At the end of a good night, I often have more takeout stacked in the front seat of my car than I can carry up the stairs in a single trip. Some of my to-go compulsion is work-related. When I need to know exactly what ingredients were in the ravioli,…
I have long held that Buffalo, New York — where I spent a few formative years of my cooking career — is a city unjustly labeled as a one-hit food town. Chicken wings, chicken wings, chicken wings, right? Nothing but deep-fried bird parts and snow. But this is wrong. Well,…
“Look, Rhumba was never a restaurant that I was fully, culinarily happy with.” That’s Dave Query telling me this. Dave Query, owner of the now defunct Rhumba (above), of the very much funct Lola and Jax and West End Tavern and Zolo Grill. Dave Query, who I took to task…
Here’s everything I ate at Red Tango in one sitting last week, an enthusiastic order so large that the dishes could not fit on the table at one time, forcing the kitchen to stagger courses, the floor manager to wonder aloud if six or seven more people would be joining…
While restaurants across the metro area were swamped by Denver Restaurant Week, I was wrapping up my Denver Restaurant Year, debating a few final picks for the very best eating in this town — everything from hot dogs and cheeseburgers to cassoulet and loup de mer — at restaurants big…
Life after death. I’m sure it’s no coincidence that the owners of Vita, the Italian restaurant that opened in part of the old Olinger Mortuary in December, named their place after the Italian word for “life.” The interior is certainly lively enough, with its exposed brick, dark wood, leather booths…
I don’t like Sundays. You always feel like crap on Sunday and are most likely regretting something from the previous night. Or regretting that you have nothing to regret. In high school, we used to congregate at five o’clock mass to collect church bulletins and prove that we had cleansed…
While South and Central American restaurants like Red Tango (see review) are just starting to get serious traction here, Denver has long been blessed with many fantastic Indian restaurants — and those Indian restaurants have been blessed with a very supportive and reasonably educated clientele. I can’t even count how…
Ceviche…fresh chips and chipotle salsa…empanadas and arepas con something-or-other with goat cheese…fried plantains, thick-cut and buttery, crisp at the edges and gooey in the middle. Plantains are hard to do even moderately well, and these were the best fried plantains I’ve had in Denver. Since I eat fried plantains everywhere…
A brief list of stuff I don’t like: Poetry, with the exception of a few pieces by the likes of William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot and the shell-shocked blasphemy of Siegfried Sassoon. The musical stylings of the Grateful Dead or any of their legions of hippie imitators. Vegetarianism used…
Wow. No, I mean seriously. Wow. I’ve taken shots before for my reviews. I’ve been called lots of nasty names. I’ve been screamed at on the phone. I’ve been threatened with everything from lawsuits to having my teeth kicked down my throat. That all comes with the job — at…
It’s been more than a month, but we here at the Institute are still bitching about the Snickers Super Bowl commercial. That’s the one in which two guys accidentally touch lips and have to atone by doing several manly things, including ripping off chest hair and kicking each other in…
I often wonder if New Orleans boosters rue the day that a bartender invented the Hurricane, the city’s most popular cocktail. Prior to August 2005, when I thought of New Orleans, I thought of Mardi Gras, Jazzfest, Bourbon Street, bead-throwing, boob-showing and Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s — in that order…
I’ve always been a little creeped out in empty restaurants. There’s that uncomfortable sense of being watched — because there’s no one else in the dining room to attract any of the staff’s attention. I feel like I ought to whisper, so as not to distract the bored cooks and…
The lineup was always heavy on jam bands and, eventually, Adam, Jeremy and Matt realized one of their fundamental problems: the fans of that trippy, spacy, Grateful Dead style music were all showing up stoned and stoned hippies don’t drink. Or at least not enough. What stoned hippies do have…
Fruition, which opened last month in the former Somethin’ Else space on Sixth Avenue, opted out of Denver Restaurant Week because owners Paul Attardi and Alex Seidel wisely decided that the crushing DRW scrum might be tough on such a new place. Still, it’s doing a respectable business this week…
A special report by Amy Haimerl Ugly Americans. That’s the only way to describe the party that was celebrating a fiftieth birthday at Bistro Vendome last night. Of course, if we’d really been sitting on the patio of a Parisian bistro, we’d be saying “Ugly Americans” with an accent and…
This was not the kind of place I was likely to review. It was not the kind of place where I was ever likely to eat, much less steal a menu from. And yet here I was, puzzling over a menu that I lifted from Reiver’s a week or so…
Reiver’s is one of a half-dozen restaurants on a single block of Old South Gaylord Street. Across the street is Japon, an excellent sushi spot for more than a decade, perfect for its place, custom-fit for its neighborhood and space — especially since its recent remodel. A few steps away…
Warm hut, cold heart. While skiing at Winter Park, I stopped at Sunspot — a gorgeous log-and-stone “lodge” with amazing panoramic views of the Continental Divide — for a toe warmer, otherwise known as a hot alcoholic beverage. But while this cozy area looked like the quintessential ski-resort bar, with…
There’s nothing quite as irritating as having your flight canceled after you’ve already checked in — especially when it’s not for some semi-understandable reason, like snow flurries or drizzle around DIA or a herpes outbreak at O’Hare. No, this inexplicable cancellation was because of weather on the East Coast the…
People are always trying to bring a taste of somewhere else to whatever place they now call home. Immigrant cuisine, nativist cuisine, fusion cuisine, recipes passed down through generations — they’re all attempts at preserving across time and distance memories that are tied up in food. This is a noble…
