Best Fusion Menu 2009 | L'Atelier | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Fusion Menu

L'Atelier

Courtesy L'Atelier Facebook
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.

Best Fusion Restaurant

Izakaya Den

Izakaya Den
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.

Best Gourmet Pizza

Buenos Aires Pizzeria

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.

Best Green Chile

Santiago's

Molly Martin
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.

Best Grits

Venue

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.

Best Hangover Breakfast

El Noa Noa

Courtesy El Noa Noa Facebook
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.

Best Happy-Hour Deal

Lancer Lounge

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.

Best Happy-Hour Food

Delite

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.

Best Happy-Hour Menu

Le Central

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.

Best High-End Italian Restaurant

Venice Ristorante

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.

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