuts you find only at Chinese buffets and certain Asian bakeries. Forbidden City's version is fantastic: greasy, sweet and crisp, glittering with plain table sugar on the outside, soft as pillowy buttermilk biscuits on the inside. This bun's for you.
Doing excellent bread a mile above sea level is tough; it takes some funny chemistry to make the stuff come out just right. But the bakers at Udi's have the knack, and not just for making bread. Their real contribution was figuring out what to do with the leftovers -- and that's turn it into the best bread pudding we've ever had. Soft, pillowy, honey-sweet but not overwhelmingly so, this single dessert is probably packed with more butter, cream and eggs than any sane person should eat in a week. And yet we'd eat it every night if we could. The cubed bread is soaked in heavy cream, baked until the top goes stiff and golden, then set on a cloud of wonderful creme anglaise. It's so good it should come with a warning label, posted right on the menu alongside this award.
Buffalo isn't cheap, but if you're a fan of these walking buffets of the plains, then go directly to the Fort Trading Company, an offshoot of the Fort restaurant. Sam Arnold has put together a variety of cuts and packages, providing natural, hormone-free, Colorado-raised and free-range buffalo that you can buy and have shipped back home. Although the site also offers elk steaks, quail and some other game meats, buffalo is the focus. You can get it as filets, strips, burger meat and bratwurst, but the roasts -- while pricey at $150 for five pounds of untrimmed tenderloin -- are probably the best deal if you've got a dozen hungry cowboys to feed.
Kris Ferreri grew up in Buffalo, cut his teeth on the two-note cuisine that made Buffalo famous. Chicken wings and pizza, pizza and chicken wings -- that's really all Buffalo has besides the Bills. And now we have the wings and pizza, because Ferreri now runs a joint on Broadway, where he offers Denver an honest taste of the things he knows best. And while the boxy, slightly thicker-than-Brooklyn pies are good, what he does best are the wings -- tender, slathered in just the right kind of sauce when ordered regular, and served to-go in a foil-lined cardboard box that smells like home to anyone who's spent time in the Nickel City.
From top to bottom, the taste of Philly is exactly what Taste of Philly delivers. The little storefront looks like an authentic East Coast operation with its tiny dining room, Eagles pennants and requisite framed pictures of Rocky Balboa. The counter is always crowded, the six tables cluttered with dine-in customers and people waiting for their to-go orders. The cooler right across from the register is packed with cans of birch beer and bottles of black-cherry Wishniak, and there are Tastykakes for sale. So it looks and feels like Philly -- and the food coming out of the cramped kitchen definitely tastes like it. Every sandwich arrives on an Amoroso's roll -- the only kind of roll for a serious kind of sandwich -- and the cheesesteak is the best you'll find outside the City of Brotherly Love.
Pat's #1 is not the best restaurant in the world. The french fries are terrible, the soda machine is sticky, and the help is only occasionally helpful. But none of that matters, because no one makes a better hoagie than this Pat's. The rolls are fantastic, the ingredients fresh and stacked tall, and we're pretty sure they put heroin in the sandwich oil, because that's the only thing that could explain the wickedly powerful cravings we get for their salami sandwich with nothing more than lettuce, oil, salt, pepper and a slice or two of funky provolone. No matter what kind of cold sandwich you want -- from a simple ham-and-cheese hoagie to a stacked Italian with everything -- it's listed on Pat's long menu, and the hoagie made by the freakishly talented galley crew is bound to be the best you've ever gotten your hands on.
Last spring, Amy Vitale left Strings to start Tables, a cozy little spot in Park Hill, with Dustin Barrett. And in the process, the partners moved sandwiches to an entirely new level in this town. Tables' menu recognizes sandwiches for exactly what they should be: transport vehicles for the best ingredients, front-loaded in interesting combinations. So here, a simple turkey sandwich takes on layers of gourmet complexity with the addition of brie and artichoke hearts, fresh tomatoes and handmade herb pesto. Ham and cheese gets a boost from sliced pears, watercress and a smear of apricot jam. And as if great sandwiches weren't enough, Tables recently got a liquor license and has now started offering full dinner service.
Not surprisingly, Buenos Aires Pizzeria is best known for its South American pizzas and, to a lesser extent, its fantastic spread of empanadas. But this spot also offers the best Cuban sandwich we've found outside of the Cuban neighborhoods of Miami. Thick-sliced ham, good Swiss cheese, pickles and mustard on grilled bread -- that's all that constitutes a Cuban. But put together right, the sandwich is so much more, and Buenos Aires does it very right. The bread is larded, pressed and grilled until crisp, melting all the ingredients inside together, and the sandwich is then plated with a side of salty fries that could only be improved if they were served in a twist of wax paper. In Havana.
Big Bill's has great pizzas, calzones and chicken parm sandwiches, as well as the requisite New York mementos hung all over the walls to let everyone know that this is the real deal. But what truly gives Bill's an honest feel of New York's blue-collar latitudes are the Drake's Cakes stocked proudly behind the counter. Just as Tastykakes are key to a Philly cheesesteak joint, the Drake's coffee cakes and Yodels give Big Bill's that extra bump of authenticity, making it an indispensable outpost for any ex-pat New Yorkers doing time in the Mile High.
Although New York is renowned for celebrity hot spots and chef-driven ego-bistros, the delis there offer the truest taste of Manhattan. And here in Denver, that taste is best represented by Deli Tech -- an authentically styled New York deli (right down to the etched skyline and brisk service) that offers everything a proper deli should. There are huge stacked sandwiches filled with pastrami and Swiss, excellent corned beef, bagels and lox, borscht, pickles, latkes and rye bread like you can't get anywhere else in town. Much of the meat is imported from the Carnegie Deli, and the chicken soup alone is enough to transport you right back to the Big Apple.
BEST TASTE OF NEW JERSEY
Somethin' Else 1313 E. 6th Ave. 303-831-1992
Any Denverite who's ever spent time in the Land of Enchantment will tell you that while the New Mexican outposts of Little Anita's are nothing to write home about, our two locations are an indispensable hedge against homesickness for the regional flavors that make Albuquerque and its environs such a foodie hot spot. The blue-corn enchiladas slathered in green chile and topped with a fried egg are right off the menu at the Range in Bernalillo, the red chile a staple of New Mexican cuisine that's rare here, and the sopapillas among the only ones in town done right. And Little Anita's even recognizes the true meaning of Christmas: a plate done with half red, half green chile, in real New Mexico style.
Owner Pemba Sherpa -- a native of Nepal who grew up in the shadow of Everest and made his living as a mountain guide before settling in Colorado -- wanted to create a "traveler's lounge," a place where climbers and adventurers could gather and plan, reminisce and share stories over cold beers and warm butter tea. And he did just that with Sherpa's Adventurers Restaurant -- but he went further, creating a menu that's an adventure in itself. The roster includes momo dumplings and lashi laced with rosewater, thick Nepalese stews and Indian pakoras and samosa and saag -- all less exotic than you might think, and full of recognizable flavors and ethnic preparations that would comfort any traveler. Even if he never leaves a Sherpa's armchair.
When Hector and Maritza Gil took over a former omelet house, they kept breakfast filled with eggs, bacon, potatoes and dollar cups of coffee but added a lunch and dinner menu that reads like a greatest-hits collection of every food standard south of Brownsville and Laredo: bistec encebollado, platanos fritos con crema, fried yucca, carne asada, tortas, Salvadoran-style chicken tamales, fried tilapia. But most folks dropping by this small spot are after pupusas, El Salvador's most recognizable contribution to world culinary culture. Made with flat-grilled cornmeal-flour patties stuffed with anything from pepper-spiked queso to chicharrones and beans, the pupusas come with marinated cabbage, carrot and chile salad (called curtido), as well as a liquid salsa made from stewed tomatoes and chiles. Toss in a cold can of Jumex mango juice from the cooler or perhaps a cold beer, and you've got a quick trip south of the border.
The true measure of a good ethnic restaurant is its ability to not only serve something that no non-native in his right mind would dream of eating, but to make that thing so good that it immediately becomes part of the reluctant gastronaut's gustatory lexicon. And Los Cabos does just that with its chupe de camarones, an unquestionably bizarre soup/stew that combines whole, head-on shrimp, all legs and feelers and sweet, delicate meat like baby lobsters, as well as rice, diced potatoes, streamers of egg white, slivered onion, dense garlic, smoky Hungarian paprika and some other stuff that we wouldn't be able to identify even with a field guide to Peruvian fauna. The soup is full of strange flavors you find yourself chasing toward the bottom of the bowl, and so filling that we've never actually seen the bottom of the bowl.
In the late '70s, American cuisine was in such a sad state that the notion of taking local, seasonal produce and fresh vegetables and grilling them up for dinner was considered absolutely revolutionary. This simple act of rebellion against the staggering heaviness of classicism and the old European canon gave rise to the American food revolution, and Potager continues to carry that flag forward. Chef/owner Teri Rippeto cooks a rigorously seasonal and ever-changing menu of beautiful and perfectly realized dishes. Her command of cuisine is impressive, and her crew is committed to her vision of showcasing the best ingredients in the best possible ways. Although Denver today is packed with bright young chefs doing freaky things with your food, dinner at Potager remains nothing short of revolutionary.
There's no place like home, and there's no taste more reminiscent of home than mashed potatoes. Unfortunately, the creation of these spuds is often sloughed off by cooks who see them as nothing more than a cheap way to fill a plate and a belly. But Rialto Cafe takes this dish seriously and takes great care in making its wonderful, fluffy, smooth and buttery Yukon Gold mashed potatoes, served heavy on the cream and with a few clinging tatters of skin. As a result, this hotel restaurant serves Denver's best taste of home to travelers and locals alike.
Mark Tarbell, owner of the Oven, has won many awards at his various restaurants. And now he's earned another with the thin-crust pie made at the Oven, his very winning restaurant in Belmar. These pizzas aren't traditional, New York-style thin crusts, but rather very rustic, very scratch-built natural pies that just happen to have thin crusts. The kitchen here makes its own everything, from dough to sauce to cheese (including mozzarella and a fantastic smoked ricotta), and infuses it all with a true love and dedication to craft that's sadly lacking in a lot of neighborhood pizza joints these days. And even though Belmar is a very upscale neighborhood, the Oven suits its needs -- and ours -- nicely, packing the place with friends and neighbors every day.
The pizzas aren't just thick-crust at Beniamino's, they're deep-dish. And they're not just deep-dish, but stuffed pizza, the sort made famous by any number of restaurants on Chicago's South Side. Owner Ben Guest knows the difference, because he came straight from the Windy City to Denver, bringing his skills and the proper pans with him. While it may be a little weird that he gets his knowledge from a certain Italian fraternal organization and the man is missing a couple fingers, who are we to argue with genius? One slice -- a meal in itself -- is enough to settle any debate.
If you're looking for a raucous, crowded, family-friendly, suburban Italian restaurant with New York city transit maps, 9/11 memorials and a lot of crazy crap on the walls, Big Bill's is your place. But this is also the best spot in town to get a slice of a serious, New York-style thin-crust pizza -- a gooey, greasy, foldable wedge that doesn't just taste, but also looks and smells, exactly like the kind Brooklyn made famous. The sauce is mild and sweet, the pepperoni thin-cut, the cheese stretchy 'til forever, and the grease -- that most magical of elixirs -- as orange as a traffic cone.
John and Patrick Pool came up with a quirky way to take pizza global at Pizzeria Mundo: They simply name pies after cities (or areas) around the world, then cover them with ostensibly appropriate toppings. The New York, for example, is a fairly straightforward version of the classic Bronx 'za, with cheese, pepperoni, sausage and then a spicy red sauce, one thing that New York pies actually made in New York never have. But then a quick ride on the virtual D-train gets you to Coney Island (home of The Warriors, the Wonder Wheel and the Coney Island hot dog) for a pie covered in chili, chopped onions, sliced all-beef hot dogs, cheddar and mozzarella. The Kennebunkport is done like a lobster bake, with white corn, roasted potatoes, sausage, bechamel and chunks of lobster; the Death Valley version features habanero pepper sauce, rabbit and rattlesnake sausage and nopalito. Go global with a sweet-potato-smeared Jamaican jerk pie or the Kathmandu, with tikka masala sauce, tandoori chicken and roasted onions. All in all, these international pies are out of this world.
Technically, Patsy's isn't in a strip mall -- but it's tucked into a strip of co-op galleries in northwest Denver and embodies all that's great about the strip-mall-Italian experience. First and foremost, it's a neighborhood joint and knows how to take care of its regulars. And some of those regulars have been coming a long time. Patsy's has been making history -- and wonderful homemade pasta -- since 1921, when Chubby Aiello opened the place, named it after one of his daughters and ran it like a clubhouse for his friends and neighbors from across the city. The family dining tradition is so strong here that it survived a change of ownership ten years ago, when Patsy's was sold to Bill Taylor and Cindy Knippel. The new owners wisely kept their meddling to a minimum, making a few changes to the menu and giving the joint a little polish. But today Patsy's looks and feels much as it did in the '20s: The service is friendly, the vibe comfortable, and the meatballs gigantic.
Since the moment it opened two years ago, Luca d'Italia has turned out Denver's best high-end Italian food, no contest. Since its very first day of service, since the first plate hit the rail, Luca has been doing the most overdone cuisine in the food world better, smoother, sharper and with more obsessive precision than anywhere else in town. Even the least of the plates on chef/owner Frank Bonanno's discursive menu -- the pappardelle or the bricked chicken, say -- beats out the competition. And Bonanno's best? Well, Luca's "Rabbit, Three Ways" is a wonder of excess, its mozzarella tasting plate the definition of three-note simplicity, and we're just waiting for him to get his call to appear on Iron Chef so we can watch him school Mario Batali and then do a victory dance around Kitchen Stadium, waving Batali's clogs over his head like a trophy.
Is it possible that a steakhouse could be better than Capital Grille? Cheaper, maybe. Less crowded and clubby, absolutely. But every night, Capital Grille justifies big tabs with little details: the padded tabletops, the great knives, the newspapers on the bar, the sherry in the lobster bisque, the egg in the bearnaise. It does the big things right, too. The steaks are wonderful, always cooked to temp, always presented nakedly and arrogantly in the middle of the plate. The servers are the Delta Force of the food-service world -- better trained and better prepared than anyone else out there, always on the spot wherever there's trouble. The seamless ballet of food and service leaves all the other steakhouses in this steakhouse-heavy city in the dust.
BEST CHEAP STEAKHOUSE
Steakhouse 10 3517 S. Elati St., Englewood 303-789-0911
"Cheap" is a relative term when it comes to steakhouses. A one-man meal at Steakhouse 10 could easily run forty bucks, but the Kallas family piles on the value. Here there's no worrying about customizing plates, or adding pricey sides, because the steaks all come with potato and vegetables included. The Greek influence is an added bonus that shows through in some dishes, like the ubiquitous flaming saganaki, but it never overwhelms the core steakhouse vibe. The service is friendly, the dining room comfortable without being intimidating, and the prices are right on, with entrees topping out at around thirty bucks -- the point at which many other steakhouses start.
Bastien's sugar steak takes the prize -- it's an American classic. But so is Bastien's itself, a steakhouse that's been in constant operation since 1937 and left pretty much untouched since its heyday in the late '60s, making it the ultimate in anti-retro swank and earned cool. If Dino and the boys were ever to roll through town, Bastien's is where they'd hang their hats, knocking back martinis and sidecars in the bar, whooping it up under the cupola and digging into a round of sugar steaks. This steak is exactly what it sounds like -- tender beef glazed in sugar, caramelized against any possible exsanguination when on the grill -- and comes with salad and potato for just $18. Throw in a couple of cold ones, and make a night of it for less than thirty bucks.
If restaurateur, chef and culinary man-about-town Dave Query has a signature spot that captures the evolution of his empire, it's Jax in LoDo. Here, in a retooling of the original Boulder fish house, Query's vision and his attempts to meld the upscale with the down-home come together most smoothly. From the brick walls sketched with graffiti to the big horseshoe bar, from the seating crammed in every which way on the floor to the butcher's paper on the tables, Jax exudes a feeling of casual fun. The moment you walk through the door, you want to loosen your tie, then eat too much, drink too much and definitely stay too long. The day's specials are listed on the chalkboard, but everything on Jax's menu is a keeper. The oysters are particularly good, and a Bloody Mary or three at Sunday brunch is an excellent way to emerge from your own briny deep.
There are moments when you just know you've eaten one of the best somethings of your life -- the best chili dog, the best foie gras, the best what-have-you. From the first bite of a soft-shell crab at Chez Thuy, we knew it was the best we'd eat in our lives -- until we came back and had an even better one. The soft-shell crabs are deep-fried whole, and the beautiful golden batter, just a little spicy, comes crisp out of the oil. Inside that jacket, the shells are chewy, yielding and full of white meat that tastes like what clouds might taste like if they lived at the bottom of the sea. The accompanying nuoc cham is sharp as crystal, bright with flavors, and so astringent that a sniff of it is dizzying, like a toot of model-airplane glue. The only way to eat these crabs is to tear right into them with your hands and strip the meat right out of their fat little bodies with your teeth. Dignified? No. Delicious? You bet.
Wayne Conwell, the chef/owner of Sushi Sasa, is a man obsessed with details. From the precise alignment of a piece of fish on a plate to the shape of a hundred different hand rolls, nothing is too small to warrant his attention. And from his post behind the sushi bar at Sushi Sasa -- his white-on-white-on-white dream of what a great restaurant can be -- no detail escapes him. Conwell sees everyone who comes through the door, sees every plate that passes out of the kitchen, sees the surprised looks on the faces of the happy diners (except those hanging out in the downstairs lounge, of course, which is used as overflow seating when the dining room is full) as they take their first bites of his sushi or his tempura -- the raw and the cooked. This obsession with all the little things makes for a freakish kind of excellence, and also makes Sushi Sasa the new benchmark for sushi restaurants in Denver.
Forget everything else on the menu at Sushi Den. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but if you're walking into a place that has not just the best sushi in Denver but some of the best sushi outside of Japan, why would you want to eat anything else? What sets Sushi Den apart is simple: It's the fish. But actually, it's not so simple -- the way Sushi Den gets that amazing fish is incredibly complicated and took owner Toshi Kizaki years to work out to his satisfaction. You see, much of the fish served here comes straight from the fish markets of Japan, where Toshi's brother goes every day to buy supplies that then are loaded on a plane, flown to Los Angeles, flown to Denver, picked up by Toshi and put on that night's menu. Which means the fish on your plate were swimming in the ocean less than 36 hours before. That kind of sourcing and shipping is expensive, time-consuming -- and totally worth it when you want the best.
The Zen garden at Domo is the ideal spot to sit and consider how lucky you are to live in Denver. Seriously, here you are, smack in the middle of a city smack in the middle of a nation half a world away from the peace and calm of the region that invented this cuisine, eating teriyaki and tonkatsu and miso soup and flying-fish roe and the best, most authentic expression of Japanese country cooking in maybe a thousand miles. It's not enough that Denver has some of the best sushi restaurants in the country. It's not enough that we have a profusion of Japanese restaurants and Japanese fusion restaurants. No, we also have a place that focuses quite specifically on the family-style food of rural, northern Japan and serves it in a Zen garden attached to a Japanese cultural center that's open to the public six days a week. Lucky? That doesn't begin to describe life in Denver.
Kim Ba is one of Denver's oldest Vietnamese restaurants, a shirttail relative of more famous spots on South Federal, and has held down this near-invisible space in a ghost-town strip mall for nearly twenty years. In that time, owner Ba Forde has perfected her menu into a cornucopia of ultra-traditional flavors, reflecting in proper ratio the variety of ethnic influences that have nibbled away at the edges of Vietnamese cuisine for centuries. The green-lip mussels come in a Thai coconut curry sauce. The thit heo kho tieu -- pork cooked in a spicy black-pepper sauce -- is reminiscent of any number of Asian pork barbecue sandwiches. Bo xao dam is beef sauteed in a wine-and-vinegar sauce: a little French, a little Chinese. The vit xao xa ot, duck sauteed with lemongrass, is more French than anything, even in the way it's cut. But then, the French are the only cooks who've managed to mix comfortably with Vietnamese tradition, or to have any real effect on the country's cuisine. A delicious effect, as evidenced by Kim Ba's excellent Vietnamese food.
Using as her inspiration the imperial cuisine of Hue and the family dinners that her mother still cooks on weekends, Mary Nguyen opened Parallel Seventeen just in time to prove that the small-plates fad did not begin and end with the Spanish. Here she's arranged a menu that offers the best of Vietnamese cuisine, designed with a modernist's touch. The banh mi sandwich served whole at lunch is deconstructed at dinner into a dreamy charcuterie plate of pork pate and mousse and smoky char siu. The pho is powerful and fiercely traditional, while the gaufrettes showcase French influences. The space this food is served in displays Nguyen's contemporary sensibilities: It's comfortable, casual, traditional and nouvelle all at the same time, just like her cooking.
BEST THAI RESTAURANT
Yummy Yummy Tasty Thai 13000 E. Colfax Ave., Aurora 720-858-9121
Traditional cuisines are often damaged by the profusion of assimilated knockoffs that surround them. It's sometimes easier for an ethnic restaurant to just go with the flow, dumb down its food and reap the inevitable rewards as timid diners flock in for the sweet curries, the bland rice and the gummy sesame-everything. But give credit to Pim Fitt, owner of Yummy Yummy Tasty Thai, for avoiding that route and instead sticking with Thai cuisine that's as authentic as you can get without a plane ticket and a passport. From deep-fried spinach leaves, unusual soups and blazing hot Thai curries to the gentler pleasures of rice cakes, coconut ice cream and icy bottles of Singha beer, Fitt serves nothing in her tiny, cozy dining room that isn't exactly the way she knows it should be after half a life spent in Thailand -- and the other half spent teaching the rest of us what the first half tasted like.
REALLY CHINESE RESTAURANT
JJ Chinese Restaurant 1048 S. Federal Blvd. 303-934-8888
JJ Chinese isn't much to look at, but all the scenery you need is right on your plate. This little storefront cooks mostly for the Chinese immigrant community looking for a taste of what it considers comfort food, but it also offers ample pleasures for the daring gastronaut willing to sample chicken feet and sea cucumbers right alongside the regulars. Service can be quick and friendly or achingly slow, depending on how crowded the place is -- but the food is always worth the wait. The seafood dishes are particularly good, prepared and presented with a pride that's rare in even the most authentic of Chinese restaurants.
BEST AMERICAN CHINESE RESTAURANT
P.F. Chang's China Bistro Seven metro locations
If you're going to Americanize a cuisine, you might as well go all the way. At P.F. Chang's, the portions are American-huge, the flavors American-intense, the drinks American-expensive and the business model American-kinked to put maximum butts into maximum seats and turn the dining room as quickly as possible. And yet a meal here can be very good -- and it will be just as good the next time you make the same order, because P.F. Chang's prides itself on consistency. Although the food is no more authentic than the faux-Asian architecture in the giant dining rooms, no one who craves Americanized Chinese food is looking for authenticity anyhow.
How could we not love a place that fills an entire parking lot with the smoky scent of its tandoor ovens? When the front doors are open and the wind is just right, you can smell Star of India from an acre away. And inside, it's like being wrapped in a blanket of spice: You settle into one of the booths along the wall and lose yourself in a world of foreign perfumes. But a first bite of the food here could rudely bring you back to your senses, because some dishes are hot. Not everyday Southwestern hot, but seriously, punishingly, brutally hot. The Goan vindaloo, for example, makes us wonder how the British survived their colonial adventures without simply exploding. The secret is to ask for exactly the meal you want, at exactly the level of spice you want. And if you succeed in that, Star of India will provide one of the most transporting culinary experiences you'll ever have in a strip mall.
Sometimes even ardent carnivores need a break, and when the urge for veggies strikes, we head to Masalaa. Here, vegetarian is not the cuisine of denial that it is in so many other places, but rather one that celebrates all the goodness inherent in the vegetable kingdom. Indian food is generally greenery-friendly, but Masalaa raises the bar with its delicious curries, traditional dosa and complicated sauces. Granted, there are some dishes that would be greatly improved by the addition of bacon, but the same can be said for just about any restaurant. Masalaa doesn't just serve vegetarian food, but great food that happens to be made of vegetables. And that makes all the difference.
Our favorite dish at the town's best vegetarian restaurant is the steak and eggs. Always has been, probably always will be -- particularly ordered rare. You know what else is good at Sunflower? The cioppino with Maine lobster and Manilla clams. And you know what else? Every other dish on the menu, meat-free or not, because chef Jon Pell understands that being vegetarian ought to be a choice, not a dictum, and everything he cooks -- for vegetarians and carnivores alike -- is done with the same strict attention to source and seasonality. Pell picks the best ingredients and makes the most of them. Eating vegetarian -- even vegan -- doesn't have to be a chore or a bore. Not if you're at Sunflower.
BEST VEGETARIAN BAKERY
WaterCourse Foods 206 E. 13th Ave. 303-832-7313
We dare you to try the Boston cream pie, the chocolate mousse tart in its vegan shell, the wheat-free spelt-flour molasses-and-ginger cookies. Try any of the items cranked out daily by the crew at WaterCourse, and you'll quickly understand why we consider this bakery the best. Using none of the ingredients that any sane baker would consider fundamental to the job -- things like cream or butter or flour or eggs -- WaterCourse makes vegetarian, vegan and gluten-free masterpieces using the recipes and procedures laid down by Deanna Scimio (who now consults on the menu when she's not busy teaching a new generation of bakers at the Culinary School of the Rockies in Boulder). Working in this dusty laboratory, owner Dan Landes's bakers have figured out ways to make baking powder act like egg whites and soy chocolate taste like the real thing. And they won't let anything go out the door of the bakery unless it not only tastes good, but tastes right.
On Friday and Saturday nights, it's hard to get a table at Istanbul Grill. The kitchen sells out of food some nights, and things are 86'd off the menu as early as seven o'clock. And the crowds keep coming, with people bringing their friends, bringing their families. In the small, austere, lemon-yellow dining room, the food never stops arriving. And what food! The gozleme -- Turkish cheese and parsley sandwiched between sheets of phyllo, then baked -- is the perfect way to start your dinner. The doner is delicious, like chunky gyros meat served in a massive pile with quartered pitas on the side. And at the end of any meal, there's Turkish coffee served sweet as love, black as death and strong as hell -- just like it's supposed to be. Denver has needed a proper Turkish restaurant for a long time, and now we have one -- the best one -- with Istanbul Grill.
BEST MIDDLE EASTERN RESTAURANT FOR LUNCH WHEN YOU HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO BE
Hookah Cafe
Hookah Cafe is comfortable, casual, eclectic -- which is just a polite way of saying the chairs and tables don't match -- with plastic sheeting covering the tablecloths and minimal decor consisting of Lebanese flags, sponge-painted ceiling and hookahs displayed next to the kitchen. But that's fine, because the smells of pipe smoke and spiced tobacco, of tabouleh and onions and spices from a dozen nations; the buttery sunshine streaming in through the windows; the music and all the other customers give a better sense of the Middle East than would any travel-agency posters of the sunny shores of Lebanon. Hookah is an eatery the community actually comes to -- not a theme restaurant, but the real thing. And though this is not the place we'd stop if we had a plane to catch or an appointment to make (there's a Starbucks around the corner for that), it's exactly the place we like to go when we have no plans other than taking a long lunch, sitting, eating, relaxing -- and maybe even taking a hit off a hookah.
Sabor Latino's feel-good ambience makes this an easy place to love. The dining room is comfortably rustic, and the atmosphere hangs somewhere in that inviting, tender middle ground between aging white-tablecloth class and neighborhood eclecticism. The restaurant does a brisk trade in baked empanadas filled with pino (a Chilean mix of chopped meat, fried onions, raisins and deep, earthy spices), in workaday fajitas, in Mexican moles and tamales that are big and subtly sweet, filled with seasoned pork and steamed in banana leaves rather than corn husks. There's Peruvian lomo saltado on the board, as well as bistec a lo pobre -- poor man's steak -- that's a diner benchmark across the Americas sur de la frontera, draping an eight-ounce rib-eye over rice and french fries, topping it with grilled onions, then topping that with a fried egg. Sabor Latino does so many things well -- and so many things from so many different ethnic traditions -- that it deserves extra honors as the best purveyor of a continent and a half's worth of cuisine.
Joseph's looks a lot like the old roadside soda fountains you can still find in small towns along the blue routes in West Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana and Georgia. It's small and crowded with stuff -- soda machines, ice cream coolers, bar stools and displays of candy, desserts and glass bottles of Orange Crush. Everything about the place -- from its drive-thru to the hot line and counter crammed into what was once the front parlor of this converted bungalow -- screams Americana. Especially the food. Partners Joe Johnson and Rick Bousman offer a limited menu (no more than a dozen items a day) that serves up the best of the Deep South: grill-fired burgers, catfish sandwiches, root beer floats, fried shrimp, coleslaw, collard greens and cold peach cobbler. And the three-piece fried-chicken dinner with chunky mashed potatoes, mac-and-cheese and a cup of sweet tea on ice will only run you $8.49, plus tax. That's what we consider American, the beautiful.
The menu at Black Pearl is studded with dishes like an "unassembled" clam "chowdah" (the quotes courtesy of the house), Asian-influenced seared tuna and a truffled mac-and-cheese, all trend-humping examples of the culinary smart-assitude that makes New American food so laughably stupid. And yet that unassembled clam chowder is absolutely delicious. And that seared tuna -- one of the most archetypal workhorses in the entire New American stable -- is so good and so thoughtfully assembled that it instantly makes you forget the hundred other derivations of the exact same plate you've had at a hundred other temples of American haute that never quite rose to the level of Black Pearl. After it opened last summer, Black Pearl quickly proved that it was the best of the New American breed, and as long as New American continues to evolve in strange new directions, Black Pearl will continue to draw a crowd curious to see what's coming next.
Z Cuisine is a warm little bistro that's like a perfect fantasy of Paris, requiring no passport, no baggage, no feigned appreciation of the films of Jerry Lewis or Gerard Depardieu. We love the old iron gate hanging open by the front door, the fact that there's nothing else on this quiet block save a few old houses and a dark, silent church looming against the dark sky. The crowds come and go all night, laughing, sometimes stumbling, clutching each other close in the shadows, and the food is an ideal expression of farmhouse French done in a thousand spots in Paris, tens of thousands of kitchens in France. The wine, the food, the staff, the company -- everything is in perfect alignment at Z Cuisine. In fact, the only things missing from this idyllic scene are the Gauloises-smoking French, the pall of their yellow cigarette smoke hanging around the high ceiling, and the bells tolling the hour as it grows later and later.
Rebecca Weitzman is a natural, a smart, hardworking chef who runs the kitchen at Cafe Star, one of the best houses in the city. She wrote (and continues to refine) a menu that took the overused, overworked, insipid and childish notion of comfort food, knocked the dust off and -- with a rigorous application of skill and intelligence to a style of cooking that generally showcases neither -- made magic. She's trained a crack crew of cooks who will someday take all they've learned from her and use it in their own houses to bolster the ranks of big-hatted white-jackets in town. And through it all, Weitzman has consistently performed at a level higher than that to which most chefs aspire, and definitely higher than many will ever achieve. Her food is nearly flawless, her vision pure, her talents formidable. Weitzman is the best.
Table for eight on a Saturday night? Cafe Star will fit you in. Special requests? Done. Problems on the floor? Handled. Whether you're coming here for multiple flighted courses, paired wines and one of the best meals of your life or just to grab a quick beer and a pizzetta with friends, Cafe Star is ready -- because this is a neighborhood restaurant working the trade in one of the strangest neighborhoods in the city. Between old friends and new neighbors, history and gentrification, Cafe Star stands as a restaurant that's there for everyone, offering a taste for every craving and a solution to every problem. The menu is comfort food squared, and the staff is dedicated to making every meal a great one. There was a time when "neighborhood restaurant" denoted a tavern that made cheeseburgers, a taco stand open late or a little mom-and-pop trattoria with great spaghetti and meatballs. And while that still may be the case in some neighborhoods, this stretch of Colfax deserves a shining Star -- and now it's got one.
Belmar has the Oven and Chama. Sixth Avenue has Table 6, Somethin' Else, Barolo Grill and more. Larimer Square is overflowing with great restaurants, and Highland is like a small-plate foodie nirvana these days. And yet this has been Cherry Creek's year -- not for the old dogs pulling new tricks, but for the young blood making this neighborhood a much better restaurant scene. The construction workers and temps crowd Tula for lunch, then clear out just in time for the Creeker contingent to load it up over dinner. Sketch is already getting rave reviews. It's hard to find a seat at Emogne on the weekends, and in May, Ocean will make a fresh run at the crowds that Mao failed to impress (for more than five minutes). Over on Clayton Lane, North changed everything the day it opened its doors. Barely a week goes by without an announcement of something new happening in the Creek, and if we might make a humble suggestion to the neighborhood association, it would be for a new slogan that matches the new scene. Something along the lines of "Cherry Creek: Not Just for Yuppie Dickheads Anymore."
Over the past twelve months, many great restaurants have opened in Denver. But Z Cuisine is the best. In addition to its intimate room, amazing food, wonderful service and obsessively dedicated chef, Patrick Dupays, it has a special je ne sais quoi -- that indescribable, warm and electric vibe of a house working at its absolute peak. Every dinner here is a celebration of life and love and food and good company, every night a party. For bringing to Denver this joie de vivre, this endless revel and non-stop culinary bacchanal, Z Cuisine deserves to be named best new restaurant of the year.
Steve Ell's little-burrito-chain-that-could has come a long way in the dozen years since it opened its first outlet at 1644 West Evans Avenue -- all the way to Wall Street, where it raised $45 million on its first day of public trading this year. En route, Ells entered into a partnership with (read: sale to) McDonald's, making Chipotle another chain restaurant in a world that's already more or less owned by chains. But in this case, bigger is better: How else are the good people of Minnesota, Georgia or New Hampshire going to learn what a great burrito is supposed to taste like? Better Chipotle than Taco Bell. Better Chipotle than McDonald's, even. For that matter, better Chipotle than 99 percent of the mom-and-pop stores rolling burritos here in Denver, Colorado.
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