Best Central/South American Restaurant 2013 | Las Salteñas | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Central/South American Restaurant

Las Salteñas

You may not even know that metro Denver has a Bolivian restaurant, much less what kind of food you'll find there. But this tiny restaurant's name gives away the Bolivian national treasure: empanada-like pockets of beef or chicken stew called salteñas. Soupy and notoriously difficult to eat without spilling, salteñas contain spicy filling studded with olives, potatoes and diced hard-boiled eggs. Poke a hole to let the steam out before nibbling the slightly sweet pastry and downing the rich, warming broth. Other specialties include lomo borracho — a beer-based, chunky beef soup topped with a fried egg — and pique macho, a street-food-lover's dream dish of tender beef, french fries, hot dog slices and spicy gravy. With only a few seats in the place, takeout is a definite option, but then you'll miss the owner's warmth, charm and wistful descriptions of Bolivian culture and cuisine.

Best Cheap Steak

Bull & Bush

Evan Semón

Here's the primary problem with ultra-cheap steaks: They're annoyingly thin — too thin to prepare mid-rare — and for those of us who prefer a mooing cow to a muffled cow, that just doesn't cut it. But you don't have to pay upwards of $30 for a great piece of meat. For a bargain-priced steak that's thick, beastly and full of beefy flavor, head to the appropriately named Bull & Bush, which serves a twelve-ounce baseball center-cut sirloin that's liberally rubbed with salt and pepper and then grilled to the exact temperature requested. Included in the $17 price tag is soup or salad and a choice of mashed potatoes, wild rice or a loaded baked potato. This is a steak you can bank on.

Best Chef

Lon Symensma

If the kitchen is a stage, then Lon Symensma, chef-owner of ChoLon, is its undisputed star. He exudes extraordinary verve and charisma behind — and beyond — the line, and there's no end to his experimental innovation and bedazzling flavors and textures. But even more important is his endless pursuit of perfection, evident in every dish he creates, plates and tastes before it's whisked from the kitchen. He leaves absolutely nothing to chance, cooking with precision and finesse, standing guard over his troops and exposing his soul in every sauce, glaze, skewer, dumpling, potsticker and egg cloud that touches your lips. This is the kind of restaurant — and Symensma is the kind of chef — that makes you want to drop everything you're doing and just surrender to delicious temptation.

See also: A look at the last decade of Best Chef winners

Best Chef Ambassador

Jeff Osaka

Mark Manger

A few years ago, Jeff Osaka, chef-owner of twelve, issued a plea to his fellow troops: Call me. Let's get together and hang and talk about how we can continue to capitalize on Denver's ever-evolving restaurant landscape. Osaka, a brilliant chef in his own right, has made it his mission to make sure that chefs in this city have a place to gather (oftentimes at his own restaurant), and the flock that does isn't remotely cliquish. Instead, his monthly get-togethers are all-encompassing, and they're lively and informal, too, although hot topics — Denver Restaurant Week, the health department, working closely with local growers and farmers, and satisfying guests — are usually on the table. We often hear local chefs laud this city's culinary camaraderie, and credit for some of that should go to Osaka, who doesn't just talk the talk — he walks the walk.

Best Chef's Counter

TAG|RAW BAR

For an unofficial — and free — lesson in masterful raw cookery, head straight to TAG|RAW BAR, where every stool gives you insider access to the workings of chef Shaun Motada, whose pedigreed techniques speak to a real counter culture. Motada and his staff cook at a supersonic but controlled pace as they prepare a series of brilliant small plates and raw-fish compositions: kangaroo steak tartare, citrus-spiked ceviches, stunning sashimi and sushi rolls, ramen noodle bowls. It's a counter where you can live — and eat — a little dangerously, tossing your whims and fancies straight to the kitchen crew, whose ambitious combinations will rock your world. What chef doesn't want to see instant gratification? And that's exactly what diners get, too, when they park their butts in Motada's open kingdom.

Best Chicken and Waffles

Lola

Which came first, the chicken or the waffle? There may be a lot of disagreement about how this dish came about, but almost everyone agrees that the unusual combination of sweet and savory is delicious, which is why it's a staple of Southern cuisine. And you'll be heading south across the border — at least hypothetically — for Denver's best plate of chicken and waffles, served up during the weekend brunch at Lola. Although the restaurant is inspired by the coastal regions of Mexico, the brunch menu travels some unusual territory, serving up a great chicken-fried steak and a version of chicken and waffles that pairs a buttermilk-brined fried chicken breast and waffles with chorizo gravy and a sweet cherry syrup.

Best Chili Con Carne

Rackhouse Pub

The Rackhouse Pub welcomes you with stews, casseroles and sauces served in metal measuring cups. This playful touch draws you right into the spirit of the kitchen, as if you were standing next to the cook while he offers you samples from a simmering pot of chili con carne. The spicy aroma of the whiskey chili grips you with cumin and red pepper pods, pulling you closer to the two-cup serving vessel surrounded by its diminutive partners brimming with sour cream, chives and shredded cheddar. This is thick, chunky Texas campfire chili, with Stranahan's whiskey adding sweet and smoky notes to the coarse-ground beef and tender beans, all swathed in a piquant, brick-red sauce that sticks to the sides of the cup. Luckily, there's a honey-glazed corn muffin to dredge up the last of it, because you won't even consider taking home leftovers.

Best Chinese

East Asia Garden

Cassandra Stiltner

Some of the best cooking in Denver comes from restaurants that are completely off the grid — those with generic names, facades as forgettable as last night's one-night stand and featureless dining rooms with clashing color schemes. East Asia Garden is that kind of restaurant. You've whizzed by it on Broadway a dozen times, never giving it even a cursory glance. And that's a mistake, because it turns out the most amazing home-style, traditional Chinese food in the city. Here, among the usual suspects, are dishes like tofu with black eggs, pig's ears and cucumbers, cross bridge rice noodles (good luck finding those anywhere else in Denver) and Chongqing chicken, which is very much the food equivalent of a firecracker: a shovel of blistered, volatile fried chiles tangled with equal amounts of Sichuan peppercorns and cubes of fried chicken, hot enough to make your mouth numb for days. But the unadventurous have an out: Along with fried pig's liver, the menu includes benign dumplings.

Best Contemporary Cocktail Bar

Squeaky Bean

A bar — a really good bar — should function like a kitchen. And bartenders — really, really good ones — should put signature stamps on their cocktails the same way that a really good chef handprints his food. A chef like Max MacKissock at Squeaky Bean, for example. So it's no surprise that the Bean's innovative bar program, commanded by Sean Kenyon and a squad of other serious spirit geeks, takes the modern cocktail movement to the next level. The roster, divided into 1970s and '80s movie headings — The Longest Yard (tall drinks); Rocky III (all drinks served on block ice); Up the Academy (drinks that are served up) — is compact and focused, but also crafty and ambitious. Particularly intriguing are the Weird Science offerings, a catalogue of smoked cocktails that, like the rest of the list, change on a whim. For all the drinks, the ingredients are market-fresh; the ice is hand-carved and tailored to whatever you're sipping; the spices, sourced from the Savory Spice Shop, are aromatized and ground in-house; and there's even a PolyScience smoking gun that infuses billows of vapor into the cocktails. It's an exceptionally innovative program that doesn't miss a drop.

Best Dim Sum

Super Star Asian

Cassandra Kotnik

Super Star Asian nearly doubled in size last year, but securing a table here — especially on the weekends, when hunger-pained customers line up like dominoes to get their dim sum fix — is never easy. An eclectic mix of Asian families, American groups, couples and intrepid stalwarts with massive hangovers scramble for tables in the chaotic crowd of faces, most of which are buried in bamboo steamers filled with everything from divine shrimp-and-chive dumplings to pudgy lotus-leaf wraps. The dim sum dishes are all wheeled around on darting carts, pushed by solicitous servers who aren't shy about encouraging you to take one of everything. And so you should: Even the chicken feet fly right. Just make sure to hold on to your seat, because the unending stream of cranky customers who want it aren't afraid to stand at your feet and stare you down.

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