Anyone who has lived in Colorado for more than five minutes has heard of the People’s Republic of Boulder. According to Wikipedia, the label “People’s Republic of” is placed sarcastically before the name of a left-wing university town and most likely “derives from the late 1960s, when The People’s Republic…
This week we continue our series on home improvement, courtesy of the Professor Emeritus for Stereotypical Wisconsin Drinkers, Mayor John Hickenlooper and the Wazee Supper Club (1600 15th Street). The Professor would seem an odd home-improvement tutor; he nearly had a heart attack at my home a few weeks back…
Mori is an unusual place. For starters, it’s housed in an old VFW post that’s done double-duty as a Japanese restaurant since 1948. But the building dates further back than that, to the 1890s, when it was a brothel (and a fairly popular one, from what I understand). Today, depending…
At Emogene Patisserie et Cafe, it was the bakery cases that hooked me — a glossy, sluttish, sugar-coated come-on speaking straight to my baser instincts and addictive personality. Biscotti and miniature cheesecakes, chocolate muffins glazed in shiny black icing, airy cream puffs, dense meringues and thick slices of almond cake…
Wow. Seriously, wow. You readers never fail to surprise me. I can talk about foie gras and caviar, confess to thoughts of whizzing on a restaurant’s carpet — and it’s just another day in the life. But I start talking about hot dogs, and all of a sudden the discussion…
From the outside, Mori looks slightly bunkerish, and with its weird VFW sign, I thought I might stumble into a concrete room filled with bitter WWII vets smoking and talking about “the big one.” But the minute I stepped inside the bright, streamlined space, my fears were assuaged by a…
Any good Minnesotan, Cheddar Head or even Iowegian knows a great, functional way to decorate the home. That’s assuming the women haven’t already taken over. Women will worry about filling bathrooms with soap and towels that no one is supposed to use while also insisting that there not be a…
My sugar-fueled romps through Emogene Patisserie et Cafe (see review) put me in mind of another place in the neighborhood, a longtime bastion of the patissier’s and chocolatier’s art. Andre’s Confiserie Suisse crouches on a corner outside of the standard Creeker territory, so it has a bit of that “hidden…
The first time I went to Istanbul Grill was about a week after John Lehndorff reviewed the place for the Rocky Mountain News. There were big photocopies of his review on the counter, a whole stack, and the servers were handing them to anyone who asked and almost anyone who…
I was running about ten minutes late for dinner at Istanbul Grill on Monday, April 17, and when I pulled into the parking lot, I found it full of police cars. Istanbul owner Emre Karaoglu and his sister-in-law, Gul Kapci, were standing huddled together out of the wind, watching cops…
The Pinnacle Club occupies the 38th-floor space that housed the swanky Petroleum Club back in Denver’s go-go oil days, and not only does it give a feel for the past, but it provides phenomenal views of the Front Range — all 360 degrees, if you want to walk around and…
Coming into turn three on Good Friday, the Mormon Representative and I effectively distanced ourselves from the pack of the damned. Devout types that we are, we decided there was no more fitting way to reflect on our blackened souls than to brew a batch of beer while barbecuing some…
For twenty years, House of Kabob has been jammed into this strip mall on Colorado Boulevard, tangled up with other Middle Eastern markets and restaurants. That’s twenty years of Persian cuisine, twenty years of kabobs and lamb tongue and herbed yogurt and pita. And while the room — done in…
I have now been to 250 Josephine Street more times than I can count. The address was predestined to fascinate me. As Papillon, it was ground zero (one of the ground zeros, at least) for Denver at its height of pre-millennium excess: a jumping-and-jiving bastion of high-tone, big-money weirdness with…
Bad enough that Chris Douglas and his crew had to take on the sorry history of the 250 Josephine Street address when they opened Tula there (see review). Bad enough that they have to deal with a crowd of diners who have long memories (when Ian Kleinman was cooking there,…
Leave it to the Institute of Drinking Studies to host one of the biggest events in a very young man’s life in the oldest saloon in Denver: My Brother’s Bar (2376 15th Street). We here at the Institute feel that it is important to demystify drinking by showing our progeny…
Gene Tang has always had a beautiful place at 1515. The Victorian storefront wears its age well, handling crowds with a kind of shotgun feng shui — moving people back and forth through the long room, around the well-spaced tables and banquettes. The upstairs dining room is elegant, the dimly…
I like Greek food, but it’s never seemed like much of a cuisine to me. Greek food isn’t a cuisine because it has no rules. Ask a hundred Greeks how to make tzatziki — the ubiquitous yogurt and cucumber sauce — and even though tzatziki contains only about four ingredients,…
May is going to be a big month for Troy Guard. And not just for Guard, who’s currently standing post as exec chef at Nine75 and Emogène and also overseeing the Caribbean menu at Wings and Wraps, which opened at 4736 East Colfax Avenue, but also for his wife, Leigh…
If you’re like me (and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be), you yearn for a return to basic values. This means you think that pros playing in the Olympics (especially hockey) was the primary reason that TV ratings for the Winter Games hovered somewhere between those of Supernanny and Fox’s…
If you’re like me (and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be), you yearn for a return to basic values. This means you think that pros playing in the Olympics (especially hockey) was the primary reason that TV ratings for the Winter Games hovered somewhere between those of Supernanny and Fox’s…
There are two ends to every spectrum, including the spectrum of Greek restaurants, although in this case, neither end is necessarily better than the other. On one, there’s Yanni’s (see review) and places like Yanni’s that attempt to present the best of Greek food culture in a comfortable environment; usually,…
