Best Of Denver® 2009 Winners
Food & Drink
La Fiesta has won many Best of Denver awards, and it's eligible for so many more. Best Mexican Restaurant in a Former Grocery Store. Best Strictly Colorado-Style Mexican Restaurant. Best Wednesday Special (chile caribe). Best Weekday Lunch-Only Mexican Restaurant. Oops, that no longer applies. Because La Fiesta has now extended its hours on Friday, and Friday only, to 9 p.m., and added special happy-hour deals on both food and drink starting at 3 p.m. On sunny days, the outdoor patio is the perfect spot to watch conscientious business types racing home to pay the babysitter; the capacious dining room is conducive to throwing all manner of impromptu parties.
Breakfast King has always been there for us, through early-morning breakfasts and late-night breakfasts; breakfasts when the sun is just peeking up over the horizon and we haven't yet been to bed; and breakfasts at four in the afternoon when we've just woken up from whatever the night before had brought us. And no question, when Denver's night owls are in need of a feed, Breakfast King is the place to go. There are nights when this venerable 24-hour diner looks like something out of Quentin Tarantino's wet dreams — a weird conglomeration of club kids and criminals, night-shift blue collars and just plain folk who've found themselves a little bit lost on the wrong side of midnight. The King is there for all of us, helping us get up or come down, chill out or straighten up. In fact, the King has never once locked its doors in all the years it's been operating. And honestly, we're not sure what this city would do if it ever did.
Chef Ian Kleinman is a magician. Not just because he manages to make thoroughly impossible food (carbonated grapefruit, grape caviar, floating bacon and the like) that people come from all over the country to eat, but because he somehow figured out a way to do this at a hotel restaurant in Westminster, Colorado. Magic, indeed. In addition to watching over the regular menu at O's Steak & Seafood, Kleinman personally oversees a brilliant molecular-gastronomy menu that changes completely every week — and he has yet to blow the place up, burn it down or accidentally freeze himself in liquid nitrogen. A single taste of his instant peanut butter sorbet, watermelon powder, Miracle Fruit pills or guacamole space foam and you will never, ever look at food the same way again.
It seems like such an obvious idea: a restaurant dedicated entirely to the glory of the pig, serving pork and pork products. And yet Denver had no all-pig restaurant until Andy Ganick came along. His brainchild is the Berkshire, a restaurant whose menu is like something out of the sickest, most indulgent food fantasies: all pig, all the time. Pig for lunch, pig for brunch (a plate of bacon and a can of Pabst as the house "hangover special"), pig for dinner (bacon flights!) and a little pig in between. Almost every plate has pork worked into it somehow; if Ganick could get away with it, he'd even garnish the bar's cocktails with pig. But there is bacon-infused vodka for those who like to take their pig in liquid form. We go hog wild for the Berkshire.
While American Indian food may be the original American cuisine, not many of us have experienced much past fry bread. But Tocabe, a new fast-casual spot that got its start in Denver, does a perfect job of fusing the old with the new. In a Chipotle-esque setting, and at Chipotle-esque prices, you can get Medicine Wheel Nachos and delicious green chile, as well as pillowy fry bread. Made to order, these delicious edible plates are ideal for holding a variety of meats (including buffalo) and other toppings, as well as a slightly spicy ancho-chile sauce. Conclude your meal with more fry bread topped with honey, and you're guaranteed to become one with nature.
Shrimp and grits. Buffalo chicken wings and Rhode Island calamari. Memphis ribs, Louisiana etouffee, Maine lobster rolls and Chicago-style hot dogs. Steuben's isn't just an American restaurant, it's an All-American restaurant — a restaurant dedicated to the preservation and glorification of our mutt, immigrant canon; our staples and standards; our occasional flashes of brief genius. And while opinions may differ as to whether Steuben's is making the best version of some regional favorite, opinions always differ on every regional favorite. The fights over the Steuben's recipe for trout amandine, its green-chile cheeseburger or the truck-stop chocolate cake started even before the place opened, and they haven't stopped yet. The probably never will. And they all make for delicious conversation over a meal in this popular, comfortable hangout.
You could cut the kitchen right out of the center of Marco's, airlift it to Rome, set it down in the middle of that city — and any Italian cook could step right up and get back to business. But we'd miss that kitchen, because it's the heart of a great, hip new hangout in the Ballpark neighborhood. The ovens here are serious fire-breathing monsters that can blister up a fine pie in sixty seconds. The crusts are made fresh with the best flour in the world: Italian flour. And everything — everything — is done in accordance with the rules set down by various Italian pizza-certifying bodies that get their kicks by traveling all over the world and telling people if they're making their pizzas properly. Marco's is, and owner Mark Dym has the paperwork to prove it. But more important, Marco's excellent pies prove that sometimes the old ways are the right ways and the best ways, and that one diverges from tradition only at one's own risk.
Want to know who made the great bread you had at that restaurant last night? Odds are good that it was City Bakery, the bakery and dessert-a-teria started last year by freaky bread savant Michael Bortz. Bortz started out in Denver as an independent, then went corporate as a baker for Paradise Bakery when the chain started making some serious moves in town. And then he went indie again, taking most of his wholesale contracts with him. The result is a bakery that supplies the best bread in the city to some of the best restaurants in the city, seven days a week. Baking isn't an easy job, so we're lucky to have Bortz looking out for us. If we had to, we really could live on bread — his bread — alone.
No other BBQ joint can touch the shrimp at Big Hoss — and we can't keep our hands off them. Served in a trough and doused with Hoss Orwat's special sauce, they're as close as you can come in Denver to the taste of the vinegar-sharp and spice-shot barbecue of the South Carolina tidewater region. And once you're done with the shrimp, pour the rest of that thin sauce over a plate of pulled pork brought naked from the kitchen. An order or two of shrimp, a couple PBRs off the tap, maybe a side of fried cheese and a Jim-Beam-and-Coke float for dessert, and you're well on your way to another memorable night at Hoss Orwat's house.
Small place, big flavor. Sometimes we crave Yazoo's amazing pulled pork, at other times its ribs. But once when we stopped in for ribs, the tiny kitchen was out, so indeed we got a BOB — chicken breast wrapped in bacon and jalapeños. then smoked — and almost died from pleasure right on the spot. In fact, the only problem with Yazoo is that it sells out of certain things so quickly that we can't always get what we happen to be craving at that moment. But that's not a very big problem, because there's always another great option. Adding a second outlet down south has helped expand supply, but we remain faithful to the small downtown spot, which just keeps pouring out that big, big flavor.
Bacon is already cured. In some cases, it's even smoked before it ever makes it to your table. So why not barbecue it again, Korean style? At Han Kang, a big plate of raw bacon, cut into easy-to-eat chunks, is brought to the table with one of those propane-fired portable grills. Throw on the pork, let it cook, and prepare to pig out. (The menu says this is a dish for sharing, but if you've ever wanted to eat an entire pound of bacon by yourself, Han Kang is definitely the place.) A bowl of garlic oil comes with the bacon, but a spread of alien side dishes also arrives with every order, ensuring new taste treats with every bacon-y bite.
It's not odd to find good barbecue in Aurora, but it is unexpected to stumble across good barbecue in a gigantic outdoor mall. Because who in their right mind would go to a spot like Southlands looking for pulled pork and cornbread? And who would imagine that you could not only find it here, but you could get that good 'cue from a drive-thru? While the location may be weird, it's also welcome when you're driving around the 'burbs and the pork jones hits. Because Jim 'N Nick's takes its barbecue very seriously. Everything is made from scratch, and the 'cue goes through a twelve-hour smoke. And if your diet needs a little more starch, order the Pig in the Potato Patch, a baked potato loaded down with smoked bacon, butter, sour cream, cheese, barbecue sauce and more pulled pork. This spud's for you.
On the best days, you can smell Big Papa's from across the parking lot. On the best days, you somehow manage to sneak in between the rushes and be out of the place in ten minutes, tops, with an order of Denver's best ribs. But even on bad days, those ribs are good enough to turn everything else around.
The Counter is a concept restaurant, a pure product of the 21st century, of the fast-casual boom and West Coast culture. The interior is spare and spartan; the staff wears blue jeans and tattoo-art-inspired shirts. The art on the walls is black and white, with a rock-and-roll theme. And the burgers? They're huge and bloody and sold sushi-bar style, with a slip of paper and a pencil so that you can choose from among a plethora of artful and interesting toppings. And then enjoy a bottle of beer or glass of wine while you wait for the mad-scientist burger of your dreams.
It's a measure of how far this city has come in the pursuit of dangerously untested culinary thrills (the eating of seitan, the serving of meals made of nothing but vegetables, creating a Buffalo wing made of tofu, which does not have wings) that a place like WaterCourse Foods — where all of these high-wire gastronomical games are played daily — now attracts more than just a dedicated clientele of twig-and-berry vegetarians, vegans and other ascetics. Although the restaurant can still look like a game preserve for the final holdouts of Denver's chipmunk-hugging Earth lovers, it's attracting a growing crowd of diverse diners — many of whom have a common goal: breakfast. Granted, a breakfast here must be eaten sans bacon, ham, hash or sausage (the four primary elements of any proper breakfast equation), but if you must go pig-free, WaterCourse is the place to go.
Snooze has answered its wake-up call and settled into a vibe where the food is as good as the concept and decor, as nicely made-up as most of the customers clamoring for a table during the weekend breakfast rush. This is one of the very few spots in the city where hipsters go to see and be seen before noon on a Sunday. But they also pay attention to what's on their plates, because Snooze features a nicely modern American breakfast menu, well prepared and presented, with just enough oddness and quirks (breakfast tacos, pulled pork Benedicts and corned beef hash done in ring molds) to ensure that the food doesn't get swept away in the wash of design, style and attitude.
We've eaten a lot of breakfast burritos over the years. We've eaten what some people might consider a truly shocking number of breakfast burritos. And every time we're put on the spot and asked, straight out, for the best breakfast burrito in Denver, our answer is always the same: Santiago's. This homegrown chain offers a wonderful way to start the day: thin burritos, foil-wrapped and packed for eating on the go. A Santiago's chorizo-and-egg breakfast burrito is perhaps the truest expression of why we love living (and eating) in Denver — or, at the very least, it's an excellent reason for getting out the door before 11 a.m., when all nineteen Santiago's outlets stops serving the best breakfast burrito in Denver.
Nestled in Idaho Springs, less than a half-hour from Denver, Tommyknocker Brewery and Pub is going on fifteen years and boasts an ornery streak that can only come from watching, with a mix of business pleasure and nativist horror, as the traffic builds over the years. Still, Tommyknocker welcomes all comers and delights all kinds, from locals and tourists to tired skiers and kayakers in need of a cold one. While the brewpub's mainstays, such as its signature Maple Nut Brown Ale, are available in stores far and wide, some of its best offerings — Pick Axe Pale Ale, Black Powder Stout and Spleen Cleaver — can only be enjoyed on site or in a growler to go. Pair them (or a homemade root beer) with Buffalo Roadhouse Red Chili or a Smokehouse Pulled Buffalo Sandwich smothered in Big B's BBQ sauce, and you'll taste the best of the new and the Old West.
Brunch at Beatrice & Woodsley is like waking up in a dream — and it's not just because of the fantasy interior of this new restaurant, designed to resemble a turn-of-the-last century Colorado cabin. It's also because of the fantastic food. Chef Pete List and his crew of culinary hooligans serve turtle soup, beautiful frog's legs, pear clafouti, pork belly, pimento-cheese grits, curried lamb and flapjacks all off the same menu — their brunch menu. And they do it to a consistently packed house of Denverites who, convinced only by the expertise and brilliant execution of List and company, now realize that there's nothing at all strange about eating turtle, frog and pancakes for breakfast...in the middle of an aspen grove. In fact, it makes for the best brunch in town.
Bud's Bar is a survivor. It survived a change in ownership and the smoking ban, and it still came out on top. We've eaten burger after burger across the metro area, but we always return to Bud's. Bud's not only serves the best burger in Denver, but it serves the best burger in Colorado, one of the best burgers in America. We can think of maybe two burgers in the whole of the United States better than the double with cheese at Bud's, and Bud's might edge out one of those simply on the strength of the joint itself: an uncompromising roadhouse full of surly waitresses and bikers, where demanding fries (which Bud's doesn't serve) might get you punched in the mouth, and complaining about the wait (which there almost always is, even though it's now open on Sundays, too) will get your ass deservedly 86'd into the parking lot. Bud's ain't pretty and it ain't nice, and it ain't precisely welcoming to strangers. But its burger is perfect.
Colorado beef grilled up a perfect mid-rare, topped with white cheddar, on a soft, grilled brioche roll and sided by hand-cut fries. A great seafood restaurant has no business making such a great burger. It seems wrong, almost greedy. But there it is: Chef Sheila Lucero and her crew at Jax make a burger that can stand proudly among the best in town.
My Brother's Bar has a million things going for it — from a building that's held a bar since the 1880s to the classical music piped through the place to the friendly crowd of regulars to the eclectic menu cooked up out of the tiny chuckwagon kitchen — but the most important thing is the burger. My Brother's not only makes one wicked, huge, messy and (by request) multiply-topped burger, but it serves said champion burger in a unique conveyance: a plastic, burger-specific condiment tray that contains everything a man could need for prepping a burger to his satisfaction. Both the burger and the bar itself are classics.
"Biker Jim knows his wieners." That's what it says on what has to be one of the only websites in America run for and by a hot dog cart guy. But then, Biker Jim doesn't exactly run a normal hot dog cart. While you can get a simple all-beef with mustard, Biker Jim also has Alaskan reindeer sausage, German white veal brats, jalapeño-cheddar elk brats and boar sausage. His dog toppings are well thought out, too, and include not just the standard mustard, relish and ketchup, but sriracha hot sauce and cream cheese (for the Louisiana red hots) pumped out of an industrial-sized caulking gun. Biker Jim peddles all of this to regulars and tourists alike who flock to this part of Skyline Park at lunch, and he does it with style: always talking, always working, always keeping the crowds entertained like a sideshow huckster while he works the grill on his cart.
Peruvian food is some of the strangest, most delicious stuff in the world: a mishmash of centuries of cultural influences thrown together onto one plate. Spanish conquistadors, Arabs and Moors, explorers bringing spices from India, Italian cartographers, historic Creoles, African slaves and Asian immigrants — they've all added to the rich history of Peruvian cookery. And at Los Cabos, you can taste all of that (or most of it, anyway) every time you walk through the door. The house does a little of everything, from Spanish paellas and urban/peasant bistec a la pobre to the delicious papas a la huancaina, ceviche and parihuela, a very nearly French bouillabaisse with all kinds of seafood in a smooth, fragrant broth. Added bonus: Los Cabos also has a stuffed llama in the bar, giving it a lock on the award for Best Bar in Denver to Get Thrown Out of for Trying to Ride the Llama.
There are plenty of spots around town where a man of little means can get himself a hot breakfast. But there's no better spot for the archetypal cheap American breakfast than Rosie's. This custom-built '50s-style diner full of gleaming chrome and sock-hop decor seemingly stalled its pricing strategy a couple of decades back and offers massive plates of everything that's great about the first meal of the day for the kind of money you might find in your couch cushions. Seriously, two eggs, hash browns, a plate of pancakes and a mound of corned beef hash, all for around five bucks? It doesn't get any better than that. And if you're feeling flush, you can get a fine steak with three eggs, cakes and sides, plus a cup of coffee or a chocolate milkshake, for close to a ten-spot.
Nothing on Taquería Patzcuaro's menu costs more than eleven bucks, and almost everything is worth twice what you'll pay for it. Carnitas Michoacán or carne adovada for nine bucks? Four tacos albañil for $7.50? Those are bargain prices, particularly since these are some of the top carnitas, carne adovada and tacos albañil in the city. And the ambience in this three-decade-old restaurant is priceless. You can come in, settle down in a booth, watch Mexican talk shows or even the occasional bullfight on TV, knock back a couple of cold beers and eat a bunch of tacos under the frozen gazes of the Mexican revolutionaries and cowboys pictured on the walls, then get out for less than fifteen bucks. In these trying economic times, Patzcuaro is looking more vital than ever.
Ba Le is a hole-in-the-wall in a neighborhood full of a million other holes in a million other walls. But Ba Le is also a real hole in one: a spot frequented not just by members of Denver's Vietnamese community, but by hordes of Denver diners on the lookout for something new, something delicious and something definitely cheap. Ba Le is basically a sandwich shop, but it makes only the Vietnamese banh mi sandwich — a beautiful mix of unusual meats (various pâtés and pork and chicken and pork) and mounds of vegetables (cilantro, shredded carrot, cucumber and more) all smushed together between two halves of a French/Vietnamese baguette. The bread itself is worth the trip, the smeared-on pâtés like a bonus French kick. And the clincher? Each sandwich comes in at less than three bucks.
Frank Bonanno envisioned Mizuna a neighborhood fine-dining restaurant before that trend became de rigueur in every neighborhood in town. Then came Luca d'Italia, a great little Italian restaurant that hit before this city got overrun with great little Italian restaurants, back in the day (not so long ago) when the city really was a red-sauce wasteland. There were a couple of missteps along the way (Milagro, Harry's), but Bonanno came back strong with Osteria Marco in Larimer Square, a beautiful, honest and low-to-the-ground osteria offering (more or less) pig, pig, pig and wine. And now he has Bones — the noodle bar that's not really a noodle bar, the Asian restaurant that ain't Asian. There are a lot of people on the restaurant scene who don't love Bonanno, who are annoyed by his pride, his ego and the fact that he doesn't keep his mouth shut when he sees something being done wrong. Thing is, those are exactly the reasons that we like the guy. Because he reminds us of a chef — a loud-mouthed, occasionally crazy, always commanding sonofabitch who can back up every quirk and tirade because not only does he already operate three of the best restaurants in the city, but now, officially, the Best New Restaurant in Denver for 2009.
The chicken and waffles at the Corner Office may well be the city's only chicken and waffles — but even if there were dozens of competitors, this plate would still be the best. It's dinner and dessert in one — a beautiful mix of crisp and salty fried chicken mounted atop a lovely waffle, dusted with powdered sugar and served with a little syrup on the side, all sweet and savory and greasy and delicious. While Denver might not yet be a chicken-and-waffles kind of town, as long as the Corner Office keeps serving this dish, it will be our kind of town.
Spice China is about 8,000 miles from Beijing, the home of the Peking duck, and yet it is in this Louisville dining room that you can have set before you the best Peking duck in the Denver area. The kitchen takes two days to cook its ducks, then serves them the right way: a full breast, expertly deboned and sliced with a flashy double-cut that makes for about a hundred bite-sized (or pancake-sized) pieces, topped with shingled strips of crisp, sweet, smoky duck skin the color of caramel candy. And in a sop to duck junkies, it tops the breast with a flap of fatty skin that's perfect for chewing after it's been dipped in the cup of super-sweet and nutty, savory, smoky hoisin sauce.
The spartan Super Star Asian is primarily known for its dim sum, but that's really just the start of what it does. The restaurant has another menu for those days that aren't Saturday or Sunday, those hours that aren't between early morning and just-past-noon. It is this menu that offers the quote/unquote French-style cubed beef in black sauce, the shark's fin soup, the jellyfish salad and the completely non-threatening sesame chicken. As a dim sum restaurant, Super Star is among the best in the city. But as a straight, nose-to-tail Chinese restaurant? There's simply no place better.
There have been two big developments at Los Carboncitos this year: They've added a third location, on East Sixth Avenue, that serves alcohol — and all three restaurants now serve chips (although you may have to ask for them). And Los Carboncitos still has the best salsa in the city. As a matter of fact, it has three or four of the best salsas in the city — all brought to every table in little salsa caddies so that customers can add spice and heat and flavor to their heart's content. But this doesn't mean that the food needs any enhancement. Because while Los Carboncitos might have the best salsa in Denver, it also has any number of great dishes that are just fine on their own. The tacos and burritos (particularly the desayuno) are excellent, and the huaraches are unbelievably good — giant slabs of masa on which all the best things in the world (like pork and steak and avocado and pork and bacon and shrimp and pork and bacon) come stacked. A dish this good deserves to be adorned with only the best salsa — and at Los Carboncitos, that's exactly what you're going to get.
The Cruise Room is the very definition of a classic. This cocktail lounge in the historic Oxford Hotel opened the day after Prohibition ended — and it's been this town's most liquid asset ever since. Modeled after a bar on the Queen Mary, the narrow, neon-lit room boasts original art-deco decor, bas relief depicting toasts from around the world (Hitler was erased in World War II), uneven marble floors, a great jukebox and rarely an open seat at either the bar or one of the cozy booths. But you won't mind standing, because that just gives you a better view of the bartenders as they mix up classic cocktails, everything from martinis served with their own shakers to greyhounds made from fresh-squeezed grapefruit. All aboard!
Here's how you decide which restaurant in a city has the best comfort food: You spend a couple of months doing nothing but eating and obsessing over food, going out at all hours of the day and night for tacos and tamales and foie gras and fried chicken. Then you spend weeks assembling a list of the best of the best of them, revising the list, dreaming about the list and, finally, writing up awards for the very best places and dishes in town. And then, when all that eating and listing and writing and obsessing is done, you ask yourself: Where do you really want to eat? The answer will be Table 6, which achieved star status early but continues to shine, putting out the town's best comfort food in one of the town's most comfortable, cozy settings.
Root Down's bar may be located in an old service station, but Justin Cucci's new restaurant is completely contemporary, from its "field-to-fork" mentality reflected in a menu full of locally sourced ingredients to its streamlined dining room (with amazing views of downtown). But we keep returning to the bar, where Root Down's adventurous spirit is reflected in original cocktails featuring those same fresh ingredients, from the Thyme Gin Rickey (fresh muddled thyme, lemon and lime juices and gin) to the Pepper Blossom (St. Germain elderflower liqueur, Prairie organic vodka, muddled fresh basil, lemon, jalapeño and agave nectar). Happy hour runs from 5 to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday, but this bar is hopping at all hours. And if you don't spot something you like on the specialty cocktail list, the resident mixologists are always happy to create something for you. We can't wait to see what they come up with after the first harvest of Root Down's two gardens.
Everyone, even the most hard-core, everything-from-scratch purist, will admit that the best corned beef hash in the world is the stuff that comes straight out of the can — mushy, smelling like cat food and with that slick white cap of fat on top that would keep the hash fresh even if the can remained unopened for 10,000 years. But the second-best hash (at least in this city) is at Mona's, where an order brings sliced corned beef brisket, cut the size of bathroom tiles and given a fast sear in the pan, along with deep-fried potatoes, crisp on the surface and soft within like perfect pommes frites, and big chunks of green bell pepper and sautéed onions. True, it's dangerous to screw with the vital corned beef/potato/fat ratio. And for a moment, this plate will horrify anyone who grew up with the canned stuff and, even today, loves it all out of proportion. But be brave. For scratch hash, Mona's beats every other breakfast bar in the city.
Plain croissant, almond croissant and chocolate croissant: Daniel's of Paris makes the best croissants in the city, in three varieties, each a little bit better than the other. The plain croissants are fluffy and buttery and light, the almond stiff and filled with a delicious almond paste as addictive as heroin. And the chocolate? Eaten hot and fresh, they are dizzyingly good, messy, beautiful and smelling like heaven — a near-perfect expression of the French patissier's art created in a little strip-mall shop in Aurora.
So, the first date went well. The second went even better. The third paid dividends, and now you're dating. You're in a relationship, with all of a relationship's pitfalls. To smooth out the rough spots, keep Osteria Marco in mind. This restaurant is the perfect place for a couple to relax once again into each other's company. The service is competent and unobtrusive, the floor intimate without being stifling, and the food? It's some of the best scratch Italian in the city, much of it just made for sharing.
D Bar Desserts is a dessert bar, but it's also an excellent snack bar, with a cool little menu simply called "Things We Like to Eat" offering such delicious diversions as dressed avocado and dates and bacon. After working your way through this menu (and maybe a glass of wine or two), you'll definitely want something sweet to finish off the night. Something from behind the bakery counter might be nice, or a freshly made cookie, or perhaps one of chef/owner Keegan Gerhard's more whimsical digressions on a standard dessert. Gerhard may be a bona fide food-world celebrity, but he spends every night working at D Bar — and that hits our sweet spot.
Chinese brunch may be the best brunch of all — and newcomer Star Kitchen, started by the former chef at Super Star Asian, serves the best dim sum in town. The carts keep coming out of the kitchen, full of baskets and bowls, all steamy and smelly and packed with surprises. And then there are the plastic cafeteria trays, loaded with two or three dishes sent out special by the kitchen, little bites that the galley crew throws together — things they're testing out. We like seeing the overwhelming enthusiasm for one's craft that can make a kitchen already bogged down by a Sunday morning rush of a hundred covers or better break from the menu and start cooking new, delicious, occasionally inspired stuff just for fun. And dim sum at Star Kitchen is decidedly fun, made even better by the addition of a liquor license.
Okay, you're done dating. You've navigated the end game, gotten married, made a family. But you're still a human being! You can't live forever on Happy Meals and quote/unquote family restaurants. Sometimes you just have to take the plunge and take the kids to a place with real chairs and silverware and a menu with no pictures. That's where Locanda del Borgo comes in. For starters, the food is fantastic — a nice, light and modern take on classic Italian cookery with the best spaghetti carbonara in the city and some fine gnocchi, all cooked by a skilled kitchen that really knows how to get the most out of that wood-fired pizza oven and racks of gleaming sauté pans. The room is simple and spare, but comfortable. Service is friendly and informal. And, most important (at least from where you're sitting), the place has a kids' menu and welcomes the little rug-rats with a smile. Junior has to learn how to behave himself in a proper dining room eventually, and there's no better spot to practice than Locanda del Borgo.
Denver doesn't have an In-N-Out burger. But it has the next best thing: a Griff's, one of the few survivors of an also-ran chain in the burger wars of the last century. We love the weird, lost-outpost vibe of this Griff's, the sense that this spot has been cut off from history and forgotten by the powers that once brought it into being. And if we were ever going to get a tattoo, Griffy — the psychotic, lobotomized clown mascot of Griff's — would be high on our list of possible body art. But even more important, if you pull up to Griff's drive-thru window, you'll be rewarded with a fine burger, excellent fries and a shake so thick it'll kill you if you don't let it thin itself a little before you wrap your lips around the straw.
Kevin Taylor and the staff at his eponymous restaurant create some of the most incredible high-end food in Denver. Roasted Maine lobster and truffle bisque; French foie gras with a peanut financier, pineapple jelly and vanilla foam; lamb rack and belly with minted jus; and the best pavé of salmon anywhere. It's all there for the asking — if you have the answer for how to pay for this stuff, which is expensive. We're talking $15 apps and entrees that run as high as $65. If you're one of the few lucky ones employed by a solvent boss who's still covering your extravagant expenses, take advantage of it while you can and make a reservation at RKT posthaste. We promise it'll be the best free dinner you'll find anywhere in the city.
No question about it, Sushi Den has some of the best sushi in the city. Matter of fact, Sushi Den has some of the best sushi in the country. This is wonderful fish, fresh and delicious and artfully prepared with an artist's restraint. The one thing it isn't? Cheap. Even lunch at Sushi Den can easily damage your bank balance once the courses start stacking up. The best way to avoid this problem is to find a someone who can pick up the tab. Even in this bonus-busting environment, no one could quibble with the importance of such a perk.
Who's the party pooper who decided that happy hours were just for the boozin' crowd? Shouldn't everybody be able to revel in that special time of day when the sun slants just right through the trees and proprietors slash prices like maniacs? Red Trolley, the popular new ice cream joint on West 32nd Avenue, is happy to cater to the non-alcohol crowd with happy-hour $2 root beer floats. Like everything at Red Trolley (the divine banana bread ice cream and insanely good salted caramel gelato come to mind, but there is also a bottomless cereal bowl that is a real deal for five bucks), these floats are done right - with Wynkoop Brewing Co.'s Tiger Root Beer straight from the shop's in-counter tap. Fair warning: With a few of these sugary concoctions on board, you may still need a designated driver.
First dates are tricky. You want a restaurant that's inexpensive but not cheap. You want a restaurant that's loud and crowded in case the two of you have nothing to talk about, but not too loud or too crowded in case you hit it off so well you actually want to hear what the other person is saying. You want a restaurant that's cool without being flighty, solid without being ponderous. And, in the event that everything goes terribly wrong, you want a restaurant with a fairly open floor plan so that you can make a speedy escape into the night. The ideal spot: Le Central. It's French, so it seems immediately classy, but also inexpensive, so dinner won't leave you feeling like you got mugged in the parking lot. The food is excellent, the wine list extensive and, most important, it's a nearly straight shot to the door from any of the dining rooms.
The Morrison Holiday Bar makes tasty, strong drinks; the covered patio is always open; there's live music Thursday through Saturday, karaoke on Sunday and a jazz/blues band on Monday, plus card games on Tuesday, Wednesday and Saturday; and you never have to pay a dime to walk in the door. In other words, there's always a good reason to be here (no wonder regulars refer to it as the Local Cure). But the best day of the year at the Holiday Bar is Christmas — because not only does the joint stay open, but it puts out a full Christmas dinner buffet, free to anyone in the bar. All the owner asks is that you stick around after eating and buy a few drinks, to celebrate the true spirits of Christmas.
There's Colorado Mex, Tex Mex, Cali Mex and New Mexican Mexican food, best exemplified in this city by the three Little Anita's outlets (soon to be joined by a fourth). But one Little Anita's item erases all borders: the complimentary sopapillas at the end of every meal. Little Anita's starts making these fried treats every day at 10 a.m., guaranteeing that the warm pillows of dough are always fresh when they arrive at your table. Land of Enchantment, indeed.
It's worth going to Bistro Vendôme every weekend just to see what sort of crepes du jour the kitchen is cooking up. It's worth going twice in a single weekend just so you can have the croissants with rose jam and croquet madame and bier rouge one morning and the steak tartare, mussels in garlic-wine broth and gaufre maison with Nutella whipped cream, shaved chocolate and sauternes-poached pears the next. And when the weather is nice, it's worth getting up extra early so you can hurry down to Larimer Square and claim one of the tables in the lovely courtyard.
An encore performance by Encore, which continues to serve the best french fries in the city. They're hand-cut shoestrings, perfectly fried, then given a drizzle of hot mustard sauce that sounds a little scary until the first minute you taste it on the hot frites. After that, you'll be a shameless addict, hooked for the rest of your days and comparing every other french fry in the city to those coming from this kitchen.
It begins with the assiette de charcuterie maison — the house meat plate, a delirious mix of pâté and rillette and cheeses and sausage and cornichons and chutney and more. From there — from that best of all possible beginnings — Z Cuisine's menu blooms outward into a board that might include foie gras marinated in sauternes, pork belly brined in white wine and served with caramelized skin, oxtail crepes, cassoulet and lamb Niçoise. Chef Patrick Dupays sources as close to home as he can, scouring farmers' markets for the best product he can lay his hands on. Every one of his plates is a benchmark preparation. And amazingly, when the menu changes — as it does weekly, sometimes daily, sometimes even in the middle of service — every one of the new plates will be just as good.
No matter how many bodies you pack inside, some restaurants are always going to be as cold and sterile as a surgical pre-op, where voices seem to evaporate into wisps of cold before they can travel across the length of a table. But there are also restaurants that miraculously exude warmth and life and comfort no matter the condition of the floor. These are the rare ones, as extraordinary as real magic, where the house — despite a lack of trade, of buzz, of superficial action — subsists on a sort of rich inner life, a passion that flows outward from the kitchen, through the bar, to suffuse even just a few tables, even just one, with the sense that everything is going to be all right, despite all evidence to the contrary. Indulge French Bistro is just such a magical place, a wonderful Normandy French restaurant that serves amazing steak tartare, beautiful salmon with leek fondue, and the best duck we've ever tasted.
Mezcal is a fantastic starting and ending place for any Friday night. Why? For so many reasons. Let's start with the fact that the kitchen serves until one in the morning. The cheap tacos, which we've loved since day one, are just the thing to fortify you before you head out to whatever weirdness awaits you downtown — and work equally well sopping up that excess alcohol at midnight. And then there's the bar, arranged like an agave stockade — walled in by bottles of all the best and worst tequilas and mezcals on the market. A shot could be just what you need to prepare you for the night ahead — or make you forget whatever just came down. And if things really went wrong, you can drink here until closing, go sleep in your car, then come back in the morning for a nice brunch.
Henry Coleman, owner and head cook at Coleman's Soul Food, which took over the space occupied for decades by Ethel's House of Soul, knows from Detroit soul food, Detroit comfort food, Detroit's streetside, slapdash, eat-while-walking cuisine. He's a veteran lunchwagon cook from the city. Now, behind the rail of his kitchen at Coleman's, he knocks out specials (roasted barbecued chicken breast with greens and rice and gravy), bakes cornbread, slow-cooks his brisket and hot links. But what he does best is fry chicken. Each serving brings two legs and a big, plump piece of breast, steaming and juicy beneath a simple crust of flour, pepper, salt and spices. And on the side: a little cup of straight, uncut hot sauce; a big bowl of excellent church-picnic potato salad, heavy on the mustard, with celery and hard-boiled egg; another bowl of soft, sweet, molasses-y baked beans; a slab of cornbread big as a piece of birthday cake. The only thing missing? A couple shots of whiskey to wash it down.
Fish, chips, prawn chips, Cornish pasties, bikers, punks and soccer jerseys — what more could you ask of a neighborhood chipper in Denver, Colorado? Owner Alex Stokeld has done a fine job of transforming this cement bunker of a space into a down-and-dirty fish joint, with picnic tables in the dining room and beers at the bar. All of the food is excellent, but the best dish is the namesake fish and chips: sticks of flaky cod cut off the fillet, jacketed in a perfect, crisp, crumbling batter (which took Stokeld years to get right), scalded by the heat of the fryer and served in generous, greasy portions over a mound of proper, thick-cut chips fried the way chips are supposed to be fried — hard and fast, in animal fat.
Radek Cerny has never been a "normal" chef. He's always been the kind of guy who pushes borders and boundaries for his own amusement — for the thrill of hanging himself out there on the edge just to see what will happen. At L'Atelier, his current culinary workshop, he's free to be as weird as he wants to be. And for just $59, you, too, can go to the wall with Cerny. That's the price of his degustation menu — an eight-course, greatest-hits collection of whatever the kitchen is playing with at the moment. There are tartares on the degustation menu, little blips of French and Italian and Japanese and American technique, as well as escargot with potato foam. (Cerny has long been fascinated with doing unusual thing to and with potatoes). This is a man who's never seen a rule he didn't want to break or a border that didn't deserve crossing — and the results can be delicious.
Izakaya Den is a lot of things. It's a tapas restaurant, a small plates restaurant, a sushi restaurant, a sake bar. It does Mediterranean food and Italian food, re-envisioned American bar food and really, really authentic Japanese food. And sometimes, it does all of these together on a single plate — to the delight and confusion and occasional horror of those fortunate enough to have happened into this South Pearl Street restaurant with the nondescript exterior and windows that look out on its always-busy sister restaurant, Sushi Den, across the street. You can get sashimi with real (and murderously expensive) wasabi here, skate wing and waffles, shumai dumpling and lemongrass vichyssoise, kobe beef sliders with foie gras, purple Peruvian frites and hoisin duck wontons. Izakaya is not only proud to call itself a fusion restaurant, but it stands as an avatar of what fusion could've been had such an intriguing culinary designation not been wrecked years ago by 10,000 restaurants all serving wasabi mashed potatoes and ahi tuna tartare.
We've eaten big pizzas and little pizzas. We've had fancy-fancy dining-room pizzas and organic pizzas and a thousand-and-one digressions on the Spago-fied California pizzas. And not one of these quote/unquote gourmet pizzas had us aching for another bite. Instead, we find ourselves longing for the modest dining room of Buenos Aires Pizzeria, where the pizza is as gourmet as it gets, because the Carrera family will put egg or chimichurri or hearts of palm on your pie if you want them. But really, it's all just Argentine pizza, and Argentina is like the Olympics for culinary canons — the place where they all go to fight it out and see who comes out on top. No matter what you top your pie with at Buenos Aires, it's bound to be very, very good.
It took us a year to make this decision. Seriously, a year. We spooned our way through bowl after bowl around the city, through green chiles thick and thin, sweet and sour, dull and devilishly hot. And we kept coming back to Santiago's. Fortunately, it was easy to do so, because this homegrown chain keeps opening up more stores all around the city, and all of them serve the same great green. With its moderated heat and perfect balance of the chile's vegetable sweetness to the savor of pork fat, this elixir goes with everything from eggs to tacos to midnight snacks — and is also just splendid on its own. In our hearts, we knew Santiago's green chile was the winner from the start. All that testing and experimentation? Just an excuse to eat the leftovers, really.
Grits: the ultimate comfort food. So poverty-simple, and now, like Britney Spears, so trash-gone-superstar. It's the American polenta, the best thing to happen to high-end food costs since wasabi mashed potatoes. Just about every kitchen cooks grits these days, and just about every kitchen cooks them poorly. But not at Venue. Holly Hartnett's kitchen treats grits with care and respect, topping an immaculate white mound with a piece of perfect pork tenderloin, surrounded by a puddle of maple-pork jus and studded with dried cherries. When a kitchen gives such thoughtful attention to the most simple things, it can do almost anything exceptionally well.
We love a Mexican restaurant that opens for breakfast. And if there's one thing we love more than a Mexican restaurant that opens for breakfast, it's a Mexican restaurant that opens for breakfast and then continues to serve that breakfast all day long — a mercy for those of us whose notion of "breakfast" is somewhat fluid, defining it only as the first meal of any waking period, even if that meal happens to be taken at, say, one in the afternoon. El Noa Noa is just such a lovable place, a longtime neighborhood favorite that does a brisk breakfast trade throughout the day. Of all its breakfast options, the best for a man who's been drinking is the nice, greasy plate of machaca con huevos: shredded desebrado and scrambled eggs mixed together, served with a side of rice and a double-sized side of refritos. If that's not enough to get you up and going on the morning after whatever weirdness you got up to the night before, then God's mercy be with you — because you are beyond the help of man or breakfast magic.
In these debilitating economic times, stretching your dollars as far as they can possibly go isn't just frugal; it's the only way to make sure you don't end up in a sleeping bag outside of Jesus Saves. Bless its soul, the Lancer Lounge — already known far and wide for stiff pours and recession-friendly prices — has your back with its aptly titled Panic Bar. "It frightens me," one bartendress told us, and it should. Because every Monday night from 10 to 11 p.m., well drinks and draft beers are free. That's right: FREE. Go ahead and stretch those dollars right back into your pocket. But if you fail to tip, not even Jesus will save you.
Last spring, Deluxe owner Dylan Moore opened Delite right next door to handle the overflow from his excellent restaurant. But on some nights it seems to work the other way around, as Delite fills up early. And while, sure, the bar is the focus here, the menu — an offshoot of the Deluxe board and dosed with the same vaguely Californian sensibility — is incredibly satisfying. The green eggs and ham is brilliant: deviled eggs with bacon and pesto. The Chinese barbecued pork buns re-envisioned as American sliders are so good you'll want to order two plates (they come two to an order, topped with tiny jungles of scallion). And then there's Deluxe's trademark oyster shooters: single oysters, fried, topped with a chipotle rémoulade and served over a spicy salsa in a pho spoon. Moore makes the best fried oysters in town, no doubt, but the best thing about Delite's menu is the happy-hour deal: half off the normal price, which means you'll never pay more than six bucks, tops.
From 3 to 5 p.m. every Thursday through Sunday at Le Central, owner Robert Tournier more or less gives the house away, offering about twenty small plates at two bucks or less. We're talking rillette, chicken-liver pâté e foie, Merguez sausage or pissaldiere for $1.50 each, and moules Provençal, duck confit or salmon fumée for $2. Meanwhile, all well drinks, mulled wine and house wines are just three dollars a throw, and espresso, lattes, cappuccinos and hot chocolates go for two bucks a cup. Le Central has always billed itself as an affordable French restaurant, but this is ridiculously good: fine French cuisine at prices cheaper than a McDonald's value meal.
Just looking at the menu at Venice Ristorante is like reading poetry. Actually eating off that menu is amazing. Some restaurants decline over the years, others reach a mid-level plateau and just hang there forever after. Only rarely does a restaurant continue to improve across the years, though, and Venice is one of those rare finds. From its start as an overcrowded strip-mall joint where every night looked like an open casting call for The Sopranos to its early days in its new LoDo home (formerly occupied by Adega) to today, when no one remembers a time when Venice wasn't holding down that corner, this restaurant has only gotten better. If you haven't been recently, it's time to return to Venice.
There was something about Il Posto that moved us on our very first meal there. It wasn't the food, and it certainly wasn't the staff. No, it was something about the vibe — some indefinable hum of friction between the kitchen and the floor, the customers and the chalkboard menus hung high on the walls, that just made the place seem alive. And since it opened three years ago, the food has improved markedly, the staff has mellowed, the early crush of neighborhood trend-humpers trying to squeeze through the door on a Saturday night has cooled, but that vibe remains — that feeling of excitement that the best neighborhood restaurants must have, regardless of their price point.
Boulder is blessed with many good restaurants, but the best of all is Frasca. Although it no longer has the three-month backlog of reservations it did in the early years, this deceptively plain-looking spot is still an amazing little Northern Italian restaurant with a strong vein of modernism running through its big heart, staffed by the best crew around and featuring an ever-changing menu offering gorgeous and unpretentious proof that, absent all other modifiers, greatness lives wherever great cooks choose to settle.
We've eaten at every steakhouse in this steakhouse-heavy town, and we've never found anything that tops the Capital Grille. Everything about this restaurant — from the hand-cut steaks and perfectly set tables to the flawless service, cool lunches and killer weekend dinners — is a model against which all other steakhouses might be judged. And thus far, no others have measured up. While there might be better individual steaks, better sides, better drinks, even the occasional better night at another beef palace, no other place in town puts it all together the way Capital Grille does.
Tacos y Salsas is a tough place to miss. It's as bright and shiny and carnival-colored as the street outside is gray and grim and run down by long, rough use. It almost seems like a spot where clowns should go to buy their floppy shoes and hand buzzers, all red and yellow and orange. But this homegrown chain is serious about its food. The Federal outpost, in particular, always seems full of cooks from other restaurants. Cooks and families of cooks and other families and neighbors and construction workers. And dedicated gastronauts, too, who're digging into tacos and enchiladas filled with exotic grilled meats and weird, mushy rellenos that they've doctored up with salsas and toppings from the bar. In a town full of Mexican restaurants, there's always room for another Tacos y Salsas.
The guys at the Old Fashioned know from good hot dogs. Why? Because they're from Buffalo, a city that knows from good dogs. Here, they're Sahlen's brand, boiled to a beautiful, ruddy pink and served on a simple bun, with a little twist of casing that makes a tail at both ends. The standard at the Old Fashioned is "flying with everything," which means topped with Buffalo's own Weber's horseradish mustard, dog sauce and jalapeños and much more, taken to go. But we prefer our dog naked, with just a shot of Weber's. And we like to eat it here, where the setting is as authentic as the dogs: slightly grungy, with walls covered with pictures of Marilyn Monroe, mismatched tablecloths, Sopranos memorabilia, and shelves loaded down with pastas, canned tomatoes and other Italian dry goods.
Denver drinkers used to be content ordering snifters full of ice, cheap tequila, sweet-and-sour mix that made your teeth squeak, maybe a lime wedge, and all sorts of top-secret (and cheap) ingredients guaranteed to give them a big headache in the morning. If they wanted to get really fancy, they might even order their margaritas frozen so they didn't have to taste what was going to give them a big headache in the morning. But then Denver drinkers started studying tequila, differentiating the regional nuances, demanding fresh lime juice and margs served coin-style. While local bars increasingly focus on specialty drinks that quench the ever-growing thirst for better margaritas, they often give scant attention to the house marg. But that's not the case at Mezcal and its sibling, Tambien, which continue to turn out spritely, fresh-tasting, potent house margs that feature plenty of quality tequila, plenty of fresh juice, and just a spritz of carbonation to keep your evening bubbling along.
The Royal Peacock would win this award on smell alone. As you walk up to the restaurant, it feels like you could be lifted off the ground by the mingled aromas coming from the kitchen, like a cartoon hobo smelling pie. But once you get past the smell of tandoori and cumin, curry, saffron and a hundred other barely identifiable odors — once you get through the door, make your way to a table, thumb through the well-worn menu and order a royal feast — it's the flavors those smells ride on that make such a lasting impression. The Royal Peacock's setting is a nondescript strip mall. But its food is so good as to be almost beyond words.
A cement bunker filled with soup: That's Pho 79. It doesn't serve anything more than pho and rocket-fuel Vietnamese coffee and a few boba tea drinks — but then, it doesn't need to. Long a popular breakfast spot for the local Vietnamese community and usually far more populated (at least during the morning hours) by members of that group than by wild-eyed hipsters, East Coast transplants and others of their foul ilk, Pho 79 is nonetheless a miracle for those who feel that nothing starts the day better than a gigantic bowl of noodles, basil, broth, lime juice and various cow parts.
Maybe it's the rock-bottom prices. Maybe it's the authentic fare. Maybe it's that we've got noodle bars on the brain. Maybe it's the freaky little alien-moose thing that stands as the house mascot, because we've always had a weakness for creepy mascots and patron cartoon characters. Maybe (probably) it's all of those things. This year, we kept finding ourselves returning to Oshima Ramen, the only link in this country to a Japanese chain. Everything about this place is awesome and bizarre at the same time — from the giant bowls of fresh-made ramen to the tasty chicken bits and gyoza to the unusual Japanese sodas behind the bar. The walls are sketched with years' worth of graffiti, the history of a thousand love affairs with Oshima Ramen, of which ours is only one.
Korean barbecue isn't barbecue at all by the traditional definition — but when it's as good as what's called barbecue at Sae Jong Kwan, who stands on ceremony? Sae Jong Kwan (aka: House of Korean BBQ) is almost a gastronaut hideout, a spot where adventurous eaters gather to stuff themselves with meats and vegetables and other odds and ends all cooked on the little barbecue grills built right into the tables. Join the fun: Bring a bunch of friends, order a bunch of drinks (because there's nothing more adventurous than mixing alcohol and an open grill) and let one of the helpful servers be your guide through the long, detailed and very traditional menu.
Denver has always had a shortage of good late-night restaurants. Most places in town lock the doors around nine or ten and leave the late-night service to the drive-thrus, bars, diners and street-corner burrito vendors. So before the clock strikes eleven, head to Izakaya Den, which has a great menu for late-night snackers: a combination Italian/Mexican/French/American/Japanese board that offers both the lowbrow and the high-tone side by side.
Bastien's isn't retro. The rest of the world might be leaning in that direction, looking for cool, but Bastien's is something else entirely: It's classic. Looking for the cocktail culture of the '50s? Bastien's has it. Early-'70s swinger swank? It has that, too. Bastien's doesn't change with the times; the times change around it. Like they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and while the batteries on Bastien's Timex ran down a long time ago, this is still a great place to go for sugar steaks, sidecars, fried cheesecakes, steely martinis and a taste of Denver's culinary past.
The photos on the wall of the Avenue Grill date back to the '80s, but the feel of this bar dates back much further, to those classic cocktail lounges of the '30s and '40s. And you can taste that golden era in the martinis, which the amiable bartenders mix up big, bold and icy-cold. The martinis here are such a hit that the Avenue Grill even has a martini club, but you don't need to join in order to feel welcome at this bar. Although $5 martinis are a specialty during happy hour, which runs from 4:30 to 6:30 p.m. weekdays, the bartenders keep mixing them all night. An evening at the Avenue will leave you shaken, if not stirred.
Yes, you're probably going to pay top dollar for your meat at Marczyk Fine Foods. But trust us, it's worth it. If you really care about the quality of your food, you should shop at a place where owner Pete Marczyk and his staff take pride in offering nothing but the best of the best. Just peeking through the glass at the cuts of meat displayed by the butchers is addicting — better than leafing through any high-gloss food mag out there. Marczyk's stocks free-range chickens, makes its own sausage, and even puts some of that meat into sandwiches that you can grab for lunch.
On Wednesdays all through the summer, the scene at Elway's is hot! Aged, but hot. While bands play in the courtyard, cougars prowl through the bar and the patio, looking for fresh prey. And sugar daddies are doing the same, looking for the next sweet young thing. Should they strike out, there's always a consolation prize: real red meat in the dining room.
Face it, fellas: The Yetis you're meeting on that snatch.com Internet dating site just aren't panning out. And ladies? You want it, but you don't want to give it up to a Neanderthal or have to wear a penicillin wetsuit just to get shagged. It's okay to be horny like rockets. And when you need some booty but have no one to call, there's only one place to prowl: the Park Tavern. There's no surer spot for men or women to score a romper-room buddy. The lays are as cheap and easy as the beer. And should you actually just want some platonic company, the Park has both quality drinks and drunks.
The first time we ate at El Viva Villa, we immediately wanted to eat here again. The second time we ate here (roughly six hours after the first time), we knew that it was going to go into heavy rotation on our dining schedule. While there's nothing unique about the space (other than the fact that it used to be a good dim sum restaurant), El Viva Villa serves a spread of amazing Mexican food from early in the morning until late in the evening. Our favorite is the burritos — all deeply flavorful (the al pastor in particular), charry-sweet, just the right size and significantly cheaper than a burrito at the Chipotle across the street.
First things first: The service at Ya Hala Grill is terrible — sometimes laughably so, sometimes maddeningly so. The building itself is little more than a cement bunker on Colorado Boulevard with half a bakery in front and a few tables in back, and the kitchen often seems to be working in its own little world, releasing your dinner in dribs and drabs and often completely out of order. But you've just got to get past all that, because the food at Ya Hala is so good. It's Syrian food, done traditionally and exceptionally well. Gyros for lunch, ballila and fouel and roasted chicken for dinner, the greatest baklava we've ever had for dessert. It's worth putting up with any indignity to get your hands on a plate of that baklava. When a restaurant serves the best Middle Eastern food in the city, you just have to be ready to suck it up — and then eat it up.
On the one hand, Parallel Seventeen is like a Vietnamese tapas restaurant — the style having been co-opted by owner Mary Nguyen from the banquets once held by the Vietnamese royal family. On the other, it's a proper sit-down restaurant that is almost fusion-y in its modern reinterpretation of the traditional French-Asian cuisine of Vietnam. Put those two competing influences together and you get a completely original, delicious concept. From the Maine lobster dumplings with kaffir lime beurre blanc to the steak frites and Hanoi curry, Parallel Seventeen slips effortlessly between culinary traditions and time periods, offering Denver diners the best of all possible worlds.
This isn't your typical huevos breakfast place. Lola's creative weekend brunch menu — right now, at least — includes crawfish and grits, catfish, chicken-fried pork, even a breakfast torta with smoked shrimp, Serrano ham and tomato-jalapeño jelly. And then there are the weekly specials, each one more inventive than the previous week's. The flavor is distinctly Mexican, with an emphasis on coastal cuisine — and on a sunny day, there's no better beach than Lola's outdoor deck, particularly when you're enjoying it with a margarita in hand.
Sibling restaurants Racines and Dixons are great places for casual breakfasts, power breakfasts, late-night snacks and the last drink of the night. But we're particularly partial to their nachos — the biggest, boldest plate of nachos in town, a piping-hot heap of food for under ten bucks. You can customize them with black or refried beans, subtract the sour cream or guac, throw on more jalapeños, add meat (flavorful steak or tender chicken), or douse them with the house salsa or your choice of hot sauces. They're carefully constructed so that the gooey nacho goodness goes all the way to the bottom of the platter, and the ratio of toppings to chips ensures that the last bite will be as good as the first.
Just in case you were ever wondering, yeah, every neighborhood Italian joint back east is a little like Patsy's. Which is to say that every one of them has a claim to some kind of history, serves a wicked good linguini with white clam sauce, has a weird bar filled with exactly the kind of guys you never want to grow up to be, and makes spaghetti and meatballs that will hang with you, in flavor and in sweet memory, for the rest of your days. Patsy's has been around in one form or another, under one owner or another (a cousin of the founding family recently took over) for more than seventy years, since back when northwest Denver was a true Italian neighborhood, and it remains the best taste of neighborhood Italian in town. The kitchen does the simple stuff (pizzas again, mussels, that benchmark linguini with clam sauce) very well and, wisely, leaves the more complicated things for other restaurants. But you won't miss them, because at Patsy's, you'll find a dish you like and stick with it for the rest of your life — just like customers at a proper neighborhood joint are supposed to.
Venue serves American comfort food. It serves American comfort food prepared with French technique, with a little Italian influence, with a greenmarket sensibility. But that doesn't begin to convey the wonders coming from this kitchen: Manila clams with crumbled fennel sausage and roasted quarters of tomato in a sweet and rich broth spiked with lime and smoked paprika; slow-slow-slow-cooked beef short rib with oyster mushrooms, the meat so sweet and soft that it seems to melt; homemade tomato soup (a perfectly smooth purée of house-roasted tommies) with fresh thyme and garlic, an unexpected dart of spice that hits you right on the back of the tongue. Holly Hartnett's new restaurant is the neighborhood place everyone wishes was in their neighborhood — a place that will happily serve you grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch and then agnolotti with brie, white beans, mushrooms, tomatoes and leeks for dinner just a couple hours later.
Duo has the trappings of a simple neighborhood bistro — but one with a particularly inventive cook behind the grills. Chef John Broening can do French, as evidenced by his duck confit over potato pancakes with apricot mustard. He can do Italian (gnocchi with oyster mushrooms and pecorino), fusion (a dish of pastry-wrapped mahi with herb pistou and sautéed vegetables). And he clearly knows his way around the fine points of old and new Continental, greenmarket and straight-up American cuisine (parmesan-crusted chicken with bacon-shot potato salad and watercress). Add to those talents a pastry department run by Yasmin Lozada-Hissom (one of the best pastry chefs anywhere), and the result is the most intelligent, consistently well-executed and grounded New American menu in the city.
"New American" is a term that's fallen somewhat out of favor as a way to describe the type of cuisine that essentially marks the page where, in the history of gastronomy, American chefs began asserting themselves as being capable of cooking more than just cheeseburgers and fat steaks. And that's because, for a time, the phrase was used to describe just about every restaurant that wasn't a takeout Chinese place or a Greek diner. But really, the reason that no other Denver restaurant wants to be labeled "New American" is simply because no other New American restaurant in this town (and maybe anymore) could be as good as Fruition. Chef Alex Seidel and his crew take their beef barley soup, oysters Rockefeller, confit pork shoulder and notions of American mastery very seriously, and in the front of the house, partner Paul Attardi takes the ideas of comfort and ease just as seriously — making a room that lulls you into a focused languor where nothing matters but the meal in front of you and the person you're sharing it with.
Bones is a restaurant made by a cook, for cooks. It's a restaurant dreamed up by a guy who loves food unreservedly and opened for those who share his outsized passions. Borders? Canon? Fads? Fuck 'em. Nominally a noodle bar, Bones is really a loose conglomeration of plates and styles and techniques that came together only because one man thought to stick them together. But what makes Bones work — makes the place truly sing — is that each one of these plates is an act of love, an ode to flavors and tastes that cooks love. It's a peek behind the curtain, a kind of psychological report on the passions of the food-obsessed and the food-drunk. "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are," Brillat-Savarin once said. And Bones, where owner Frank Bonanno and his guys cook what they like to eat, is simply this: the best new restaurant in Denver.
If ever a food deserved to take off as a fast-food staple but didn't, it's the humble kolache. Sure, it's been ripped off as everything from Hot Pockets to Pizza Rolls, but the only place that gives kolaches the care they deserve is the Kolache Factory, a small, Texas-based chain. And while the traditional kolache is a simple, yeasty, slightly sweet roll filled with sweet or savory leftovers, the Kolache Factory has modernized things by shoving all sorts of surprises inside its fresh-baked rolls. Chicken Ranchero kolaches? You bet. Breakfast kolaches with potato, egg and cheese? Of course. Since most versions retail in the one- to two-dollar range, you can essentially stuff yourself with three gastrointestinal hand grenades for just five bucks. But the Kolache Factory also sells them by the dozen, in case you have a sudden need for twelve sausage, jalapeño and cheese kolaches.
In New Orleans, people might say that eggs Sardou is just as traditional as any white-bread, ham-and-holly eggs Benedict. But here in Denver, this Gulf prawn-and-spinach version is an exotic, rule-breaking freak Benny — and the best thing on Lucile's menu full of very good things. As such, it stands as incontrovertible proof that any classic recipe ever touched by a Cajun or Creole chef is only made better by their restrained fussing and murderous application of heavy cream, butter, eggs, butter and butter to everything. The eggs Sardou at Lucile's are so good that we've occasionally been tempted to order two plates and eat both at a single sitting. The only thing holding us back? The sure knowledge that we'd die from the pure excess — though God knows, we'd go out smiling.
An argument could be made that all Japanese food is fast food. Dumplings and noodle bowls are basic convenience foods, and sushi's ready with the slash of a knife. But Kokoro puts a uniquely American (and, arguably, uniquely Denver) spin on this idea that lands its noodle bowls, rice bowls, gyoza and sushi right between Chipotle fast-casual and old-time Woolworth's lunch-counter grub — except here the customers are eating unagi rice bowls, shrimp tempura udon, tekka maki and "sobaghetti" (yakisoba with vegetables and sauce) instead of cheeseburgers and milkshakes.
Why "Old American"? Because the central conceit behind both the menu and the design at Beatrice & Woodsley is that the restaurant is supposed to look like a place that might've been prepared by a particularly adept woodsman for his lady love in turn-of-the-last-century Colorado — and the food is part of the same fantasy. Thus are the bar's back shelves mounted to the wall by way of chainsaws, and the main floor has aspen trees growing out of it. Thus does the menu manage to mix beautiful frog's legs, deconstructed Fig Newtons, turtle soup, buffalo hash, pork belly, roast quail, crawfish beignets and foie gras all together — a lineup that would be ludicrous without the design. And without the menu, the design would be goofy and annoying. But when everything comes together, Beatrice & Woodsley becomes much more than the simple sum of its parts; it becomes one of the most singularly beautiful and brilliant restaurants that Denver has ever seen.
There's almost nothing in this world as fine as a perfect stack of pancakes. Aged whiskey, a good lay, a stripper who's actually doing it to pay for her philosophy degree — these all edge out a perfect plate of flapjacks, but not by much. And when you're looking for that perfect plate, the place on your list should be Toast. The "Plain Jane Pancakes" here are so good they ought to be criminal — light and fluffy and dense all at the same time, cooked on the flat-top so that each one is marked with the concentric rings that can only be made by a flapjack-flipper who's got his eye on the ball. But what really raises Toast to the realm of hotcake heaven are the specialty pancakes with Fruity Pebbles or Oreos, spiked with lemon and blueberry, made to taste like strawberry cheesecake or in the style of bananas Foster. The kitchen will even do them in flights, so you never have to decide between one sweet, unbelievable indulgence and another.
Mark Tarbell is some kind of pizza genius. We don't know what, exactly, he had to sell to the devil in order to gain his magical pizza-making skills and then apply them to the Oven, but his sacrifice was worth it. Because even with all the fierce and bitter competition in this town over what is essentially some dough, tomato sauce and cheese, the Oven continues not only to serve Denver's best pizza, but to stand far above its closest competitor. The Oven's pies are addictive, always displaying the ideal balance of quality toppings, sauce and crust. And the Belmar restaurant where you get to eat those pizzas is just plain fun — an honest-to-god neighborhood pizza joint that's full of neighborly types from across the city every night.
In both atmosphere and attitude, Brooklyn MC's establishes itself as one of those straight-outta-the-boroughs New York pizza joints the minute you walk through the door. And then a pizza comes out of one of the big deck ovens, thin as a dream, looped with swirls of red sauce and splotches of cheese bubbling the way real mozzarella will. It's a great pizza that makes for a great slice, and chances are there are some slices from the last pie to come out of the oven waiting for you right now, under glass on the counter. So what are you waiting for? If you're hungry, broke and in a rush, MC's has you covered.
Take one Mexican restaurant, add a drive-thru, and what do you get? Another Best of Denver award for Viva Burrito. This spot is a great at virtually any hour of the day — breakfast burritos in the morning, enchiladas in an unbelievably good red chile after work, deep-fried tacos on the way home from the bar — but perhaps the best expression of Viva's greatness is during the lunch rush. Where else can you get a Mexican taco-and-enchilada combo plate, a horchata and some weird, jelly-filled churro-esque dessert in under five minutes, and for less than a ten-spot? We doubt that any such place exists — and even if it does, it would be hard-pressed to do the job better than Viva.
We don't know what it is, exactly, but certain cuisines and certain restaurants are always better when the weather is right. A smoothie is always sweeter when the sun is out. A plate of goulash or bowl of borscht always tastes better in the frozen dead of winter. And a rainy day always — always — makes the food at Bagel Deli taste better. On such days, we like to take a quick turn around the market shelves and then settle into one of the well-worn booths where, as the rain patters down, we order up a cup of watery coffee and a nice scrambled-eggs-and-salami plate, maybe some latkes, rugelach or matzoh ball soup. The Bagel Deli also has some good sunny-day picnic food — thick sandwiches and good egg salad and a sixer of Dr. Brown's from the shelf. Still, when the rain is coming down, we always find ourselves heading straight for the Bagel Deli.
Las Tortas sells tortas and nothing but tortas — about two dozen varieties, from the simplest steak-and-chicken Jalisco to the most bizarrely overpowering La Macha, with steak Milanesa, chorizo, chile, a fried egg and a hot dog crammed together on a roll. There's a counter on one side where you order and pick up, a few high-top tables on the other, a cooler with Mexican Coke and beer by the bottle, and a couple of TVs hanging from the ceiling playing telenovelas and VideoRola. The joint is simple and spare and unbelievably awesome. And the best thing about it? No torta will run you more than eight dollars, and even that price is only for las especiales. The bulk of the items on the menu can be had for six or seven bucks, and just one of the tortas at Las Tortas is plenty big enough to make a meal for any big hungry boy.
This year's hot restaurant neighborhood news is a northwest-side story. In 2008, three new restaurants sprang up at the corner of 44th Avenue and Lowell Boulevard long held down by Cafe Brazil: Billy's Inn, Tocabe and Shazz. From there, it's a quick trip to Tennyson Street, where you can have breakfast at DJ's Berkeley Cafe, lunch at Brasserie Felix, then drinks at the Berkeley Inn, the recovered dive bar where you can still have a couple of cigarettes with your beer and shot. Then it's down to 32nd Avenue for happy hour at Venue, dinner at Duo, a quick after-dinner glass of wine at Z Cuisine À Côté, and a final nightcap at another newcomer, Root Down. In between, there's Big Hoss Bar-B-Q (fried cheese and whiskey floats), Bang, Taquería Patzcuaro (chicharrones), Masterpiece Deli and about a hundred other spots that range from a few of Denver's worst to some of its very, very best.
A roasted chicken is a benchmark dish for any kitchen. It can be the simplest or cheapest or most popular dish. But at Bistro One, it is none of those things. Instead, it's the soul of the menu — classic, traditional, borderless. The bird comes stuffed with cornbread, its little legs crossed, roasted to a perfect golden brown, surrounded by winter vegetables and sauced with a delicious, deep and complex golden raisin sauce. Of all the plates at Bistro One, this is the best, the most fully formed and skillfully executed — proof of the potential for a great restaurant in the making.
At Thai Lotus, the crew is Thai and the food obviously Thai, unkinked for the American palate, presented the way the best immigrant cuisines are — as recalled from home. The menu is, for the most part, a standard retelling of the country's culinary history: lad na and pad thai, curried this and that, and "hot" meaning hot-hot, like crying gasoline hot. But it takes one small diversion, into a section marked "Rotisserie" that has only one dish listed: a rotisserie chicken that is flat-out amazing. After you order it, you can hear the thunking of the cleaver as the chicken is deconstructed — and when it arrives, accompanied by rice and a bowl of thick red sauce flecked with dried hot pepper, it's steaming like something out of a commercial. Under that steam, the chicken has been roughly hacked into bone-spurred chunks, its golden-brown and fatty skin perfectly roasted and still attached, the meat inside juicy and incredibly tender.
At Masterpiece Delicatessen, partners Justin Brunson and Steve Allee do some pretty amazing things with a little bread, a little meat, a little this-and-that. Their simplest creations — egg sandwiches, grilled cheese, turkey with pears and cranberry honey — show their command of the artistry of restraint (just enough, never too much), while their more complicated plates demonstrate a high-end, Super Frog cookery gone feral in the service of a soup-and-sandwich board. Their kung fu is strong, no doubt. And here in Denver, we're lucky to have them.
So you're planning on getting out there and tearing it up on Saturday night? Well, cowboy, you might want to put a little something in your stomach before you start sucking down the shots — and Señor Burrito is just the place to do it. Or maybe you're thinking about catching a movie at the Mayan. Why not grab a snack at Señor Burrito before the show? What? The boss called you in to work on Saturday and you're just getting off at eight? Time for Señor Burrito, pal. We can't think of a single circumstance when a burrito or pork chop plate at Señor Burrito won't make things better.
What does it take to run a great seafood restaurant a mile above sea level and a thousand miles from the nearest ocean? The kind of system that hums behind the scenes at Oceanaire — a business structure that brings in fresh fish daily, six days a week, following supply lines that run back and forth across the globe, all terminating in a kitchen that actually knows what to do with a glut of great product. Under the command of chef Matt Mine, Oceanaire serves up the best sea critters you'll find this far from the ocean. And the kitchen also hands down some nice non-piscine thrills as well, banging out bacon steaks, salads and more for those who (for whatever reason...) decide to go to the best fish restaurant in the city for meat-and-potatoes fare.
Best Secret Russian Deli
Solomon's Grocery and European Delicatessen
It's a long way from Uzbekistan to Aurora, but Bukharan immigrant Solomon Gurzhiev and his family take the miles in stride at their Russian-Jewish deli, where they feature a compact selection of imported Eastern European foods as well as more than eighty kinds of deli meats, smoked fish, sausages, pickles and cheeses. Authentic is the word at Solomon's, where the proprietors are bend-over-backwards friendly, the coolers stuffed with a dozen varieties of kefir and farmer's cheese, and mom Gurzhiev whips up homemade pelmeni on request. But nowhere is that authenticity more evident than in the small but potent selection of fresh-baked breads offered daily at the counter, including a dense, coriander-laced rye loaf that goes nicely with the deli fare.
There's not much in this world that's as comforting as a perfectly done plate of steak frites. And in this town, there's no better plate of steak frites than the one coming from Brasserie Felix's kitchen. Good thing, too, because if a restaurant calling itself a brasserie can't knock this classic of comfort-French gastronomy out of the park, it had better just lock its doors. Instead, you'll want to hurry through those doors for an order, which includes a beautifully done eight-ounce flatiron with a silky béarnaise that mixes wonderfully with the steak juice, as well as a pile of nice frites, blanched and fried. Though it's nothing more than a piece of beef, a dab of sauce and some fried potatoes, this steak frites is much greater than the sum of its parts.
Everyone in this town serves steaks. Most restaurants serve pretty good ones. But no other steakhouse in the city has a menu like that at the original Elway's, which covers all the traditional steakhouse basics (big whacks of beef, lobster tails, shrimp cocktails and creamed spinach), then turns the whole concept on its ear, fooling with the formalized, high-rolling boys' club feel of the traditional beefery by serving shrimp cocktails over smoking dry ice, offering lamb lollipops, excellent steak tacos and tuna tartare, and even serving Ding Dongs for dessert. A meal here is just plain fun. With chef Tyler Wiard in the kitchen, Elway's continues to score.
Maybe you've heard stories about the little Italian place in Lakewood that won't take reservations because if it did, there'd never be an open table for the neighbors, a place where regulars arrive a half-hour before the start of dinner, jockeying for position and counting heads to make sure they'll get a seat. Welcome to Cafe Jordano. The fare here is classic Italian strip mall done phenomenally well, and the crowds proof that one needs nothing more than talent and pride in good work to make a restaurant successful. Well, talent, pride and a single dish (the pollo alla Roberts) that has become legendary over the years as the single, best-tasting thing on any menu in Colorado.
Yeah, it's busy. Yeah, real estate at the counter (bests seats in the house) can be tough to come by, particularly on Sunday, when people are stopping in before and after mass, on their way to work or just going home. The ladies working said counter won't take any shit, and they'll get pissed if you dither too long over the menu. But the Sunday-morning scene at El Taco de México is not to be missed, and the food that's served at this most authentic of Mexican diners is some of the best in the entire city. The menudo is an excellent hangover cure, and every taco is a work of short-order art. We brake for El Taco on Sunday morning — and you should, too.
Oceanaire may be the modern embodiment of a system that facilitates swift and stunning deliveries of fish from all corners of the globe to little ol' Denver, but Sushi Den blazed the trail that others would follow. For two decades, Sushi Den has labored toward perfecting a supply line whereby fish that were swimming yesterday could tonight land on the plates of picky eaters in this town. Through contacts in the fish markets of Japan and lots of big FedEx bills, Sushi Den manages to get not only some of the best, freshest fish in Denver, but in the whole of the United States. And while for most people the difference between a piece of baby bluefin that's been out of the water 36 hours and one that's been dead three days might not seem like a big deal, for real sashimi fans, it's huge. And Sushi Den is the place they go for the freshest, most delicately handled fish in the city.
The sushi at Sushi Katsuya is excellent, the service friendly and precise. The restaurant is relatively inexpensive, not too kitsch, not too spare, and fairly quiet on most nights, a place of solace for those whose consolations come more from the East than the West. But you'll never feel alone, because Sushi Katsuya quickly makes you a regular. The employees welcome you in unison, and if you take a seat at the sushi bar, you might not get up for another fifty years or so.
At Sushi Sasa, the attention to detail makes all the difference. There's no need here for plastic grass garnishes, lumps of fake wasabi, bias-cut plating or two dozen stupidly named rolls that are all tuna, avocado, cucumber and tobiko. At Sushi Sasa, even the simplest tekka maki is a work of art, lavished with the kind of attention that other places don't even give to expensive rolls. Everything about the space is clean and white and spare, and everything about the kitchen is geared toward maximizing the impact of the fish itself — the tiny moves that could elevate a simple piece of skipjack, shrimp or bonito into something you might remember for the rest of your life.
Sometimes the simplest spots are best, and it doesn't get much simpler than Tacos D.F. Basically a taco truck parked indoors, Tacos D. F. hands you the best tacos in the city, hands-down, through a hole in the back wall. It cooks up plenty of other things (soups and stews, tortas and burritos), but tacos are the kitchen's true pride — filled with meats hot off the grill that need nothing more than a squeeze of lime or maybe a touch of handmade salsa to be perfect. The asada and the carnitas are our favorites, but depending on the day, the hour and the mood of the crew in the back, upwards of a dozen varieties might be available — every one of them fantastic, none with the least bit of pretension.
How sweet it is! Lime, the homegrown chain that started in Larimer Square and now stretches from Greenwood Village to Winter Park, is known for its Tuesday-night tacos, its fresh (flour) chips, its strong margaritas. But our favorite item here is the tamales, offered both as an app and an entree. The tamales are vegetarian and all about corn, corn and more corn. Inside each corn-husk package you'll find a steaming layer of masa surrounding a succulent, sweet corn filling. Smothered in Lime's red (also vegetarian) or green (chicken, not pork) chile, this is one hot tamale!
Step into US Thai on a busy afternoon, when both of the small dining rooms are full and the rail of the open kitchen is crowded with dupes, and you can watch the blur of the cooks at work. With the grates popped on the ancient, fire-breathing hot-top and water cascading down the backsplash to keep the whole place from burning down, they never stop moving, never stop tinkering, never stop adding to a plate, a bowl, an oil-seasoned wok, until an entree hits the rail. A dozen combative spices, countless vegetables (done rough-chopped, julienned, slivered, batonnet-cut or shaved, each in their proper way), curry as a paste, curry as a powder, nine proteins, broths and bases held aside, rice in the steamers, noodles in the lowboys, fryers always in use, flames always leaping. It's an incredible dance, with results that are almost infallibly delicious, every flavor true. US Thai isn't just the best Thai restaurant in Denver; it serves some of the best Thai food we've ever tasted anywhere.
You don't get more traditional than the Brown Palace, and the Sunday brunch at Ellyngton's is a completely over-the-top version of the classic, high-society Sunday brunch. Here you'll find everything from egg and waffle stations to carving stations with white-toqued chefs slaving over hot steamship rounds, to salad, sushi, and pastry boards from the in-house bakery. If you want to up the ante, you can go for the Dom Perignon version, which is definitely a nice way to start the day but will set you back nearly two hundred bucks. If you've got that kind of green to blow, though, what better way to do it than by pulling up a chair in front of mountains of jumbo shrimp, wrapping those suckers in rare slabs of prime rib, and then washing it all down with Dom drunk straight from the bottle? Top hat and monocle optional...
The guys in the galley at DJ's Berkeley Cafe really care about their Bennies. They only make them until eleven each morning (mostly because if they offered them all day, they'd never stop), and they make every single hollandaise sauce to order (no small trick on a busy line). They also recognize the difference between a classic Benny (with eggs, Canadian bacon, English muffin and hollandaise) and all the mutant forms that the Benedict has been twisted into over the years. Sure, they'll make you a crab Benny, a vegetarian Benny or one with smoked salmon, but their classic, traditional presentation is the very best in town.
Not just Japanese, but country Japanese. And not just country Japanese, but country Japanese focusing specifically on the peasant food eaten in the mountains of Japan, with decor to match. Strange as it may sometimes seem (scallion omelets and giant clam sashimi and wonderful, cold buckwheat noodles), each plate that comes from the kitchen at Domo arrives freighted with both history and tradition. Settling down on one of the polished tree stumps that pass for seats and melting into the slow languor of the dining room and Zen garden beyond, you'll find yourself as close to ancient Japan as you can get without flying to the country from which Domo has taken its deep inspiration.
The best vegetarian food is just food that happens to have no meat in it — a dinner served without the sides of guilt, bullying or whining, Be Nice to Animals socio-political rhetoric. And that's exactly what you'll get at Masalaa, a good restaurant that happens to not serve meat. The big draw here are the dosa — enormous Indian pastry roll-ups stuffed with all manner of unusual things — but the rest of the dishes are equally good, offering a full palette of flavors and textures without ever having to resort to wrapping things in bacon.
Denver has about a thousand Vietnamese restaurants, and most of them are pretty good. But even in this ocean of eateries, a few stand out as truly special, and the best of all is Kim Ba. Virtually every plate that comes out of the kitchen at Kim Ba (and yes, we've tasted almost all of them) is a model against which similar plates might be judged and found lacking. And if that plate is coming off the grill? Nothing beats it. The only challenge to eating here is saving room for the entrees, because the short board of appetizers includes Denver's best soft-shell crab and best Vietnamese fondue.
We love the pho at Pho Fusion. We love the Vietnamese coffee and the noodle bowls, too. Also, we love the lo mein and the sesame chicken, the curries and the idea that all these dishes from all these differing canons can exist so comfortably together on one single, straightforward menu. Owner Tom Bird gleefully tosses out all geographic constraints, cramming competing influences together into a single, coherent, American fast-casual model that every year seems as though it really ought to be the Next Big Thing. No such luck — but after five years, Bird finally got a second location open, introducing the good people of Highland to his very good food.
What's the most important thing to have at a great wine bar? No, it's not the wine. It's the scene. Because no matter how good the wine might be (and at Lala's, it's very, very good), you don't want to be sitting there drinking it all by yourself. And in just six months, Lala's has become a regular hangout, a great space where neighbors — and in spirit, that includes people from across the metro area — come to unwind and chill out at the end of the day, enjoy a solid menu of snacks and small plates, and be catered to by staffers who know how to handle themselves around a good bottle of grape juice and offer a spread of bottles well-suited to everyday drinking.
There are great French wine lists in town. Great Italian ones, too. There are lists that stick to certain countries, certain growing regions, certain tastes; ones made for pairing and ones made for impressing the wine snobs. But the list at Solera has a different goal: It simply wants to get good bottles into the hands of those who need them, and is more than willing to cross borders and price points to do so. So Solera offers both Perrier-Jouët champagne and Italian prosecco from Lunetta. Its list has Oregon chardonnays and Spanish Albarino, Argentinian malbecs, German pinots and classic French Rhône blends from Châteauneuf-du-Pape. And while you might be able to get yourself a twenty-dollar bottle of American cabernet, that bottle of Verite La Joie from Sonoma will run you $190 — proving that the Solera cellars have you covered no matter your style, taste or bank balance.
We love a place informal enough to list its bottles on a chalkboard — even if we're cowed by the fact that we can't correctly pronounce most of them. But at Z Cuisine and its sibling wine bar, À Côté, we have no doubt that anything we drink will be delicious. Z Cuisine has stayed true to its concept as a neighborhood bistro by offering some fantastic (primarily French) wines at reasonable prices. By the glass, they generally run between five and ten bucks, with a couple (like the new, Denver-born Infinite Monkey Theorem sauvignon) cracking twelve. And the bottles usually stay in the thirty-dollar range. A Domaine la Garrigue 2006 Côtes du Rhône for $33? That's not a bad deal on any list, and at Z Cuisine, it's just the start.
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