Food & Drink

You might recognize the name “Tacos D.F.” It was painted on the side of a great lonchera that once prowled the streets of Denver. Now all the pleaures of that taco truck can be found in the same spot night after night, in a little joint in the middle of a strip mall along Parker Road. The space is warm and comfortable, with one wall covered floor to ceiling with black-marker graffiti scrawled by legions of satisfied customers. Service is exceptionally quick, incredibly friendly and eager to please. There are specials written out longhand on construction paper — but anything from the regular offerings of pork and asada tacos, tacos cabeza, sopes de bistec and a short list of tortas is bound to be good. It helps to speak a little Spanish here, but you can usually get by with some phonetics, a little mime and a lot of pointing at the menu hung above the window where orders are taken, paid for and delivered.

Tonti’s is an enigma. It’s a tiny strip-mall joint, almost always empty except for a couple of employees hanging disconsolately around the counter. And while about half the time what we get off the short, predictable menu (pizzas, calzones, stromboli, meatball sandwiches) is completely forgettable, the other half it’s
fantastic beyond any rational explanation. At its best, Tonti’s makes the kind of stromboli you just can’t stop eating, the kind of New York-style pizzas that wake you up in the middle of the night — calling you from inside the refrigerator, demanding that you eat a leftover slice cold, standing there in your socks and boxers. So, yes, sometimes Tonti’s makes the best strip-mall Italian food in the city and sometimes it doesn’t. Just ask yourself one question before you go in: Do you feel lucky?

Fruition is not yet as good as it will one day be. But since chef Alex Seidel and Paul Attardi, both ex of Mizuna, opened their restaurant just a couple of months ago, it’s already proven itself more than good enough to deserve top honors as Denver’s best new restaurant. And as it grows into its space, its neighborhood and its place in the ever-changing Denver restaurant scene, it will be even better. At first glance, Fruition might not seem like anything special. The space is small and crowded, the board of fare simple New American cuisine. But look closer, and you’ll you see a room that’s being milked for every inch of its homey, comforting advantage. While the menu is New American in its presentation of pork shoulder confit, beet salad, chicken noodle soup and pork belly carbonara, those dishes work as though that overused phrase had just been invented. And the crew is already so professional and polished that they’re dancing a six-hour ballet every single night — and for the most part, making it look fun. There will come a night when Fruition will cross the line from good to truly amazing, of that we have no doubt. But so far, so good.

How long have we been saying that Sixth Avenue is going to be the next hot restaurant neighborhood? For years. But this year, we may finally be right. With Table 6 mounting a second-wind resurgence, the Master family consolidating their New American/California influence at Montecito, Fruition packing the former home of Somethin’ Else, Lime XS doing surprisingly well and a dozen more ventures both old and new holding their own, this street is definitely on the upswing. At the very least, the diagonal line between Fruition and Montecito has become one of the most heavily trodden paths in Denver’s food community as crowds constantly dodge traffic to jump between the two places, splitting dinner and drinks, drinks and desserts, apps and entrees or whatever. Sixth isn’t there yet, but it’s a neighborhood that bears watching.

Seventeenth Avenue is coming along. LoDo has a lot of great restaurants. Larimer Square has more good restaurants in one block than other parts of town have restaurants. But the real culinary explosion is on the edge of Highland, which is suddenly bursting with phenomenal restaurants. From small and fiercely ethnic joints to innovative nouvelle houses doing cutting-edge cuisine to brewpubs to solidly classical kitchens where perfection can be found in every sauce, chop and filet, Highland has it all. Equally important, this neighborhood has enough food-obsessed residents to fill the seats on weekday nights and enough dining variety to draw crowds from across the metro area on the weekends.

Even without lunch (which Tables recently stopped serving), even without those lines that once stretched out the door and past the patio, even without the walk-in traffic and the look of surprise on the faces of everyone discovering the place for the first time, Tables stands as Denver’s best neighborhood restaurant. Why? Because dinner here can so quickly and so easily become one of those meals you’ll remember for the rest of your life. Owners Dustin Barrett and Amy Vitale, everyone on the staff and everyone in the kitchen have joined to create a magical little bistro where the simplest things — a bowl of clams, a plate of prosciutto and melon, a piece of fish perfectly cooked — have the potential to change the way you look at food. Every neighborhood in the city should be so lucky as to have a place like Tables ready and waiting to serve.

Home is where the heat is. No matter how long you’ve been away from Denver — a month, a week, a day — as you head back into town from DIA, you can feel yourself jonesing for great Mexican food. And now you can get a fast fix just off Pea Boulevard, at this second outpost of Jack-n-Grill, a sort-of franchise operation that features entertainment many nights and the same fantastic food all the time. No matter what you crave — true green chile, ranchero tacos, a Frito pie or a fat carne asada burrito — Jack-n-Grill will get you back on track.

Goose Sorensen, owner of Solera, has been through a rough couple of years. Strategic errors, an attempted (and ultimately abortive) expansion into the breakfast market, the dissolution of a bad partnership — all of these things (combined with Sorensen’s forays into the national food scene that kept him away from Denver for days or weeks at a time) were dangerous distractions that put Solera in danger of losing its edge, that fine blade of forward-looking innovation crossed with comforting classicism that was always its greatest strength. Now, though, Sorensen has put all those entanglements behind him and is joyously re-engaged in the day-to-day business of his kitchen — and it shows in every plate coming out of that kitchen. Welcome back.

There was no doubt that Lola had outgrown its original location. It had outgrown the space within a few weeks of Dave Query and chef Jamey Fader opening their little coastal Mexican seafood shack on South Pearl. What was never a sure thing, however, was whether the loyal crowd of regulars, neighbors, brunchers and margarita-suckers would follow Lola to its new home at the edge of Highland last April. Today, though, Lola is living large, because not only were the faithful willing to charge that hill, but the restaurant picked up a slew of new customers who’d apparently been waiting for such a spot to move in so that they could swill great margaritas on the patio, pitch tents in the dining room and absolutely refuse to leave.

When Limn opened last July, it did so without the opening-night fireworks that have become rather customary for Denver’s big addresses. But this was by design. What looked like one of those open-the-doors-and-pray scenarios was actually orchestrated inside and out by Kate LaCroix from Dish Publicity, and it worked amazingly well considering that the only thing more difficult to find than a succinct definition of chef Alex Gurevich’s Novoandino cuisine was an open table during Limn’s first few weeks. Granted, Limn is small, but its debut was one of the most surprising crushes of the year. And now, nine months into a very good year, Limn is expanding — which is good news for the entire dining scene, since it shows that a smart idea can pay off.

One of the best, most recognizable dishes in the epic French canon is cassoulet. And at Z Cuisine, one of the best, most recognizable dishes on chef/owner Patrick DuPays’s chalkboard menu is a cassoulet maison that does proud every French cook ever tasked with carrying on the cassoulet tradition. One taste of DuPays’s version — which combines a leg of duck confit on the bone, local sausage, stiff white beans, bitter greens and whole cippolini onions gone soft as roasted garlic cloves, all in a tomato broth muscled up with stock and deeply, richly flavored with the mingled essences of each individual ingredient — will remind even the most recalcitrant epicure why the French deserve their position of honor as the undisputed masters of cuisine both haute and basse, because there’s nothing more comforting, nothing more charming, than a real cassoulet expertly done. Bracket it with a brilliant assiette de campagnard and maybe a bowl of the celery soup with cr?me frache (when available), and you’ll know that Z Cuisine represents the best of France that Denver has to offer.

We go to Le Central like Catholics go to confession — as a way to clear the head and save the soul after a week spent doing wrong. For serious fans of French food, Le Central is a required stop. But even if you just dream of spending a lazy Sunday afternoon hanging around a Parisian cafe reading Rimbaud and wearing a beret, Le Central is calling. From the unabashedly Gallic menu (loup de mer in port-wine reduction, escargots Bourguignon and Canard Grand Veneur roasted crisply and served with currant jelly) to the specials (such as an all-truffle menu for thirty bucks a head) to the nine-dollar bowls of perfectly done mussels and all-you-can-eat frites, owner Robert Tournier’s little slice of the Left Bank is truly one of Denver’s landmarks.

Tuna nicoise; grilled Andouille sausage with charred peppers, olives, almonds and pumpkin seeds; a cheese plate with poached pears and lavender honey; mushroom tarts in cognac sauce. These are just a few of the unique tastes of Aix-en-Provence featured at Restaurant Aix. Feeling a bit more Mediterranean? No problem. The menu also features shrimp risotto and mussels in a roasted tomato sauce with Pernod. Since the influences of Northern Italy, Barcelona and Belgium all flavor the cuisine of Provence, they’re all duly represented on this menu. And while the dining room where you’ll devour these dishes feels sleek and modern, the food carries a sense of history that’s inescapable.

Bastilla and sweetened black coffee at Cafe Paprika: That’s the one order that captures the essence of Morocco in particular and North Africa as a whole. Ginger and cumin and saffron, cinnamon and powdered sugar, a billion layers of phyllo dough with shreds of herbed chicken stuck in between, the heat of the coffee on your fingers through the filigreed glass cup — all of it combines to transport you far from the Denver strip malls and deep into the deserts of the other side of the world.

Last year, Arada moved out of its home on East Colfax and into a small, comfortable space on Santa Fe surrounded by taqueras and art galleries, in just the right area for catching hungry adventurers looking for an interesting dinner on a Saturday night. It’s a nice place with scratchy tablecloths and no silverware, strong, sweet black coffee served in tiny demitasse cups, a full bar and a modern kitchen, and decor dominated by a large map of Ethiopia. But the important thing here is the menu, an uncompromising document that presents Ethiopian cuisine in a style almost completely unchanged from how it’s served in the mother country. The slew of sides that attend many of the dishes are reminiscent of the more common cuisines they’ve inspired (Cajun and Caribbean and American soul food); the spicy meat dishes — best served raw — have both the feel of something comfortingly familiar and the taste of a food that’s still completely alien to many people.

At Yanni’s Greek Taverna, no meal can start without ouzo, no meal can proceed without a big spread of mezedes (Greek tapas), and no meal is complete without somebody ordering the lamb. When the wind is right, when owner Yanni Stavropoulos has the gigantic outdoor rotisserie grill fired up in this strip mall off Monaco, the odor of roasting meat and garlic and wine mixes with car exhaust and the stink of hot blacktop into an aroma of history cut loose from chronology. You can see Stavropoulos standing over that grill like some kind of laughing spirit from an expurgated chapter of the Iliad — the Lamb God, bringer of barbecue — and you understand on a very basic gut level why the Greeks never developed a haute cuisine and why Greek food never really progressed beyond this simple interchange between man, meat and fire. Because it was already perfect the way it was.

For twenty years, House of Kabob has been jammed into this strip mall, tangled up with other Middle Eastern markets and restaurants. That’s twenty years of Persian cuisine, twenty years of kabobs and lamb tongue and herbed yogurt and pita. And while the room — done in regal purple, with pale wood tables and booth backs — certainly shows its age, it’s still comfortable, a place where it’s easy to settle in and waste an entire afternoon sampling a cuisine born of spice caravans and killing desert heat. Everything is rough: rough-chopped peppers burnt on the grill; rough-cut chunks of lamb, sliced small and fatty and tumbled into folded pitas along with big chunks of charred onion and charred tomato turned sweet and wet in the heat. This is peasant food in the purest sense, ancient and unchanged by a Colorado area code.

The space is small and more than a little ragged. The service runs at a pace somewhere between slow-but-friendly and glacial. And the menu seems oddly foreshortened. But at Ya Hala, all that matters is the food — and the food is absolutely fabulous. The kitchen must be imbued with some kind of natural magic for the deep-but-narrow cuisine of the Middle East, because it turns out unbelievably good roasted chicken, shawarma and baked goods — particularly the baklava, a dish we’d simply assumed that, like celery, roasted eggplant or the musical stylings of John Tesh, was just not to our taste. But Ya Hala’s baklava is food for the gods, a fitting end to a meal that starts with the best hummus in the city (flavored with sumac powder and olive oil) and just goes up from there. The presentations are straightforward, the flavors blunt and lovely, and each plate is given an attention born of complete love of the cuisine — no shortcuts, no scrimping.

Chef/co-owner Jen Jasinski has put up many impressive menus at Rioja. But with all her housemade pastas, salads, Colorado lamb dishes and an ever-changing pork-heavy, Mediterranean board, there’s always been one delicious constant: the Rioja “picnic.” Combining Spanish chorizo, air-dried duck breast, shaved speck, Italian gorgonzola and assorted olives, nuts and condiments, this plate truly has something for everyone. And if you enjoy your picnic on Rioja’s small, pleasant patio on busy Larimer Square, you’re guaranteed to see almost everyone you know. Just don’t offer to share; you’ll want to keep this plate all for yourself.

Platt Park residents Val and Carolyn Erpelding combined their talents — he’s a chef (and an accomplished ice sculptor), she’s a florist — to create the multi-purpose Flower Wraps, a restaurant/coffeehouse/flower shop that gets people coming and going. Situated adjacent to the Louisiana and Pearl LRT station, the restaurant part of the operation serves breakfast, lunch and “twilight” menus for people on the run, and caters to its clientele-in-transit with the “Fastracks Next Day Program,” which lets customers order a sandwich on the way home and pick it up in a reusable bag to take to work the next morning. Bouquets are also on the menu, with everything from a dozen roses to an English garden basket option ripe for the picking.

Gaia is the goddess of the earth and everything that comes from the earth, including all of the wonderful dishes — the buttery quiches and buckwheat crepes wrapped around peppered lamb loin with wild mushrooms and fragrant pots of French-pressed, organic Kaladi Brothers coffee — served by Patrick Mangold-White and Jon Edwards at Gaia, a restaurant tucked into a little clapboard house on South Pearl. But it’s in the summer months that the place really comes alive. That’s when the focus moves from the charming window seats indoors to the outdoors, where the raised beds in the back yard produce much of the menu’s ingredients. This is truly a garden of the food gods.

Who is this city’s most fierce, forward-forging green advocate? The answer is blowing in the wind. This year, Marilyn Megenity — who infuses her Mercury Cafe with good, organic food and intelligent entertainment and fuels her own car with vegetable-oil fuel — took out a loan on her home so she could install two forty-foot-tall Air X turbines on the roof of the Merc’s longtime home in downtown Denver. Though Megenity’s quixotic installation (which is small in comparison to those that whir out on the prairie) isn’t big enough to completely cover the restaurant’s energy-consumption needs, the windmills do something else just as important: They set an example for the rest of us.

The D Note’s menu isn’t entirely vegetarian, but the parts that are — better than half of the offerings, with many of them completely vegan — are so good that you’ll barely notice the lack of pepperoni and hot Italian sausage. And if you do, there’s always the other half of the menu on which to slake your carnivorous bloodthirst. Chef Amy Wroblewski and the DeGraff brothers, who own the D Note, have assembled a wild board of custom pizzas with carefully sourced, high-quality ingredients piled so high you’ll never leave hungry. For vegetarians, virtue has its own reward: an overloaded monster covered in oil and basil pesto, huge puffs of ricotta cheese, vegan mozzarella, artichoke hearts or anything else your twig- and berry-eating heart desires.

Creamed spinach can be great, but the best friend that creamed spinach ever had was a steak. Make that the best American friend that creamed spinach ever had was a steak, because there are plenty of ethnic restaurants where vegetarianism is not about the denial of pleasure (read: meat), but the glorification of vegetables. And at Masalaa, you’ll be so busy eating creamed spinach with twenty different spices and squeaky cubes of cheese — better known as saag paneer — that you won’t give a thought to the missing pork chops or porterhouse. There’s just too much on this menu to enjoy. The gigantic food-as-art dosa are meals in themselves, the innumerable chickpea creations are excellent, and every creamy, rich and stunningly complex sauce is a masterwork.

Anyone can invent some freaky, prawn-and-jackfruit Asian fusion plate with chrysanthemum flowers and pierogi. Some people might even think it inspired. But for us, true talent lies in the ability to cook the favorite plate of your great-great-great-grandfather and make it just the way he liked it more than a century ago. If that ancestor liked Mughlai cuisine — the food of raiders and interlopers, siege rations brought into India by Muslim invaders — then he’d appreciate Jewel of India. And so would anyone else ever taken aback — stunned, stricken momentarily dumb — by the depth of richness and layered flavor of an Indian entree. The culinary world has the Mughals to thank for that; we’re just thankful that Jewel of India keeps the tradition alive.

At this point, Indian buffets are almost ubiquitous. Which is handy, because that means you never have to go very far in Denver for an inexpensive hit of saag paneer or tandoori chicken. But with the profusion of options, it’s also more and more difficult to tell the good from the bad. There’s an easy solution for that: Just head for the best midday feast in town, the buffet at the original Little India. Don’t let the full parking lot worry you. Or the line at the door. Or the line at the buffet. No matter how long you have to wait, once you’ve loaded your plate with rich, deeply flavored saag, biryani, chickpea salad and chicken tandoori from the frequently refilled chafing dishes, you’ll know you’ve come to the right place.

For decades, Royal Peacock’s Shanti Awatramani has been serving some of the best Indian food in the United States. Before that, he worked in some of the best Indian restaurants, hotels and resorts in Bombay. He grew up in the hotel-and-restaurant business (as did his niece, Laxmi Lalchandani, who often runs the floor at the Peacock these days), and everything he learned he brought with him to Boulder, where he opened the Royal Peacock. The menu has been largely unchanged from the first day — basic biryani, murgh chaat, samosa and rogan josh — but there’s no reason to change it, because everything is fabulous. There’s no gimmickry here, no flash, no bizarre fusions served in sleek dining rooms. Royal Peacock simply offers the most honest, delicious dishes passed down through generations of a restaurant family known halfway around the world for being the best at what they do.

US Thai is so delicious, so friendly, so addictive that we had to make a half-dozen visits over the course of a couple of weeks just to make absolutely sure that the restaurant was as good as we thought it was. And it was, every single time. This is authentic Thai food done in a simple, street-food style that forgoes all tricks and complications in favor of straightforward presentations of the hallmark curries and rice dishes that define Thai cuisine. The Penang and masaman curries are so habit-forming that they ought to be listed as narcotic; the dumplings, spring rolls and egg rolls are brilliant; and even something as simple as the Thai iced coffee has us dreaming about the next time we’ll be able to get out to Edgewater for another fix.

At many Korean restaurants, the food seems like an endless repetition of grilled beef, rice, onions and the occasional egg. But at Han Kang, that’s just where the food begins. The best dishes on this menu are those that are nearly unpronounceable — deeply flavored soups, spicy seafoods, mounds of bright vegetables and proteins tossed together in endless combinations. And then there’s the procession of sides that comes with every meal, the most recognizable of which is kimchee (identifiable by smell at ten paces when done correctly). But at Han Kang, every side is delicious and functional as salad, garnish, flavor enhancer and appetizer all at once. This kitchen will give you a new appreciation for Korean food.

There are few pleasures in life more satisfying than laying out a huge spread of Chinese takeout on the coffee table and settling in for a late-night Barney Miller marathon on cable. Maybe it’s the notion of eating straight from those waxy cardboard cartons. Maybe it’s the freedom of gorging yourself on cheap, greasy sweet-and-sour chicken and eating dumplings with your fingers. Maybe it’s Abe Vigoda. But no matter what makes Chinese takeout such a joy (or compulsion, depending on your personality), it’s important to have a good place on speed dial for those nights when the urge becomes overpowering. And for us, that place is East China, which has a big menu, low prices and understanding hours.

If we could go to only one restaurant for the rest of our lives, Super Star would rank high on the list. Although there are probably better restaurants in Denver, sitting in that blank, almost anonymous space (just a restaurant-shaped hole in Alameda Square, next to the place that offers herbal medicine, phone cards and tax advice, just down from the other place with the $1.99 Mexican lunch combos), we can’t quite remember their names. Though Super Star offers a regular lunch and dinner menu full of excellent and very authentic Chinese dishes (everything from sea cucumber and shark fin soup to French-influenced beef in wine sauce and congee porridges), the real draw here is the daily dim sum, paraded past on wheeled carts. If you’ve never been before, just walk in, wait your turn, take a table and then start pointing. A meal here is the next best thing to breakfast, lunch and dinner in Hong Kong.

The “American Chinese” restaurant is just about extinct, now that everyone is eating stir-fry noodles and lettuce wraps and even Grandma has the occasional yen for gingered pork dumplings. But melting-pot Chinese food has its place, too, and that place is Chopsticks, a restaurant that serves authentic fare as well as simple sweet-and-sour dishes and protein/noodle combinations. For the adventurous, there’s cold jellyfish salad, flaming pig intestine, “three cup sauce frog with basil” and Chinese hot pots cooked remarkably well. But there’s also excellent lo mein and barbecued pork, for those who like to keep company with gastronauts but would rather limit their own adventuring to a wok on the mild side.

Pho Saigon’s space — a box with some tables — is forgettable, and the menu a seemingly simple board of Southeast Asian classics. But what sets Pho Saigon apart is the cosmopolitan sense of otherness that comes from cramming in a mixed-demographic crowd and feeding them, in rapid-fire succession, foods that twenty years ago half the people eating here would have never heard of, and the other half would never have imagined eating in a little strip mall in Centennial. At Pho Saigon — as in Saigon itself — it’s food that brings people together, food that gives them reason to pause in the middle of the day and enjoy something extraordinary. Pho is the big seller here (seventeen kinds, from a simple meatball version to the rare shrimp pho), but the menu stretches well beyond that to cover all the comforts of Vietnamese street food.

At Parallel 17, executive chef and owner Mary Nguyen has resurrected a branch of Vietnamese cuisine that had been largely ignored for years. Her menu is composed primarily of Vietnamese small plates, a style once prized by the royal family in Hue and practiced by generations of Vietnamese home cooks for every family celebration — but she’s given each of these classical preparations a nouvelle twist, with beautiful presentations and interesting flavors firmly grounded in history. And while it might sometimes be difficult to notice the food, what with all the mobs of beautiful people and 17th Avenue hipsterati crowded into this small space, the food is definitely worth your attention.

If you’re from Vietnam, this is comfort food. If you’re not, it’s a fantastic education in the less common flavors of Southeast Asia. Gelatinized duck’s blood, fishscale mint, sawgrass and other, even less recognizable ingredients are pretty much par for the course at Ha Noi Pho, but you’ll be amazed at how quickly a brave heart, a strong stomach and an adventurous palate can be made to feel right at home. Although service can be a bit standoffish, once you get the owners, cooks or servers talking, the place becomes as friendly as any other neighborhood joint — whether in Denver or Hanoi.

Denver is heaven for fans of Vietnamese food. We’ve got the good stuff and the bad stuff, the authentic and the fake. We’ve got more pho restaurants than you can shake a stick at, and dozens of good noodle-bowl joints. But when we’re really craving all that Vietnamese cooking can be, we head for Kim Ba. Not only is this one of the oldest Vietnamese restaurants in the area, but it’s the best at anything off the grill (which is one-third of all Vietnamese cuisine) or over noodles (which is the second third, the last being pho — which can be found at plenty of other spots). For the appetizer combo alone — a massive collection of grilled meats and noodles and greens and little fried things that we can’t even pronounce — Kim Ba would take the prize, but this menu goes on for several pages after that, and every dish is a winner.

Not only is Domo Denver’s best Japanese restaurant, it’s one of the best and most interesting restaurants that Denver has ever produced. Part restaurant, part Zen garden, part Aikido dojo, part Japanese cultural center, Domo is all Japanese — fiercely original, fiercely regional and fiercely independent. Everything here — from the tree-stump seats and northern Japanese peasant cuisine to the premium sake list and funny hats given to those seated outside in the garden on sunny days — is transporting. And though Domo might be one of the very few restaurants where you can actually say that the cuisine has been elevated beyond the level of craft and into the realm of true art, it is also the last place where anyone on staff would say that anything done in this kitchen was anything but craft — anything but dinner, well-made in imitation of a style that’s been around for as long as the stones and which will outlive every one of us.

Finding a McDonald’s in downtown Tokyo is easy; finding a real ramen noodle house in the United States is much more challenging. So how lucky are we to have Oshima Ramen, a link in a chain of ramen noodle shops that is to Japan what Mickey D’s is to this country? Very lucky. As a matter of fact, we’re the luckiest people in the whole USA, because the Oshima Ramen in Tiffany Plaza is the only Oshima Ramen in America. Still, one is enough for us. If you’re looking for a true taste of Tokyo — pork bone, chicken and bonito stock, fresh noodles rolled daily, blonde soy shoyu and a coffee-dark and cloudy miso broth used to create everything from a simple Original Ramen to a veggie, to a tofu and bamboo-shoot ramen, to a seafood ramen, to a double-up super original Oshima Ramen with chaisu, boiled egg and corn — then you’re really in luck here.

At Sushi Sasa, a meal isn’t just about the food, it’s about the whole experience of dining. With its white-on-white decor, attentive servers, jewel-box space (with an overflow bar and lounge downstairs) and a menu that stretches the idea of nouvelle Japanese beyond just the over-played tricks of torch-seared salmon skin and sushi-with-sauce, dinner here is a true adventure. And with a chef as skilled as Wayne Conwell running the show, it’s an adventure that will always leave you wanting more.

The worst fights we’ve ever seen at Sushi Den haven’t been over the last piece of o-toro, but over the last seat at the sushi bar on a Friday night. And that’s odd, because we’d punch a nun if she was standing between us and some of the brilliant, beautiful, achingly fresh fish brought in by the convoluted and murderously expensive delivery system that Toshi, Sushi Den’s owner, has been laboring for twenty years to perfect. As a result of those Herculean efforts, you can be eating fish on South Pearl Street on Saturday night that was sold Saturday morning on the floor of the Nagahama market in Kukuoka, Japan, and was swimming in the ocean on Friday. There aren’t many other restaurants where you can do that — none in Denver, and few in the country. As a result, this is the only place in town where we’ll lay out the greenbacks for real o-toro, where we’ll wait an hour or more for surf clam and eel, where we’ll fight off that nun for the bright-orange uni presented in a simple slip of black seaweed.

Fried plantains and ceviche aren’t the only dishes that Red Tango does well, but they’re the dishes that Red Tango does better than anyone else in town. Strange combination plates of enchiladas and tortas, ceviches, Italian ravioli stuffed with crushed black beans and topped with butterflied prawns soaked in ancho chile — the menu has these, too, and we’ve tried them all. But what we keep coming back for are the bowls of bittersweet, astringent raw orange roughy and little fingerling shrimp dressed in lime, chile and onion, and the thick-cut, buttery, sweet fried plantains that are like God’s gift to a Southern sweet tooth.

Chef/owner Alex Gurevich had some sort of epiphany during a trip to Peru a couple of years back. He saw the blooming of an entirely new cuisine based on the borderless, international flavors of traditional South American cooking and came back to Denver with the desire to open one of the first Novoandino restaurants in the United States. That’s exactly what he’s done with Limn, combining the authentic, sometimes shocking native tastes and juxtapositions of Peruvian food with his own sense of French technique and plate design, for a menu that’s unlike anything ever seen in Denver. Starches and sauces are the secret here, and because many of the dishes are so different (cold potatoes, mashed lentils, chile and gooseberry demi), they must be tasted to be believed.

Los Cabos II picks up extra points for authenticity. Well, authenticity — and the giant stuffed llama. When the dining room is quiet, this restaurant can (and does) double as a sort of Peruvian cultural museum — but it’s best during the lunch and dinner rushes, when everyone’s ordering and then digging into huge plates of multi-ethnic South American grub. From the simplest dishes of lomo saltado and strange Chinese/Spanish fusions to the seriously Spanish paella specials, mustardy potato salad and weekend buffets, everything is delicious and served in huge portions by a staff that’s as friendly as the one at the corner diner.

Denver has always had plenty of Mexican restaurants — old Mexican, new Mexican, regional Mexican, Mexican done both fancy and plain. But it wasn’t until recently that we started tasting the true potential of internationally influenced Latin American cuisine. That potential is best realized at Sabor Latino, a charming spot that serves up ceviche, bandeja paisa with plantains and Colombian chicharrones, Chilean bride’s soup in a huge bowl filled with fish and shrimp and baby clams (because that’s just what a new bride wants on her wedding night: clam breath) and big, big drinks. The menu is like an arrow pointing the way for chefs looking for new inspiration in the coming years.

Buenos Aires Pizzeria features the full spectrum of Argentine immigration in pizza form, but Francis Carrera’s Buenos Aires Grill goes much deeper, offering perfect renditions of many of the international plates that have fed generations of Buenos Aires residents and shaped the cuisine of that city. The focus at this lovely restaurant is definitely meat — a churrasco board dominates — but so many excellent plates can be found hovering around the edges of the menu that one meal here just leaves you wanting more. The blood sausage is the best we’ve ever had, the bacalao (salt cod) an upscaled version of a peasant classic, and almost anything coming off the grills tastes of a deep cultural understanding that’s rare in even the most rigorously authentic ethnic restaurants.

Buenos Aires has long been a magnet for immigrants. Successive waves of wanderers from Italy, Africa, Asia and elsewhere have washed up in that cosmopolitan city, and each group has brought a little taste of their homeland with them. And now we have all those tastes here in Denver at Buenos Aires Pizzeria, where Buenos Aires native Francis Carrera serves all the variegated flavors of his home town in pizza form. Skip the more traditional pies in favor of something unusual, something you’ve never had before — hearts of palm, maybe, or a pie speckled with bits of hard-boiled egg. Then make a note to return for gnocchi night or one of the kitchen’s excellent Cuban sandwiches.

Two things saved Via from slipping into that great, yawning pit of mediocrity above which so many restaurants hang. First, there was last fall’s hiring of chef James Mazzio and his decision to stand his post right on the line. And second, there were the pizza ovens — real wood-fired ovens of the very, very old-school variety that could turn out similarly old-school pizzas of the Neapolitan variety. As a matter of fact, these pizzas were so authentic that Via was actually certified by the United States branch of the Associazione della Vera Pizza Napoletana (essentially the Italian pizza police), which speaks to the authenticity of Via’s product. But the true arbiter is always taste, and one bite of the three-cheese, prosciutto and arugula Parma pizza is enough to make anyone a believer.

The pizza is tasty, but it’s the ambience that really draws people to Oblio’s — that and the liquor license that so many Park Hill NIMBYs fought against. Today ex- naysayers tie their drooling golden retrievers to the fence and join the queue of folks waiting for a seat in the jammin’ joint. Fortunately, neighborhood respectability has not ruined Oblio’s; it still has the same sweet hippie-dippie vibe it did when it opened back in 1996, complete with hallucinogenic menus creatively constructed from ’60s and ’70s album covers. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Decades before “Rocky Mountain High” became Colorado’s second official state song, diners were singing the praises of the Wazee Supper Club. In fact, the Karagas brothers opened their restaurant bar in 1974, just two years after John Denver wrote that song, and today the Wazee is just as much an examplar of this state as is that cheesy number. And so is the pizza coming out of the Wazee kitchen — which has more than its own share of cheese, as well as a uniquely sweet sauce that never changes. Other things have changed, though, including the Wazee’s owners (today it’s part of the Wynkoop group), hours (it still serves late and is now open Sundays, too) and menu. In addition to pizza and sandwiches, there are appetizers, salads, even condiments. And, as always, plenty of beers on tap to enjoy in this Colorado classic.

Get past the naming conventions (every specialty pie here is named after a song, a band, a musician, whatever), get past the open-mike nights and the D Note’s double life as a live-music venue. Get past the location — smack in the middle of cutesy Olde Town Arvada — and the overt half-vegetarianism of the place. Just get here for some of the best pizza in town, courtesy of ex-Mercury Cafe cook Amy Wroblewski. The pies are big, piled impossibly high with well-sourced and earth-friendly ingredients, in combinations that manage to be tastefully original. Yes, the D Note has a distinctly hippie vibe and the service can sometimes be less than lightning-fast, but who cares? When the pizza is this good, nothing else matters.

There’s something to be said for a place that does pizza and nothing but pizza. No pastas, no hoagies, no chicken parm sandwiches or slices of up-from-frozen cheesecake. Although the Oven doesn’t quite rise to that level of obsessive focus — you can get apps of olives and fresh mozzarella, still almost liquid, and there are a few other slight departures — it comes close with a menu that has pizza as its heart and soul. Really good, really consistent, really rustic pizza served with love and pride. The Oven crew makes everything to order (including the dough, cheese and sauce) for a house that is almost always full, shuffling pizzas around in the big, exposed wood-fired ovens and boxing takeout requests with shocking speed. Every neighborhood should have a pizza place as good as the Oven.

Dolce Sicilia has authentic Italian cookies, tasty sandwiches and serious tiramisu, but we’re most partial to its remarkably inexpensive scratch-baked breads, including semolina, baguettes and heavenly ciabatta: a powdery crust, not too tough or too flaky, wrapped around a wonderfully textured, chewy-airy center that screams of quality ingredients and straight-from-the-oven freshness. A jug of wine, a loaf of this stuff and thou…heck, we’d be just fine without thou. More for us.

Frank Bonanno’s been dealing with a lot, and his load was starting to show at Luca d’Italia. It’s not that dinners here were ever bad; they were just less amazing than they’d once been, less effortlessly blissful. But over the past year, Bonanno has put his legendarily obsessive focus back on Luca, and the restaurant has come back strong. Once again, the deliriously complicated farmhouse entrees — dishes like truffle-scented rabbit three ways and pan-roasted black cod with ravioletta — are coming out tasting like the simplest, most natural things in the world. And the beautiful plates of rustic pasta have that spark of joy and fanatical vitality that have always been the hallmark of Bonanno’s best efforts.

Yes, Pearl Street is a neighborhood. Just because it isn’t your neighborhood doesn’t mean it doesn’t count. And though chef Lachlan Mackinnon-Patterson has a tendency to go off-book with wide-ranging plates influenced by countries all over the map, at heart and in spirit, Frasca is still an Italian restaurant. As a matter of fact, at heart it’s a neighborhood Italian restaurant — full of regulars, with a small menu heavy on comfort foods and a serious commitment to cooking for the community. Don’t let all the hype fool you. Pork belly, agnolotti, tajuts of wine and salumi platters? That’s all classic neighborhood comfort food. And though Frasca might be drawing crowds from around the country and winning awards usually reserved for only the hoitiest and toitiest of white-tablecloth restaurants, it is and always has been the greatest neighborhood Italian restaurant anyone could hope for.

Five years ago, owner Alessandro Carollo had just one small storefront restaurant. Then there were two. Then there were name changes and alterations in concept. And then, completely out of the blue, Carollo moved into an enormous space recently vacated by one of the hottest, most talked-about restaurants in Denver (Adega), which anchors one of the hottest, most talked-about neighborhoods in Denver (LoDo) and opened a restaurant that pretty much everyone (us included) thought was going to fail before the fryers were even warmed up. It looked like hubris, like madness, right up until people started eating there and realizing they’d never had Italian food as simple, true and good as what’s being done by Carollo’s executive chef, Christian Delle Fave, and his crew: perfect pastas, upscaled comfort-food classics like lobster-stuffed ravioli, and multi-course tastings creatively based around Italy’s regional cuisines. Right now, the best Italian food in Denver is being done in LoDo, and it’s coming out of the kitchen at Venice Ristorante.

For generations, Three Sons served as the defining taste of Italian cuisine in north Denver — but a few years ago, the place was almost moribund. Then came changes in ownership, in kitchen staff, in menu, even in style, and Three Sons has gone from bad to very, very good. It still looks like a cast-off movie set from some un-produced Godfather sequel, it still smells like garlic all the way out into the parking lot on a good night. But with its new focus on classical Italian cooking and quality ingredients, Three Sons could be a worthy restaurant for generations to come.

Back in the day, this stretch of Federal was called Little Saigon because it was the neighborhood most densely populated by the recently arrived wave of post-war Vietnamese immigrants. Not surprisingly, these newcomers to the Rocky Mountain West brought some of the flavors of their old home with them and began founding authentic Vietnamese restaurants among the strip malls. A lot of Vietnamese restaurants. And though many have since closed and successive generations moved out beyond the old neighborhood, New Saigon is still here, working from an expansive menu of dishes once completely foreign but now comfortingly recognizable, offering the same uncompromisingly authentic flavors of Southeast Asia that it has since day one.

This is International Street. It’s not Mexico, not Vietnam, not Korea or China or Costa Rica or any of those places in their entirety, but neither is it entirely the United States. It’s an American smash map where things like borders and capitals and national languages have ceased to matter. Drive it, and you’re in the middle of the engine of the new economy, the new multiculturalism. And nowhere is this more apparent than at the Avanza Market in Fiesta Plaza. Outside, mariachi music blares from nowhere in particular — from the sky, as if that’s the music that God likes — while signs on scrap-metal frames scream in bright colors, in Spanish and English, in pictograms. And inside, you’ll find piatas, pickled pig’s ears in brine, wheels of asadero and a hundred dead Mexican saints: prayer candles in such lovely variety as to burn away innumerable sins.

With all the high-end Mexican and nouvelle Mexican and fake chain Mexican restaurants coming and going in Denver, it’s easy to forget places like Taquera Patzcuaro. It’s easy to forget how friendly owner Francisco Almanza and the guys who work the floor are, how forgiving they are of our abysmal Spanish, how generous the kitchen can be when it comes to dishing out the pride of the house, giant hunks of par-cooked and fried pork shoulder that pass for carnitas down in Michoacn. But this forgetfulness is a shame, because Taquera Patzcuaro is a place just built for eating a couple pounds of fried pig with guacamole, drinking buckets of margaritas and cold Tecates while watching a couple of Latino middleweights pummel the crap out of each other on the big TV on the back wall.

There are spots where you can get a great beef-cheek taco; places where the asada burritos are as big as your head. But there’s only one Mexican restaurant in town where our favorite plate is, technically, a vegetarian one. That restaurant is Rosa Linda’s, where the cactus tacos keep us coming back year after year. The tough outer petals are de-spined, peeled, shaved and cooked down until they’re as tender and sweet as those canned green beans your mom used to make you eat as a kid. But these are much, much better. Add a little salsa or maybe just a squeeze of lime, and you’ve got the very best way to eat your vegetables.

Los Carboncitos is one of the best free-chips-and-salsa joints in town, and we’re amazed that they’re still just giving this stuff away. Every meal here begins with a basket of fresh chips and a caddy of four free salsas running the gamut from merely hot to truly punishing. Honestly, we’ve considered on many occasions stopping in, eating a whole basket of chips for lunch and then just walking back out again. And yet every time, the chips and salsas act like blood in the shark pool — stoking our hunger, firing our appetite and causing us to end up ordering more huaraches and soup than any one person could reasonably eat in a single sitting.

Papier-mch-parrot Mexican. Carnival Mexican. Meximerican. We’re still struggling to come up with a simple descriptor that describes the kind of Mexican food being done at places like Ric’s — the carefully considered fusion of Mexican flavors, Texan innovation, Borderlands heat and American tastes that will no doubt be the modern flavor of Mexican cuisine as it spreads throughout the rest of the country. Honesty and authenticity in cuisine are not as important here as huge portions, non-threatening presentations and a family-friendly menu with something for everyone from Grandma to Junior. That said, Ric’s food is also pretty good (if you can stomach things like chicken quesadillas made with cream cheese sharing the table with sizzling platters of fajitas and deep-fried chimichangas), and the atmosphere is welcoming to everyone.

There are only two ingredients in a good, unblended mezcal: water and the hearts of agave cactus. And yet with just this, the village palanqueros who make Del Maguey mezcal — working in a style and with equipment unchanged since the sixteenth century — manage to come up with more than a half-dozen truly unique tastes, each one based, like wine, on the mineral content in the soil, the weather and the way the agave is handled in that particular Oaxacan village. Each label is amazing, unlike anything you’ve ever tasted. And many are now available in Denver, where about twenty restaurants and twenty retailers claim to stock the stuff. It’s expensive, but — like many premium indulgences — absolutely worth it.

Taquera Patzcuaro is almost three decades old, and with its recently acquired liquor license, it should last at least another thirty. Just about everything at this time-honored sit-down spot comes steeped in the flavors of Michoacn. From the mar y tierra plates and camarn al mojo de ajo in its deceptively simple lime and garlic sauce to the tacos albandl with their white onions, roasted jalapeos and slivered fried potatoes that attend half of the other plates on the menu, Taquera Patzcuaro has a distinctive style and taste all its own.

All day, every day, whenever you need it and whatever you want: That’s the defining joy of having a joint in town like El Taco de Mxico. Though the crowds ebb and flow, the work in the open kitchen is constant, with the women there always chopping, stirring, slicing and cleaning to stay on top of the rushes that hit this place with the constancy of the tides. From standards like crispy rellenos and beef tacos to more traditional Mexican comfort foods like tacos cabeza and menudo on the weekends, El Taco de Mxico does nearly everything better than nearly every other place around. How can you tell? Come Sunday, when all the churches in the neighborhood let out, the wait for a seat at the counter can stretch to an hour or more — yet the regulars wouldn’t think of going anywhere else.

Simplicity. In the food world, this is an often overlooked attribute. But not at Tacos D.F. When you order an asada taco here, you get a generous pile of chopped, marinated carne asada taken fresh off the grill (along with whatever grilled onions were stuck to it) and wrapped in a fresh tortilla. That’s it. But that’s more than enough. The flavor is amazing — blood and char and caramelized-onion sweetness — and though many varieties of salsa are available at the repurposed salad bar, the best accompaniment to these tacos is a squeeze of lime. Also not to be missed: the pork tacos with a smear of blazing-hot green tomatillo salsa, which are the best thing to come from a pig since bacon.

The easiest way to find these guys is to go to the vendors’ area of the Boulder County Farmers’ Market and look for the longest line. Then get in it, wait, and several minutes and a few bucks later, you’ll walk away with the best corn tamal in Colorado. The masa is soft and sweet, rich with corn’s natural sugar, and a perfect complement to the spicy chicken and green chile inside. There are fancier tamales out there, and cheaper ones. But in season, there are no tamales better than those coming out of the Amaizing Corn Tamales booth.

You can tell how good the food is at Seor Burrito by the way all the customers lean forward each time an order is laid out on the counter and the way all but one lucky someone fall back into their chairs, disappointed when they discover that the food coming out of the kitchen isn’t for them. This little space is about as spartan as it gets — just a few tables, a big counter and a bigger menu. There are house specials, daily specials and fantastic sopaipillas that come hot out of the fryers. But as the name implies, the joint is all about burritos — in many varieties, each assembled to order, all fantastic.

If you’re going for Colorado-style green chile, you need to forget everything that makes a classic New Mexican verde or the tamal sauces you find at some of the more authentic norteo Mexican lunch counters around town. A Colorado green should be definitive in its own way, a thick stew full of chiles and pork and whatever else the kitchen decides to throw in. Reiver’s produces a brew whose dull heat, smoky flavor and strangely pervasive, savory bite makes it the perfect dipping sauce for everything on the menu. The combination of the chiles’ fire and the pork’s fatty luxuriousness are unbelievably addictive, and a true taste of this peculiar Colorado specialty.

Over the years, patriarch Jack Martinez has tried a lot of things to build his business at Jack-n-Grill. He’s expanded the menu, he’s expanded the building, gotten a liquor license, franchised his concept and done everything short of handing out dollar bills to get people in the door. But in truth, he’s never really had to do much of anything, because anyone who knows chile knows that Martinez (once a New Mexico chile importer himself) has the best, most consistent supply in Denver of the sweet-hot, smoky southern New Mexico green that defines both that culture and that cuisine. The best thing on Jack-n-Grill’s menu is anything with green chile on it, and in season, the faithful line up for a block outside Jack-n-Grill so they can take home a sweating plastic bag of freshly roasted chiles.

One can of Pacfico and one poached shrimp with lots of salt and just a touch of spice: That’s all it takes to make a chelada. Conveniently enough, that’s also all it takes to win yourself an award for finding two great tastes that taste great together.

El Coyotito #3, a little storefront on Leetsdale (we have no idea where #1 and #2 may be) gets a lot of things right. Service is fast and friendly. There’s a great Spanish-only jukebox in the corner. And while the standard Mexican fare (tacos, burritos, etc.) is only good, the seafood is great. The presentations are simple, the flavors fresh and clean. And with that big beach mural painted along the back wall, there’s no better place to kick back with an iced bottle of real Mexican Coca-Cola and a giant shrimp cocktail served in a hurricane glass.

Szechuan Chinese holds down one of the worst imaginable locations in all of restaurantdom, in a nearly inaccessible strip mall off Sixth Avenue. Still, for close to thirty years, the customers have kept coming. And most of them are coming for the dumplings: heavy and huge, as big across as a balled fist. The dough is just the right thickness; the filling is pork and ginger and herbs, assembled by hand and worked with the fingers like a great meatloaf. Served eight to an order, a single plate is a meal in itself — satisfying on a level that, after half the dumplings are gone, no longer has anything to do with simple hunger, but everything to do with the pampering comfort of salt and grease and the work of skilled hands.

Of all the things for a chef to be good at, Alex Seidel may be best at making fritters. While still on the line at Mizuna, he did apple fritters to go alongside the autumn presentations of foie gras. Now that he has his own place with Fruition, he starts off the menu with an amazing carpaccio of beets graced by the inclusion of fried goat-cheese fritters that arrive perfectly browned, round as cue balls and filled with wonderfully sour goat cheese turned almost liquid by the heat of the fryers.

Luciano’s does wings. Luciano’s does pizza. And that’s pretty much all Luciano’s does. At any rate, that’s all that matters to anyone who cares about the archetypal flavors of Buffalo, where pizza and wings are the alpha and omega. Here the wings are fried hard, sauced with Frank’s RedHot and served to-go in a cardboard box (more important to the smell and flavor than you’d think). The Buffalo-style pizzas are square, touched with a sweet sauce, mounted on a crust that’s thicker than you find in New York City, thinner than the pizzas of the Midwest. The result is a pizza that reminds a lot of people of Pizza Thursdays in their high school cafeteria. It’s an acquired taste, sure, but nothing about Buffalo is easy.

For decades, the guys working the fryers at Wingman have been perfecting their craft. And it’s a credit to the deep appreciation of regional and international cuisines possessed by so many Denverites (natives and transplants alike) that this local chain has been so successful, because Wingman’s craft is the art of chicken wings — one of the three things (the others are snow and a tragic missed field goal) that the city of Buffalo, New York, is famous for. As a matter of fact, Wingman has gotten so good at making chicken wings — or, more accurately, wing sauce — that it’s taken its game to the home of the chicken wing and twice come home from Buffalo with a first prize from the Buffalo Wing Festival.

A makeover, a change of staff, and suddenly this old watering hole has become a real restaurant, where you’ll find the best chicken-fried steak in the city. Over the years, the kitchen crew at Reiver’s has gone through some serious ups and downs, but the joint is definitely back on top now, with a renovated dining room and a passion for giving the regulars what they want. Lucky for us, the loyalists seem very fond of chicken-fried steak made Reiver’s style, with a milk-soaked and pounded steak wrapped in prosciutto, breaded Southern style in crushed Saltine crackers, then fried and served over a mound of mashed potatoes and under a nap of thick chicken gravy.

Fried chicken is not really meant to be eaten in a dining room. It’s meant to be eaten around the family dinner table, or sitting on a splintery picnic bench in the sun, or standing on the front porch watching the sun go down. At Joseph’s Southern Food, you have no real choice but to take your chicken on the run, since every mess of breasts, legs and thighs is fried in the pot to order and then bagged up to go. But that process takes twenty minutes or so, which leaves you time to order up some sides, peruse the old-fashioned candies and fountain sodas on display in the front room of the old house where Joseph’s is located, then have yourself an entire picnic packed for the park.

This is great chicken, slow-cooked chicken, tender and greasy chicken sheathed in a crisp armor of salt-and-peppered batter, a one-off of the incomparable Kansas City style practiced by places like Stroud’s and a hundred and one less well-known fry joints and chicken shacks. It’s also chicken that can take more than forty minutes to arrive, because every bird that’s ordered at Castle Cafe is split in half, hand-floured and cooked to order in a shallow pan by a guy whose only job is to watch those chickens and turn each piece at just the right moment to make sure each one is perfect. You know what? We love that guy. And the wait is totally worth it.

Since chef James Mazzio took over the kitchen at Via, a lot of things have improved. The biggest improvement? Definitely the fries, which are now so good they’d be impossible to improve on. Served in a tall paper cone stuck inside a cool wrought-iron holder, in both presentation and taste these are reminiscent of the award winners that Mazzio served at the late, lamented Triana. They’re cut thin, fried just right, hit with a little sugar and a little spice mix, then served with a side of excellent housemade horseradish cream sauce. Fries don’t get any better than this.

In thirty years, you learn to do some things right. And Govnr’s Park, which marked its thirtieth anniversary last summer, does potato chips very, very right: sliced thin, freshly fried, salted and served on greasy waxed paper.

What’s better than barbecue? That’s right: fast barbecue. While Jim ‘n Nick’s has all the trappings of a traditional barbecue restaurant — tables, menus, waiters and such — what makes it special is the drive-thru. Not only can you order off the entire menu here, but service is lightning-quick, and the real wood smokers fill every car with the smell of good old-fashioned brick-pit barbecue.

Barbecue isn’t an exclusively American passion. Far beyond the traditions of this country’s pit masters, there’s a world full of ropa vieja, churrasco and smoky roasted pig head that drives us just as wild as that perfect shredded pork butt redolent of hickory and slapped with a brush of sweet-hot K.C. mop. To us, barbecue is a global sensation, a borderless pleasure that has the same meaning in Guangdong Province as it does in Greenville. And when we’re in need of a fix of international barbecue, we head straight for the counter at Pacific Ocean. Here, Chinese barbecued pork — along with trotters, pig’s heads and all the other carnivorous Asian ephemera — is laid out in huge slabs and orders measured either in pounds or the space between two fingers, then taken home and sliced or shredded for shameless midnight consumption.

When Yazoo owner Don Hines says he’s doing Deep South barbecue, he’s not kidding. He’s from Mississippi, and it shows when he smokes. His meat cooks low and slow — twelve hours — over a combination of hickory and pecan wood, with only a strong dry rub to keep it company. As his website advises, “All Yazoo meat items can fend for themselves in taste, but we will let you add different barbecue sauces.” That always kills us — “let you,” as if the pit man needs to grant permission before anyone can fuck up his own supper. But Don’s right: Straight from the smoker, Yazoo’s meat — and in particular, the pork shoulder, powerfully flavored by sweet pecan and hickory smoke — is so good that absolutely nothing else is required.

The worst thing about barbecue is waiting for it. And the worst thing about wet barbecue is that it can’t be eaten while driving. Well, not without seriously compromising the resale value of your ride. Thus, the very worst thing about Sam Taylor’s barbecue — which comes slathered in a thick, sticky, gloss-black sauce, a Tennessee-meets-K.C. riff that packs both heat and sweet — is that it’s done wet, which means the only thing to do when you’re buying a whole lot of barbecue to go is to top off your order with a “poke sammich” — a pork sandwich done on a grilled roll with enough structural integrity that you can eat it one-handed in traffic.

The standard barbecue offerings at Cabin Creek are excellent: the ribs stiff and smoked all the way to the bone with a surface like shellacked hardwood; the pork juicy, fatty, tender and woody-sweet, turned electric with the addition of a great Carolina mustard-and-vinegar sauce. But what elevates this spot above all other barbecue joints is the rest of the menu. The kitchen does open-faced barbecue sandwiches and barbecue po’ boys. It does green chile shot with barbecued pork, cowboy chili made molasses-sweet, and red-chile-spiked baked beans hit with a handful of pulled pork or shredded brisket. The crew also rolls a terrific barbecue burrito, wrapping spicy beans and pork in a tortilla and smothering it with green chile, cheese and sour cream. And then there’s the ultimate in barbecue-junkie midnight hangover food: the BBQ masher, a bowl of mashed red-skin potatoes topped with pulled pork or brisket, topped again with cheese and again with sour cream. There hasn’t been anything done better with barbecue since the first pork sandwich with pickles was invented.

If you have friends coming in from out of state, a passel of carnivorous German tourists to impress, family in town expecting a “real Western experience” or just a pressing need to find a menu with balls (literally) late on a Thursday night, head on over to the Buckhorn. The staff is one of the friendliest and most accommodating in the city. The menu (which is translated into a half-dozen languages) consists almost entirely of meat — primarily beef steaks of various crippling sizes, but also some unusual game dishes always handled with surprising restraint — and the atmosphere is dark, cluttered, historic (there’s actually a museum upstairs past the bar full of guns, whiskey bottles and other civilizing artifacts of the good ol’ days) and full of vicious creatures that have been shot, stuffed, mounted and forced into an eternity of watching you eat parts of their brethren. Serves them right for being so delicious.

The steaks are big, the sides are big, the tables are big — everything about the Northwoods Inn is big except the prices, which are reasonable if you consider that the meals are all-inclusive and portions can be measured by the pound. This is a family spot, owned by the same family for generations (and through two locations) and catering to big clans interested only in the simplicity of a bygone age, when Ronald Reagan was still a TV star. It’s also an indisputably Western restaurant, with its penchant for square-state chuckwagon chic (soup is served communally in a cast-iron pot) and a decor comprising framed, folksy witticisms and the heads of dead animals hanging on the walls. Move ’em out!

Even though this Broadway landmark now sports a renovated dining room, it hasn’t lost an inch of history or an ounce of soul. Club 404 is the kind of joint that attracts everyone from local construction workers to the guys from Antique Row, Broadway street creatures, daytime drinkers, broke neighborhood hipsters, finger-licking carnivores and families looking for a cheap night out involving a fat steak, an iceberg salad and a couple of cold beers that won’t put them into bankruptcy arbitration. Wait long enough and you’ll see half the city pass through this bar. And no one ever leaves Club 404 hungry.

Since the day it opened in a brand-new building tucked into a very revitalized Larimer Square, the Capital Grille has been the idealized steakhouse in a town that is very, very serious about its steaks. Everything about this restaurant — from the dark and clubby decor to the white tablecloths atop the padded tabletops, the excellent bar and the high-roller tables along the far wall — is exemplary of what a great steakhouse should be: at once both exceptional and welcoming, elitist but approachable. And the food? Nearly perfect every time we’ve visited, whether during the dragging last hour of lunch or in the middle of a crushing Friday-night dinner rush. Steaks are obviously the main event here, and diners would be wise to go with the flow, order the biggest one they can swallow, and know that meat-and-potatoes dining just doesn’t get any better than this.

At Parallel 17, there are many good things to eat. There are always pretty things to look at. And there are several fine things to drink. But the one that counts is the Vietnamese coffee martini. Of course, this is not a true martini (that can only be one thing — gin, gin, gin and an olive), but it is still an amazing drink, as addictive as crack cocaine, made of chilled Vietnamese coffee, vanilla Stoli, Kahla and a single dot of sweetened condensed milk lurking in the hollow where stem meets glass. Never again will we so quickly dismiss as knee-jerk heresy those terrible, juvenile and self-indulgent cocktails that today are poured as proxy to James Bond’s favorite recreational indulgence. No, from now on we’ll try one first — and then we’ll make fun of it. Unless it rises to the level of Parallel 17’s Vietnamese coffee martini, in which case we’ll give it an award.

Though now a member of the Wynkoop family of bars and restaurants, this old-time neighborhood Italian joint and former Mob bar still has a couple things going for it. First, the atmosphere (bulletproof front door, basement vault, Frank-and-Dino-at-the-Copa decor) and fifty-odd years of history at Gaetano’s can’t be bought, but must be earned. And second, the tenders working behind the comfortable, dark bar (perfect for daytime drinking) know how to assemble those classic cocktails that never go out of style. Want a Sidecar? A perfect gin gimlet? Maybe a Gibson or a tall Collins is more your style. Whatever your cocktail of choice, Gaetano’s is the best spot in Denver to get it made the way it should be made — and the perfect place to drink it.

Vita is proof that there’s life after death — because this new Italian restaurant in part of the old Olinger Mortuary space is very lively indeed. Part of that is due to the interesting menu, part to the chic interior — and a lot to the very impressive cocktail menu that specializes in mixing fresh ingredients in very fresh ways. Basil gimlet, anyone? For a truly stirring experience, sip your drink at the indoor/outdoor patio bar.

We tried. While our tequila-snob friends sipped at their Coin-style marg, we knocked back every house margarita we could find. We sucked down so many that our teeth started squeaking from all the sweet and sour. And again and again, we kept coming back to those palate-cleansing house margs mixed up at Mezcal. Rather than try to cover up a bad tequila with a worse mix, Mezcal starts with fresh-squeezed juice, pours in (generously) 100 percent agave 30-30 Blanco, then adds a spritz of carbonation to brighten the drink. Served in a pint glass, it’s a real deal at happy hour, when it costs only $4, but even at the standard $6, it’s the best margarita in town.

On the island in the middle of Mezcal’s wraparound bar are dozens and dozens of bottles of tequila and mezcal — from the cheapest, greasy-yellow-death variety up through the finest, most artisanal small-batch liquors ever to come out of Mexico. Then there’s the small fridge mounted in the back wall, where the best of the best, the house’s favorites, are kept. And beyond that, the owners and bartenders always seem to have some super-extra-special secret stash of imported bottles tucked away that they’ll pull out and pour when the mood strikes to turn someone on to something that’ll totally blow his mind. Without a doubt, the Del Maguey “Pechuga” (the only mezcal made with a raw chicken in every barrel) is the best neat shot in the house, but we could easily spend the next ten years bellied up to Mezcal’s bar, drinking and trying to decide on what’s second best. Who’s coming with us?

It’s the tajut — the sample, the half-glass of vin ordinaire — that makes Frasca a must-stop destination for those still trying to find their way in the wine world. But Frasca takes a good idea several steps better. The impressively long list of tajuts — organized by Certified Master Sommelier Bobby Stuckey and his floor staff — was put together not to dispose of unwanted bottles, but to introduce people to a world of sometimes devastatingly good wines that they might not try if forced to commit to a whole bottle, or even just a whole glass. The list (like Frasca’s menu) is ever-changing as new cases come in and new wonders are discovered, but we guarantee that what you drink will be interesting and leave you wanting to sample, drink and learn more.

If you know almost nothing about wine, can’t speak French and couldn’t care less about growing region, age, legs, microclimatology or varietals but still don’t want to make a fool out of yourself by accidentally ordering the French equivalent of a bottle of Mad Dog to go with your cassoulet, Z Cuisine has the solution. On the wall near the bar is a chalkboard that lists the wine of the day. It’s never terribly expensive, usually interesting in some way you probably won’t understand, and can be ordered simply by pointing — which you should do with a certain attitude of world-weary lan. Z Cuisine’s vin de la maison offers an easy, eminently drinkable choice that saves you from having to peruse the list and pretend you know what you’re looking at.

The regular wine list offered to diners at the Palace Arms is as dense and heavy as a Leon Uris novel, containing both the house’s most easily moved everyday bottles and a selection of the treasures kept buried in the basement. The full list is more like the Bible, written in large print on heavy-bond paper. For serious oenophiles only, it’s a daunting tome that contains within its pages the very best of the vintner’s craft and hints of the formidable cellar below filled with once-in-a-lifetime bottles. But even beyond depth and price, the Palace Arms has a real asset in staffers who aren’t shy about sharing knowledge and are admirable in their restraint, allowing each table to define its own interest and then moving on from there. So can you get a thousand-dollar bottle of Chteau de Blah Blah here? Absolutely. But you can also get a forty-dollar bottle of something young and Spanish and walk away just as pleased (and drunk).

A longtime resident of Highland, former Wynkoop brewer Kyle Carstens thought the area was perfect for a brewpub — but it took him years to finally get his North Star brewpub up and running. Still, there’s no denying that this place was worth the wait. Not surprisingly, the home brews are great — but the ambience of the cozy, spring-green-painted spot is also unbeatable. Order up some tater tots, grab a fresh pint of the Pic’s Pale Ale, and toast North Star’s very bright future.

When the Wynkoop Brewing Co. opened almost twenty years ago in LoDo, there was no Coors Field, no sports bar every few steps, no brewpub every few steps past that. The Wynkoop was a pioneer not just in the microbrew industry, but also in this neighborhood, and for too many years, it’s been taken for granted. But no more. Lately we’ve found ourselves heading to the Wynkoop on all sorts of occasions: when we needed a night out of the house, a place to watch the game, a spot to hold a last-minute business meeting, or just a bar stool where we could kick back with a couple pints of serious home brew. With recent improvements in service and an overhaul of the kitchen’s down-to-earth menu of American classics (shepherd’s pie, burgers, steaks, vegetarian green chile, even nachos), the Wynkoop once again rises to the top — which is probably where it belonged all along.

We’ve been waiting a long time to toast Stranahan’s Colorado Whiskey. But creating a brand-new whiskey takes time, and it wasn’t until last spring that the very first barrel of Stranahan’s was tapped at this micro-distillery in the Ballpark neighborhood. That initial taste was well worth the two-year wait, though. Stranahan’s is smooth sipping whiskey that tastes as golden as it looks. And it’s almost as rare as gold. Stranahan’s is sold only in Colorado, and since just three barrels are produced per week, your best bet for finding it is at the distillery itself.

Great minds drink alike: That’s the slogan of the Great Divide Brewing Company. We’ll tap into that sentiment — and there’s no better place to do so than in the Great Divide Tap Room, a cool new space carved into the Ballpark neighborhood brewery. Sitting and swilling in this cozy, clubby nook, you can sample from the eight taps dispensing Great Divide’s award-winning craft beers while watching those beers being produced in the brewery itself. Bottoms up.

Falling Rock Tap House could be the best beer joint not just in Denver, but in the entire beer-drinking world. Every fall, folks in town for the Great American Beer Festival make a pilgrimage to this LoDo institution to partake of a few of the more than seventy beers on tap — all craft brewed, “no contract brews or megaswill.” And countless more varieties are available by the bottle, from the most obvious Colorado choices to the most obscure Austrian offerings. With expansive kitchen hours and effusive employees, Falling Rock is a great joint to fall into.

This is a town teeming with baristas: tattooed, spike-haired baristas; convenience-store baristas; baristas entombed in drive-up booths; smarmy Starbucks baristas; barely breathing baristas. But once in a while you come across someone who just understands the art of making espresso, and Doug Naiman has clearly bean there and done that. He patiently extracts his wicked brew from this Beauvallon bistro’s sleek, shiny espresso machine (a fine, functional unit that’s all work and no play) and doesn’t hesitate to start over when the results are less than perfect.

Paris on the Platte has long been one of Denver’s finest jolt joints — and now it’s among the few that can legally allow cigarettes, too, due to the Platte’s designation as a tobacconist. As a result, Paris is a sturdy, smoky spot for the laptop set, with a menu full of caffeinated creations that make your eyes bug into the wee hours. For those who’d rather not ride out an all-night espresso buzz, there’s the Paris Wine Bar right next door. Appealing and sophisticated, with a chill-out vibe and an unpretentious list of reasonably priced wines from around the world, Paris Wine Bar soothes the jitters as well as the soul — and counteracts all the hyperactive hooey next door.

When City, O’ City opened in the former home of WaterCourse, it quickly became the talk of the town because it reminded everyone of that one really great coffeehouse/bar in Williamsburg…or was it in the Mission? No, Amsterdam! It’s easy to see why a space where espresso drinkers can mingle with port sippers and pint guzzlers might make you think of an establishment very far away from Denver. But that’s only if you saddle our city with an inferiority complex. In fact, this “down-tempo coffeehouse and bar” fits right into its home on 13th Avenue, a latte’s throw from the new wing of the Denver Art Museum. And in keeping with its cool setting and ambience, owner Dan Landes (who also owns WaterCourse, now relocated to 17th Avenue) has introduced a menu of veggie pizzas as well as performances by indie musicians and DJs. No coffeehouse is better geared to this city than City O’ City.

Ah, the yin and yang, the sweet and sour of Colfax, Denver’s most diverse and delicious street. At Bourbon Grill, you’ll find everyone from hipsters to hookers, yuppies to immigrants, cops to East High students all congregating outside the little storefront to quench their common thirst with a big Styrofoam cup of fresh-squeezed lemonade.

On the best nights at the original Brix, it’s hard to tell who’s an employee, who’s a customer and who’s a friend. Everyone just seems to wander around carrying drinks and plates, jumping from table to table doing shots and carrying on conversations about everything under the sun. Though located in Cherry Creek, Brix is about as anti-Creek as you can get, drawing a young, hip, moneyed group of weirdos, bar-hoppers and night creatures: A small-time weed dealer, a chef on the prowl or a recently paroled arsonist would get more action here than a high-powered attorney or black-jacket politico. The food is good, the drinks are strong, the vibe is cool — but we come for the crowds, because you never know who’s going to hit the Brix.

There are places around town where one visit is enough. One meal off the menu and you know everything there is to know about the place. But there are other restaurants, other menus, that reveal themselves only over time. Chama is one of those restaurants, and the menu, designed by chef Sean Yontz, is one of those menus. On the surface, it seems so simple: a Meximerican three-a-day with tacos, burritos, piloncillo-spiked French toast and entrees heavy on the chiles. But after a few visits, you begin to see the careful balance of Mexican, New Mexican and nouvelle Latino influences at play here. Somewhere around meal six, you understand that with its deep tequila and mezcal list, friendly service and multi-layered menu, Chama is a truly excellent restaurant hidden in the body of a merely mediocre one. And after that? By the time you’ve been to Chama half a dozen times, you qualify as a restaurant regular — and there’s no question that friends of this house are treated like best friends indeed.

Restaurant Kevin Taylor is not only the finest expression of the classical talents of Denver’s most prolific Big Name Chef, but it’s provided some of our most surpassing moments of culinary bliss this past year. Not every one of the seasonal menus is perfect, but when this kitchen is on, it’s brilliant, rising so far above Denver’s culinary status quo that at times it can seem nearly ethereal.

Unless you order very, very carefully, dinner at the Palace Arms may cost you the price of a decent used car — but at least the macaroons brought with the bill are free. They also happen to be among the most delicious little cookies we’ve ever tasted, with a delicate texture and hints of honey, almond and sugar.

Pastry chef Yasmin Lozada-Hissom is just one of the many reasons that Duo has taken off. But she’s a big reason. Her desserts — rustic apple-cranberry tarts, completely addictive sticky toffee puddings and frozen pistachio nougat, to name just a few — are the stuff dreams are made of (you know: sugar, chocolate, more sugar, buttercream). Any one of them makes for a perfect extravagance at the end of what’s certain to have been a very good meal.

Like mod haircuts and hot pants, the cheese course seems to wax and wane in popularity year by year. There are seasons when it seems that every restaurateur in town is dumping bucketloads of money into the acquisition of increasingly strange and powerful cheeses from around the globe, others when it’s tough to find a wedge of cheddar anywhere. But Fruition has found an elegant constant with its French Bleu D’Laquille: a simple plate that offers a single, good-sized slab of Bleu D’Laquille attended by nothing more than toasted brioche, a smear of fig paste and a bit of raw honeycomb sitting in a puddle of its own delicious honey.

Frank Bonanno, owner of Mizuna and Luca d’Italia, has had a pretty wild run recently. There was the complicated publication of his first cookbook and the flurry of promotion that followed. There was the dissolution of his partnership at the floundering Milagro Taco Bar and Harry’s up on 17th Avenue. There was the loss of two of his Mizuna vets and the promotion of two new guys to take over those top spots. And through all of it, Mizuna — Bonanno’s first and best restaurant — has remained strong, full and, most important, vital. It’s a perfect showcase for the talents (and menus) of Bonanno, one of Denver’s best chefs and also a hell of a businessman. At Mizuna, it doesn’t matter what night of the week you show up (unless you show up on Sunday or Monday, when the place is closed); dinner is bound to be amazing, with terrific fried anything appetizers and great fish and foie entrees.

Monday nights at Frasca are community night — a time for owners Lachlan Mac-kinnon-Patterson and Bobby Stuckey, as well as their front- and back-of-the-house crews, to give a little something back to the community that’s been so good to them. And how better for this chef and master sommelier to express their gratitude than with food? Every week, they put together a special prix fixe menu, open the doors and wait to see what happens. Although not every lineup is brilliant — sometimes the Monday-night dinners seem like a test run for dishes that could appear later on the regular menu — with a little risk comes great reward. Some of Frasca’s best tricks have been tried at these informal evenings, and the prices are unbeatable.

It’s funny how Duo’s dining room — a simple space with pale wood, exposed brick, white tablecloths — initially seems underwhelming. At first blush, it looks like any one of a hundred other neighborhood joints going for casual bistro elegance. But Duo begins to reveal itself as soon as the menus come out — and once the plates start arriving? You’ll never look at the place the same way again. With food like this, Duo is the ideal go-to spot for special occasions of any description. Chef John Broening’s ever-changing seasonal menus always maintain a pitch-perfect balance between his obsessive love of ingredients and his smarter-than-the-average-bear take on that oft-abused cuisine called New American; the service continually walks the line between educated professionalism and informal joie de travail; and the pacing of meals is excellent — never rushed, never poky. Whether you’re celebrating an anniversary or a successful parole hearing, Duo is the best spot to mark one of life’s little victories. After all, that pretty much describes this restaurant, too.

This isn’t to say that we wouldn’t eat at Elway’s on our own dime. We would, and have, more times than our credit limit can bear. But what we are saying is, if you’ve got the chance to stick The Man with the bill, then go ring up a whopper at Elway’s. Start with a couple of classic martinis at the bar, then retire to the dining room and take a tour through the top end of the menu: the 22-ounce prime bone-in ribeye with cremini mushrooms; one of those food-as-art shrimp cocktails served over a smoking bed of dry ice; a big, beautiful lobster tail; and then a double-shot sugar rush with s’mores and Ding Dongs to round out your meal. With any luck, you may even spot John Elway himself — which will so impress your boss that he won’t quibble over a couple hundred bucks.

To begin, a few ounces of the Palace Arms’ diminishing stock of real, pre-embargo caviar, which will run you anywhere from $500 to $1,000. Then order a shot — but sip it! — of very well-aged 1870s cognac ($575). After that the prices become somewhat more terrestrial for a beautiful bowl of perfect consomm, a classic loup de mer or the loin of bison Rossini topped with slips of seared foie gras and settled in a tarn of amazing Madeira reduction. For dessert, there’s bananas Foster from the cart — then a cigar and a glass of twenty-year-old port in the Churchill Bar next door. Tip big and stagger out of the Brown Palace knowing that you’ve just had the experience of a lifetime. Is it worth it? As with a designer suit or a luxury car, if you can afford it, you really don’t need to ask.

Although Dazzle is best known as a dazzling jazz bar, it offers a great riff on happy hour. First, we like its idea of a happy “hour” being a hundred and fifty minutes long on weekdays (it’s an hour shorter on weekends). Second, we like how happiness comes at a flat rate: $5 a plate. Third, we love that happiness here does not necessarily translate to “deep-fried anything,” “artichoke goo,” “half-frozen sliders” or “jalapeo poppers.” And finally, the twenty-item-deep happy-hour menu served daily guarantees that even after we tire of the goat-cheese crostini, crab-stuffed mushroom caps, killer shrimp cocktails, cinnamon-caramel apple sandwiches with sharp cheddar, brie sandwiches and simple fried green tomatoes, there will still be plenty of choices left to keep us happy until the start of dinner.

Stepping into Chicago the restaurant is like stepping into Chicago the city, thanks to decor dominated by case after case of colorful memorabilia devoted to the Bears, White Sox, Black Hawks and, yes, even the Cubs. Indeed, placards on the tables list significant events that have taken place since 1908 — when the Cubs last won the World Series — including the invention of television, which has allowed the team’s fans to watch their beloved Cubs lose from the comfort of their own homes. But it’s worth venturing out to taste Chicago’s tasty ballpark fare, which is more than a match for the ambience. Those who dare to order a hot dog not served Chicago style should expect a side of good-natured attitude at no additional charge. To paraphrase Sean Connery in The Untouchables, that’s the Chicago way.

We love hot dog carts. Seriously, a couple of dirty-water dogs, something salty out of a foil bag and a cold Coke is often the only thing that carries us through the day. But sometimes even the traditional charms of a street-corner vendor are not enough, and that’s when we make the trek to the 16th Street Mall for one of Biker Jim’s white veal brats, reindeer sausages or spiced bison dogs. Jim is always happy to talk about his gourmet-game product (when he’s not working through a long lunch-rush line, that is), as well as his recent foray into the custom-cheesecake business. Some of Denver’s finer restaurants are now serving the cheesecakes; you can get a single slice from one of the coolers behind Jim’s cart.

In genetics, it’s known that environmental stress breeds both diversity and specialization. Same thing goes for food. And since there’s almost no environment in the lower 48 more harsh than that of Buffalo, New York, in the winter, it shouldn’t come as any surprise that Buffalo boasts a wide range of regional cuisine (chicken wings, pizza, beef on weck, etc.) and a sense of specialization that makes its particular iterations on American classic foods the best. Witness the Sahlen’s hot dogs and Weber mustard served at the Old Fashioned, one of Denver’s very few exemplars of authentic Buffalo cuisine. Go ahead and order two dogs — one with onions and hot sauce, the other with a generous shot of Weber’s finest — and think warm thoughts.

The exact history of the Griff’s Burger Bar chain is somewhat sketchy, but had the fast-food industry gone a little differently, we like to think that Griff’s might have been a victor in the drive-thru burger war. We can imagine a time when Griff’s — not Burger King, not McDonald’s — would have come out on top and blanketed the world with its weird, A-frame, car-cult cheeseburgery goodness. Why? Because a Griff’s burger kicks the shit out of anything served at Mickey D’s. So does a Griff’s shake. So do its fries. And its mascot — some kind of bizarre little midget clown thing — is definitely better than anything ever dreamed up by the suits on Madison Avenue. But even if Griff’s never made the final cut in the real world, Denver still has two of its original outposts. And they’re the best.

Bud’s Bar served the best bar burger last year, and ten years before that. Odds are pretty good that this small, insanely popular, biker-friendly roadhouse will serve the best bar burgers ten years from now, too. For decades, it has served nothing but burgers, and that single-minded focus has paid off with a two-fisted American classic that puts Bud’s ahead of all the rest.

We love green-chile cheeseburgers. We’ve eaten a lot of them in this city, and although none has been the green-chile cheeseburger of our dreams — that exists only at the Owl in New Mexico — the Cherry Cricket’s green chile cheeseburger is darn good. Part of that can be attributed to the atmosphere in which it’s served: aggressively anti-Creek. More can be attributed to the fact that the burger comes properly charred, and covered with those hot, sweet chiles. And perhaps most of it can be attributed to the Cricket serving the ultimate liquid sidecar for a green-chile cheeseburger: two bottles of Genny Cream Ale and a Bushmills back.

Steuben’s, brought to us this past year by the same people who brought us Vesta Dipping Grill ten years ago, opened huge with a full board of American classics from around the country. Over the following months, it only got huger — and today it shows no signs of slowing down. But Steuben’s does have one problem: In attempting to re-create all these fiercely regional and beloved tastes of home, it’s managed to piss off just about everyone from everywhere, because everyone knows that their hometown favorite hot dog/cheeseburger/barbecue sandwich/what-have-you is the best in the world and can never be copied. Still, as long as you stay away from your home turf, the Steuben’s menu serves as a magical gateway to everyone else’s memories of such childhood favorites as lobster rolls, spaghetti with meatballs, gravy fries and cupcakes.

P.B. Loco speaks directly to those soft and gushy, sacked-out-in-front-of-the-TV-watching-Transformers memories of a particularly peanut-butter-obsessed slice of the Denver dining demographic. If you don’t like peanut butter…no, if you don’t love peanut butter, don’t come here, because peanut butter is all this place serves, in myriad varieties, in sandwiches that run from the common (chunky peanut butter and marshmallow) to the completely fucking bizarre (curried peanut butter with pickles, coconut and potato chips) and cover every inch in between. The Elvis tribute of peanut butter, honey and bananas sprinkled with bacon bits on grilled white bread with a side of animal crackers could be the most deliciously decadent taste of anyone’s childhood, ever.

Corn dogs, gravy fries, grilled cheese sandwiches, T-bone steaks and boba tea. Of all the freaky fusions created by Denver’s odd patchwork of ethnic neighborhoods, Cowbobas — a Vietnamese cowboy steakhouse built, stocked and staffed without a hint of retro irony — may feature the best. You can feel the Mexican, Chinese, Vietnamese and American cultures rubbing up against each other every time you sit down here, order a steak — choice, the preferred grade of backyard grillers everywhere, tasting of blood and gristle and char — and baked potato and salad with a side of fries, then get your vacuum-sealed plastic cup of iced Vietnamese coffee with a Day-Glo panda on it. Amenities are limited to your choice of sauces and smiles from the waitresses, but no one who claims to truly love and understand Denver could possibly resist the charms of Cowbobas.

The best Cuban sandwich in town — a miracle of pork, pork and pork, Swiss cheese, sharp mustard and pickles on lardy grilled and pressed bread — just happens to be made at Buenos Aires Pizzeria, an Argentine joint best known for its pizza, empanadas and gnocchi. Weird? Maybe in any other city, but in Denver, it’s just another example of the small culinary miracles you can discover when willing to go the distance to find something done right.

Jerry? The guy who owns this franchise-but-not-a-franchise of the South Philly Cheesesteak Company that’s located in a Conoco? Yeah, he’s nuts, and he’ll talk your ear clean off if you let him. But he’s also some kind of sandwich-making genius — a savant, or just one of those guys with a direct line to God. Jerry’s menu is long, and his little shop inside the Conoco is always busy. People come here from across the state. And Jerry never stops talking — about sandwiches, about his customers, about conservative politics, about Philly and the East Coast, about (and occasionally to) his ingredients. But the sandwiches he makes from those ingredients! Forget the cheese-steak and go straight for the ham and provolone hoagie with razor-thin white onions and herbed oil, or the Italian with ham, capicola and real Genoa salami. Right on his menu, Jerry says that this is the best hoagie you can buy in Colorado, and he’s not lying.

The best way to judge a sandwich joint is how you order there. At a decent sandwich joint, you’ll order lunch. At a good one, you’ll order lunch and maybe a little something extra for dinner. But at the best sandwich joint, you’ll empty bank accounts and max out credit cards in order to buy enough food to feed you and ten of your closest friends for a week — even if you don’t have ten friends who need feeding or a fridge big enough to hold the leftovers. At Pat’s, ordering everything on the board — and then some — is a very real danger. Salami sandwiches dressed in oil, salt and pepper; Italian grinders; hot meatball sandwiches that are the bane of every car’s upholstery; the Gobbler (turkey, stuffing and cranberry mayo, served cold like perfect Thanksgiving leftovers every day of the year) — we just can’t stop. Which is how we know that this particular Pat’s outlet is not just the best of the bunch, but the best sandwich joint in town — truly deserving of its #1.

Banh mi — Vietnamese sandwiches with a distinctively French twist — are the plats du jour here, every jour of the week. There are a dozen or so varieties available at the counter, from classic pork pt with pork and more pork to spicy pork and barbecued pork and even all-vegetable offerings, all mounted on dwarf baguettes that have the distinctive delicacy of masterful baking. No matter what’s on your sandwich, it costs just $2.50, which should leave plenty of change for an iced Vietnamese coffee or lychee soda.

Famous Pizza was an institution in this town thirty years ago, and this outpost is still a must-stop for anyone in need of a quick lunch. For five bucks, you can get two slices of whatever’s in the box — which is bound to start with a classic New York thin crust, no matter what’s on top — and a Coke and be fed and out in about ten minutes, depending on how fast you can shovel in the food. For those with more time on their hands, well, you’re on Broadway, baby. Use your imagination.

Owners Brad and Libby Birky started SAME Cafe (So All May Eat) with a simple philosophy: Everyone ought to be able to eat well and affordably in their neighborhood. With that in mind, they decided not to demand money from anyone who comes to eat at their small cafe — which features an ever-changing menu of healthy pizzas, salads, soups and desserts — but simply to put a box by the door for donations. The way it’s supposed to work, a diner comes in, has lunch (or an early dinner on the weekends), then pays whatever he’s able or whatever he thinks the meal is worth. Surprisingly, the system has actually worked, with the Birkys doing a good business even as they do good.

Chain restaurants are creatures of convenience: They’re the places where you eat when you don’t want to think about where you want to eat. The best of them insinuate themselves seamlessly into your world and your lifestyle — and Tokyo Joe’s is definitely one of the best, not just for Denver, but for the fast-food world at large. The Japanese noodle-house concept is both the perfect extension of the modern American fast-casual business model and a working fit for Colorado, with its long history of Japanese immigration. Beyond that, Tokyo Joe’s is just good —with a DIY menu long enough to remain interesting over many repeat visits and a staff absolutely committed to making sure that everyone gets exactly what they want and need.

The Cajun/Creole fad ebbs and flows faster than the tides. Up in Boulder, however, one place has not only held on, but it’s flourished over three decades of service: Lucile’s. This New Orleans-style breakfast joint has been serving huge plates of biscuits and gravy, sugar-dusted beignets, thick-cut bacon, fat sausages and the best egg plates this side of the French Quarter to generations of devotees. Though Lucile’s has been so successful that it’s expanded down into Denver and beyond, the original location — squeezed into a rambling old house on 14th Street — is the only one that gets everything just right. The dining rooms are always crowded, the service is brusque and the waits can be long, but one taste of the eggs Sardou and you’ll know exactly why Lucile’s has enjoyed such a remarkable run.

Boulder’s Dushanbe Teahouse is the ideal place to escape the daily grind. From the trellised gardens out front to the fountain inside, every inch of this building (broken down and shipped in pieces all the way from Tajikistan) is designed to comfort the spirit and transport the body. The dress code is Crocs, dreadlocks and pants made of hemp, and though the menu itself is hit-or-miss, the tea roster is huge. A cup of house chai, Ethiopian coffee or any one of dozens of other offerings pairs nicely with a sweet off the dessert menu to transport you from any day-to-day drudgery.

For decades, the Brown Palace has served its signature afternoon tea to legions of Denver’s blue-haired bluebloods. But while perfectly brewed Darjeeling, tea cakes, finger sandwiches and scones with Devonshire cream may not be your cup of tea, so to speak, take a look around the Brown Palace’s lobby atrium any afternoon between noon and four and you’ll understand exactly why tea here has become such a tradition. At peak hours, the place is packed with well-dressed ladies and jacketed servers swanning through the press of pearls and chiffon. With things going the way they are in the restaurant world these days, we’re frankly overjoyed to see anyone sticking by the old rituals — even the ones that involve finger sandwiches.

When the crew from Rioja took over Bistro Vendme last year, fans wondered what would happen to the classically French menu. Sure, the restaurant would continue to occupy one of the choicest bits of hidden real estate in the city — with a stunning patio for warm-weather meals — but Rioja’s contemporary Mediterranean/Spanish/Italian food didn’t seem to fit with Vendme’s unabashed Frog worship. And then the transition went better than anyone expected — anyone except, perhaps, then-chef Jennifer Jasinski and manager Beth Gruitch, the now doubly dynamic duo. The new white-jackets made a few subtle changes to the dinner menu, but it was their renewed focus on brunch — that most abused of meals — that really paid off, with a smart morning cocktail menu and delicious dishes ranging from cr?pes to delicate seafood presentations. As a result, Bistro Vendme is now the best place in town for a midday meal on Saturdays and Sundays. If you can find a seat, that is.

Dim sum can be daunting for those who haven’t learned how to pick through the chicken feet and curried cuttlefish to find the exotic morsels more suited to American tastes. But at the Palace, blessed are the meek. Dim sum dining in this attractive restaurant is pleasant and unhurried, without the chaos and clatter of more authentic dim sum rooms. And while there are chicken feet on the menu (the Chinese call them “phoenix talons”), you can politely bypass them and instead opt for the delicious steamed pork buns, shrimp dumplings, sesame pockets, grilled short ribs or egg-custard tarts. Parents, take note: Kids love this place.

When it opened early in 2006, Super Star Asian didn’t just raise the bar on Chinese cuisine. It took the bar, broke it over its knee, threw the pieces away and then made an entirely new bar that’s held so high you can’t even see it from the kitchens of most of the Chinese joints in this town. The daily dim sum is amazing — an ever-changing, never-ending panoply of delicious things to shove in your mouth, the best you’re going to find anywhere outside of Chinatown in San Francisco or New York. And even the regular menu (served during the dinner shift, when dim sum is also available) holds its own among Denver’s best.

This year, the longtime dim sum favorite Mee Yee Lin left West Alameda for Aurora — but it might as well be Hong Kong, if you’re ordering the Hong Kong shrimp dumpling soup. The powerful, salty clear broth is filled with whole-leaf greens and about a dozen wispy, shrimp-packed dumplings that drift like sea anemones around the bottom for a true taste of strange climes and foreign latitudes. Order it with some shumai, another Mee Yee Lin specialty, and you’re immediately transported to the mysterious East.

Let’s face it: Any burrito vendor is going to look pretty good when you’re leaving a club at 2 a.m. — or when you arrive at the office at 8 a.m. (after having left the club at 2 a.m.) with a hangover, jonesing for the fix that only green chile can provide. And as long as we’re being honest, we must note that many of the burrito vendors peddling their wares around town might also be operating without benefit of all the necessary permits. Not only is Milagro Burrito on the up-and-up, but after one bite of its shredded beef, potato and chile burrito, you’ll find that things are looking up for you, too. The home kitchen makes hundreds of burritos every day in more than a dozen combinations, then sends them out in coolers carried by vendors whose regular routes make them the most popular people in town.

Free chips and salsa, a night-and-day crush of crowds that would send any demographer running home in tears, and huaraches — the greatest food ever named after a shoe. These are just some of the attributes that make Los Carboncitos a true taste of the Distrito Federal. This is the Mexican equivalent of an American diner — an all-comers oasis where a real Mexican Coke, a couple of tacos and a giant slab of grill-seared cornmeal dough topped with beans and cheese and shrimp and pork and steak and whatever else you can think of is better and more honest than the food you’ll find at any dozen Nuevo Latino/Meximerican restaurants specializing in candlelight and white tablecloths.

It’s late, you’re hungry and you’ve got a car full of dumb-ass buddies who are already too fucked up to drive and far too irresponsible to be trusted with choosing an appropriate spot for a late-night burrito fix. It’s at moments like these that you should be thankful for Viva Burrito Company. The Leetsdale location has zero decor and zero ambience, but the food coming out of this little red box is just what’s needed, whether you’re looking to sober up, come down or just make it through another night. And after you’re done with your breakfast burrito, come back through for some deep-fried tacos: This drive-thru’s open 24/7.

Although burritos are the breakfast of champions in Denver, there are two camps on what constitutes a proper breakfast burrito. One side likes theirs on a plate, served huge and messy, slopped up with chile and requiring a fork. Then there are those who like them thin, manageable and ready to go. We fall solidly into this camp, but we also like surprises. And that’s where Santiago’s, a homegrown chain that seems to be taking over the world, comes in. Not only does Santiago’s serve breakfast burritos every day, but it serves a different breakfast burrito every day: bacon one day, chorizo the next. No matter what’s inside, the burritos are cheap, tidy and wrapped in foil, which means there’s no reason not to order several and eat them on the run.

Some people are willing to take a chance on unfamiliar cuisines at dinner, some will risk it at midday. But for Denver’s true gastronauts, breakfast is when you earn your stripes. And there’s no better (or more delicious) international wake-up call than Pho 79. At any time of the day, the only thing on the menu is pho — but there are three sizes (the small is huge, the large big enough for a family) and countless DIY options (from simple meatballs and flank steak to the stronger and tastier tripe and tendon), and the tangled jungle of basil, lime, chiles and sprouts that comes with every order is all you need to construct the perfect breakfast. Throw in a tall glass of iced Vietnamese coffee that’s like the second cousin of nitromethane, and you’ll never look at a plate of eggs and bacon the same way again.

It might be seven in the morning, but across the pond in Merry Olde England, the lads are already tying on their spikes and getting ready to have a bit of a kick-around. If you’re one of that growing number of Americans with a taste for English Premier League soccer and are willing to get up and out of the house early in the morning in order to watch a game, shouldn’t there be a place that caters to you? Well, now there is. Saturday and Sunday mornings at the British Bulldog are meant for two things: watching the clubs play, and gigantic English breakfasts of two eggs runny, rashers of bacon, bangers, a fat slice of fried tomato, baked beans and black (meaning blood) pudding. Make that three things, since two free drafts come with your meal.

There’s no better way to start the day than with breakfast in bed, and there’s no better place to stock up than Les Delices de Paris. Walking into the warm, bright, well-scrubbed interior of the little pastry shop — which is decorated almost exclusively with the diplmes and certificats de travail earned by owners Alexandre and Christelle Donat — is like walking into another world: one of pure sensation, of cream and sugar, fine flour, yeast and butter and salt. The menu (such as it is) reads like poetry, like love: brioche and charlotte, tuiles, meringuette, merveilleux and fruits tartellet. Make it easy on yourself and order one of everything. Better yet, order two — because then there’s a chance you’ll have something left over for breakfast in bed tomorrow.

The Bagel Store sits in a quiet strip mall in the heart of Little Russia, but it’s staffed by young guys who really know their Jewish doughnut. You can smell the place doing it right, and if you show up early (the shop closes at 2 p.m. on the dot), you can even look through the doors to the huge bakery in the back, where guys work the dough as bagels steam in vats of water. While the Bagel Store does a passable version of an East Coast egg bagel, the fantastic salt bagel is the real deal — and you can pick up a half-dozen for less than four bucks.

Toast serves everything you’ve dreamed about in your wildest, most gluttonous dreams. For starters, there are pancakes: beautiful, brilliant, wicked messes of chocolate and peanut butter, blueberry and lemon zest, bananas and ice cream. Then there are plates of greasy bacon, decadent Benedicts, spicy sausages, sweet chai-infused French toast, eggs of every description and bottomless cups of coffee. Though new this year and fairly small, Toast has already won over a rabidly loyal band of regulars ten times the size of the restaurant itself. While waits during prime breakfast time can be long, they’re absolutely worth it. Or sleep late and come during lunch hour, when the full breakfast menu is still served.

Breakfast King is great for breakfast, and it’s a good spot to wolf down a burger for lunch or a chicken-fried steak on a lazy Sunday evening. But if, like us, you sometimes find yourself desperately in need of a gigantic burrito, a ham steak, some corned beef hash or maybe just thirty cups of coffee and a slice of cherry pie at three in the morning, then Breakfast King is absolutely the best place in town. While other all-night joints have come and gone, the King continues to rule, a dependable, loyal, unwavering friend to all of Denver’s night creatures.

Sketch serves late, but more important, Sketch really comes alive late at night — when restaurant crews, homeward-bound Creekers, the hammered, the shattered, those whose nights are coming to an end and those whose nights are just getting started all seem to converge on the subterranean wine bar. The by-the-glass list and super-call booze (the Del Maguey Pechuga mezcal at $14 a shot is worth every goddamn penny) might be the hook that gets us in the door, but Sketch’s well-conceived menu — and, in particular, the derivative, completely addictive beef carpaccio “Harry’s Bar” — is what keeps us coming back night after night after night.

Frozen oils, liquid potatoes, horseradish foam — chef Radek Cerny’s latest run of menus at L’Atelier haven’t even been fusion so much as Venusian, heavily influenced by the work of Ferran Adria at El Bulli and running the ragged outer edge between border-jumping French/ Spanish/American/Asian cuisines and the flummery of ultra-modern gas-and-lasers molecular gastronomy. Sure, it’s fusion — but the menu is so much more, encompassing everything from international sashimi and grits to salmon cassoulet and duck confit. No matter what you call it, Cerny’s cooking must be experienced to be truly understood. And you should experience it.

The small-plate fads may be dying, but the 9th Door deserves to stick around. Rather than compromise in the face of changing tastes, it remains dedicated to traditional Spanish flavors: anchovies, a handful of olives and almonds, some sour goat cheese laced with honey, pan-fried artichokes and potatoes sparked with romesco. The plates may be small, but that sounds like the makings of a big meal.

At Sushi Sasa, chef Wayne Conwell and his crew make great sushi. Since Conwell served a very old-style apprenticeship among some of the modern masters of the craft, that’s a given. But it’s with his omakase menus — personalized, multi-course tastings — that he truly shows the depth and breadth of his skill. With this sudden freedom from the constraints of tradition comes an honesty and a sense of potential that can be stunning. From the simplest riffs on hand rolls to the over-the-top opulence of prized ingredients being handled with a masterful touch, every one of Conwell’s original, distinctive and highly personal menus is an improvisational opus never to be repeated exactly the same way again.

Every decade, every era, every movement in modern cuisine seems attended by a requisite affectation. A few years ago, every serious kitchen needed a sous-vide setup. Before that, it was a compressed CO2 gun for making foams. Before that, it was squeeze bottles and specialty tools like fish spatulas and jeweler’s pliers in the knife kit. Today, every big-name chef worth his endorsement contract wants a potager — a sustainable garden from which all his produce can be pulled. And bragged about. Thing is, for years Denver has had its own secret garden: Potager, where chef/owner Teri Rippeto works her uncompromising magic on an ever-changing menu. The lineup is seasonal, with every dish a heartfelt expression of its constituent parts, every ingredient sourced as close to home as possible. If American fine dining is to have any kind of future, its course will be charted at places like Potager.

One meal at Tula should be enough to make almost any Denver diner reconsider just what it means to eat Mexican food. The menu here is deep and simple, elegant and approachable all at the same time. Chef/owner Chris Douglas brings French training, a sushi chef’s eye for detail and a no-bullshit sense of the inherent excellence of his ingredients to every plate at Tula. But most important, he’s been able to use traditional sur de la frontera building blocks to construct a menu as present and momentous as any in the city.

There was a moment there, right around 2004, when it seemed like Latino-Asian fusion would be the Next Big Thing. And Denver was on the cutting edge, because international restaurateur Richard Sandoval introduced it first at Zengo. But just as Zengo was hitting its stride, the rest of the restaurant world was turning back toward an embrace of purity, sustainability and locals-only utopianism. And still, as a monolith to the end of a culinary era, Zengo works. It looks like a nightclub, feels like an L.A. singles bar and tastes like genius. With its ambitious menus and yin/yang balance that mixes sushi, antojitos and back-and-forth, shared-plate ideals, Zengo remains a testament to stubbornness and stability in an industry that never learned not to eat its young.

When your grandfather thought about a nice dinner out, Bastien’s may have been the spot he had in mind. Big fat steaks, ageless cocktails and a tacky, shmaltzy, absolutely dead-on swinger’s swank put this place high on our list of favorite restaurants. Forget fusion, forget classicism or over-intellectualized retro-ironic menus that take a half-page explanation just so that everyone will get the joke. At Bastien’s, modern living (at least in terms of food, booze and interior decor) hit its high point in 1957, and it was at that point that the Bastien family — who’ve owned the restaurant through three generations — stopped all the clocks and threw away the calendars. The sugar steak alone is so classically American that it should have its own display at the Smithsonian.

It seems impossible, but Deluxe has managed to get better over the past few years. That’s saying something, because it was pretty damn good to begin with and has always been one of our favorite spots for kicking back and treating ourselves. The menu — a kind of Bizarro World take on the California Cuisine revolution, cooked as if the intervening twenty years never happened — is short and tight, just right for grazing (oyster shooters, served in pho spoons) or for going all out. While the dining room is decidedly hip and funky, we prefer a seat at the copper-topped bar that surrounds the tiny kitchen, which is perfect for people-watching and even better for dining close to the action. And lest you forget what’s really important here, a sign hung on the back wall reminds everyone: EAT.

Funny that it would take two Brits with French wine pretensions and a long history of globe-trotting culinary excess to come up with Denver’s premier American restaurant. Owners Mel and Janie Master have helped define Denver’s place in American food history for decades, the last twelve of them at Mel’s in Cherry Creek. Nearly every great young chef now working in the city has taken a turn or two through this kitchen, and over the past year, with the hiring of chef Chad Clevenger, Mel’s reached a new, humorous high, where tacos, steaks and peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwich flavors of the American West were brought to the fore. Mel’s will be shutting down come summer, but it’s nice to go out at the top of your game.

Ten years ago, Vesta broke new ground when it introduced the notion of a hip, sharp and trendy dipping grill to Denver. Amazingly, ten years later, the place remains the absolute definition of a hip, sharp, trendy and groundbreaking restaurant. In the interim, others have tried to copy the dipping-grill concept; what sets Vesta apart is chef Matt Selby’s way out West cuisine — an extreme, customer-driven fusion that owes its frisson to adventurous eaters willing to surrender themselves to anything coming out of this kitchen. Today, Vesta still feels like a wild, expressionistic experiment riding an opening-night rush — a full decade after that opening night.

At the Buckhorn Exchange, every square inch of space that isn’t being used for the butchering, cooking and plating of meat is covered with something meat-related. Hundreds of dead animals are mounted on every available bit of wall; every nook and cranny is jammed with gewgaws and antique bric-a-brac, more than a century’s worth of Old West history that dates back to original owner Henry H. Zeitz, who rode with Buffalo Bill for a decade before settling in Denver and opening his own watering hole. Zeitz once shot a bandit in the back for hitting one of his waitresses, and in 1938 was presented with Custer’s sword by a procession of thirty Indians riding down Osage Street. This is how the West was fun.

Cafe Star isn’t a French restaurant — though some of the preparations (like the duck confit) are certainly Continental in origin — and given the worldliness of its cuisine, it isn’t a completely American restaurant. It isn’t a fine-dining restaurant — it’s too fun for that — but neither is it just a neighborhood restaurant, because there are nights when even the neighbors can’t get a seat. No, on this food frontier, Cafe Star is blazing its own trail, building on the failures of California cuisine, the innovations of immigrant cooks and the decades of dining dominance enjoyed by the big cities on the coasts. This is a New West restaurant through and through, and a great star on the local scene.

Legislators and local union leaders, cowboys and cooks. You never know who’ll end up at Brewery Bar II on any given day, because everyone who knows and loves Denver for its less cosmopolitan charms passes through here eventually, looking for cold beer, hot chile, gloriously sloppy Meximerican grub of no discernible geographical provenance and that certain dim-lit and rough-edged temper that’s the solid base from which all of Denver’s uptown glitz and glamour have grown. Though Brew II has recently spawned a passel of polished suburban offspring, they’re bastards born of opportunism and sprawl psychology. You want the real thing? Head down to the blue-collar part of town, grab a seat at the bar and order a Tiny.

If you wanted to give people a true taste of Denver, where would you send them? For us, Elway’s — Big John’s eponymous temple of meat — comes out on top every time. For the scene, the service, the staff and the sly humor implicit in the menu’s design, Elway’s is that single restaurant that defines what it is to eat in Denver today. There’s money here, but there are also plenty of people in blue jeans. Although the restaurant is in Cherry Creek, it could be picked up whole and successfully transplanted to almost any other neighborhood in the city (as proven by the recently announced expansion into the new downtown Ritz-Carlton). And while chef Tyler Wiard and everyone in Elway’s kitchen certainly know how to handle a piece of meat, the little flourishes and big hospitality are what set this place apart. Oh, yes, and then there’s that connection to a certain quarterback…