Five stars at 30,000 feet

There’s much more planning required for very high-altitude cuisine than there is a mere mile above sea level, as Andres Jimenez is learning. Starting May 1, the exec chef at the Ritz-Carlton downtown will be the first of four Ritz-Carlton chefs to take on a two-month stint creating high-end, sky-high…

Boulder’s renegade lunch lady

Now serving: Renegade Lunch Lady Ann Cooper, who’s taking on the Boulder Valley School District. Cooper is known nationally as an advocate for healthier school lunches for children, and has already created greatly improved nutritional meal programs in New York and at the Berkeley Unified School District in California. I recently…

Samba Brasil Cafe & Grill dances to a June beat

I don’t want to make any sweeping predictions or jinx an address that hasn’t been particularly kind to previous occupants — most recently a java joint — and the stretch of asphalt that makes up Leetsdale Drive hasn’t exactly been a springboard for culinary greatness. Still, I’m going to postulize…

The Kitchen celebrates its fifth birthday

Happy anniversary to the Kitchen, at 1039 Pearl Street in Boulder. The restaurant will celebrate its fifth birthday on Tuesday, April 21, by introducing a “Community Hour,” a daily gathering each afternoon from 3 to 6 p.m. with reduced price food and drink. There are more changes in store, too;…

Market report, April 18: not

It may be in the sixties today and absolutely beautiful, but on Saturday morning it was demon-sleeting and I wasn’t about to walk to the Boulder Farmers’ Market, as I did last week when I was researching the second in what were to be weekly market reports. Make that almost…

Mud bugs and beer at Lucile’s

Just got word from Brian Heilman, one of the partners at the Denver outpost of Lucile’s, that his spot is going to celebrate the start of Louisiana crawfish season with a good, old-fashioned crawfish boil. “It’s our first attempt at what will hopefully become an annual tradition,” Heilman said. And…

Ask the Critic: The art of the Man Date

Last week, I posed this question: Where should Guy Fieri eat when (and if) his show, Diners, Drive-Ins & Dives, rolls through Denver? The comments poured in, and the debate was both spirited and (relatively) civil. I’ve culled the best of the bunch and sent them along to the production-company…

Milking It: Banana Nut Cheerios

Banana Nut Cheerios General Mills Rating: Two spoons out of four Cereal description: Those readers who hail from the planet Earth will recognize the standard Cheerios design: a circle with a hole in the middle, like a letter “O” designed to fill the diner with cheer. (Still can’t figure out…

Eat here now! Do good, eat well, smell stinky cheese

If you eat at Piatti, the Italian restaurant at 190 St. Paul Street, today and mention that you’re dining to support SAME Cafe, Piatti will donate 20 percent of your bill to SAME, the pay-what-you-can restaurant profiled on the cover of Westword in February. For reservations at Piatti, call 303-321-1919…

Sunday at Chipotle is free food day for kids

While it was the pozole at Chipotle that pissed off Jason Sheehan, it was the ridiculous amount of time I wasted trying to get my hands on an effing kid’s menu — part of the homegrown burrito chain’s recent menu overhaul — that made me want to shove a few…

Club 404 loses a member of the family

When you’ve been in business close to sixty years, as Jerry Feld has at Club 404 (he bought the bar/restaurant before he was even old enough to have a liquor license), the people who come to your place are like family, and the people who work for you are like…

The List: Minor leagues

These weekly lists are often easy to put together. I review a Mexican restaurant, I can make a list of other Mexican restaurants I love. I write about Chinese food, I can list a half-dozen other places to get good duck. But this week?  Not so much. I’ve been sitting…

Cafe Society: Week in Review

Things you might have missed this week in Cafe Society:   If you feel passionately about whether Steuben’s qualifies as a diner, don’t miss your opportunity to let Jason Sheehan know where he should send Guy Fieri when he comes to town for his show Diners, Drive-ins and Dives.  …

Royal Crest is now delivering Udi’s granola

On a day such as this, with some sort of sleet falling from the sky like God is throwing mini water balloons, walking outside is not in my best interest. As much as I love Udi’s line of granolas, trenching through slush to get some cereal just doesn’t seem worth…

Aurora welcomes the Salad Bowl

Yet another fast-casual spot has popped up in the metro area, this time from a franchise originating in Texas. The location at 4086 South Parker Road in Aurora is the first outside of that state for the Salad Bowl, a place dishing out, well, bowls of salad. Like a reverse…

Wake-Up Call: A wine time at the DAM tonight

There’s an art to drinking wine; discover it from 6-9 p.m. tonight at the Denver Art Museum when the DAM Uncorked Wine Tasting presents over 250 wines from prominent domestic and international vintners. And from 6-10 p.m. on April 18, the DAM follows up with a dinner and auction. Tickets…

Molecular gastronomy is no fad, as Ian Kleinman proves at O’s

It would be impossible to repeat all the nice things that egullet’s Steven Shaw had to say about Ian Kleinman and his molecular gastronomy menu at O’s Steak and Seafood at the Westin Westminster, which Shaw experienced when he was in town for the International Association of Culinary Professionals convention…

Win a dinner cooked by a Top Chef contender

Melissa Harrison, a contender on last season’s Top Chef, didn’t win the big prize — that went to Hosea Rosenberg, a fellow Big Red F chef — but now you can win an eight-course dinner that Harrison will cook at your house.A Harrison-cooked meal is one of the auction items…

Veggie Girl: Arada Ethiopian

The first time I tried Ethiopian food, I was visiting my friend, Mat, in Montreal. We’d met the previous summer on a train headed to Berlin, and since we were both backpacking solo around Europe and trying to get to Prague, which had just suffered a flood, we found ourselves…