In Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes talks of “shadow gatherings,” when Venetians would meet in the shadows of San Marco, wandering from bar to bar, eating tapas-like tidbits and sipping half-glasses of wine. But while ombra is the Italian word for “shadow,” Denver’s Ombra offers only a dim reflection…
It sounded too good to be true: the golds and greens of fall in southern Colorado; all the horseback riding, Jeep tours, fishing, swimming, hot-tubbing, biking and reading on the front porch of a private cabin you could stand; cowboy songs around a campfire with the stars looming ever so…
Q: I’m new to Denver and am on a quest for the town’s best mole. So far I’ve sampled one mole that tasted like it came from a bottle; another restaurant offered mole that had an almost Oriental flavor. ¡Ay, caramba! Can you help? A: The word mole (pronounced mo-lay)…
The Denver Tech Center is so hungry for decent restaurants (any restaurant, really) that people get weepy every time a new Taco Bell opens. Still, it’s a crying shame that the hot-hot Cool River Cafe serves such so-so meals. By placing his $5 million venture in the heart of the…
When Markus Georg opened his Chinook Tavern back in 1995, it looked like the sort of place that would be a hit for a short time — the baby boomers of Cherry Creek are always willing to try a new watering hole — but then business would dry up and…
If everybody enjoyed their jobs as much as Juanita Tool seems to, the world would be a much better place — at least a much better place to eat in. Tool runs the cheese department at Cook’s Fresh Market (8000 East Belleview Avenue), a new grocery that purveys raw materials…
Q:Many years ago I frequented a small Japanese restaurant in Lakewood run by a chef named Sam Furuichi. I think you once gave it a Best of Denver award. What was its name, and does it still exist? A:The restaurant you’re thinking of was Matoi, which sat at 11020 West…
Directly in front of our table, a G-stringed blonde was scraping her nipples across what must have been a very cold floor. From behind us came the sounds — just barely audible over the shriek of Billy Idol covering L.A. Woman — of someone getting his lap danced upon; to…
Not all of the meals served in Glendale are naked lunches. There’s plenty of meat at the popular Sam Taylor’s Bar-B-Que, which has been serving up fully dressed, if saucy, slabs of ribs at 435 South Cherry Street since 1997. The only bare facts that interest owner Sam Taylor are…
On this blazing summer day, you need a sweater to sit in Bruce Healy’s Boulder kitchen, a long, narrow room where the temperature is minutely controlled and every element designed to support baking. Implements hang in rows from a pegboard wall at one end: pastry bags and tips, lids, an…
Q:Where can I find breaded mushrooms? A:It seems like breaded mushrooms should have gone out of fashion at the end of the ’70s along with Jell-O molds, hash brownies and wrapping everything in bacon — which, by the way, is making a huge comeback — but despite health issues and…
The odd things that happen in restaurants are stranger than any fiction I could cook up. For starters, how about a moldy piece of cake, with big, green, slimy rings in plain view of the server as he set it down? Another server tried to tell me that the chardonnay…
Former Denver Post food writer Hsiao-Ching Chou, who now works at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, had to eat a large portion of crow after she failed to credit cookbook author Rosa Lo San Ross in a July 26 piece on Asian greens. A reader caught the error and accused Chou of…
Q:There used to be a Japanese restaurant at Sakura Square where you could sit on the floor traditional-style, but it’s gone. Can you think of any other Japanese restaurant in the Denver area where you can eat while sitting on the floor? A:The only Japanese spot I know of that…
Dennis Miller’s prime-time rants have yet to veer too far afield from football, but give him time. For now, he has the luxury of slurping down beef tenderloin and shrimp cocktail in a private box at the stadium after each game. But he’d fast lose that chipper demeanor — not…
The words “sports” and “gourmet” aren’t normally used in the same sentence, so it seemed an odd pairing when Radek Cerny, chef/owner of the highfalutin Papillon and Radex, took over the space that had been Jimmy’s Grille (320 South Birch Street, just off Leetsdale in Glendale), renamed it the Boathouse…
Q: My 82-year-old mom is in town and wants to go out for prime rib. Where can we get good prime rib that won’t cost us $30 a slice? A: While El Rancho (29260 U.S. Highway 40 at the I-70 El Rancho exit) may not be your closest option, it’s…
It’s lean, it’s healthy, it’s hairy, and it sure makes for a more marketable mascot than some thick-headed bovine that doesn’t have sense enough to gum the people injecting it full of hormones. It’s buffalo — or, to be precise, bison — and the list of reasons to eat it…
Buffalo pops up in the weirdest places in this town. Tante Louise (4900 East Colfax Avenue), for example, offers a potentially stunning Great Plains buffalo ribeye with a pine-nut-and-sage beurre sauce. But be warned: You should order the meat cooked no more than medium, and rare is actually better; because…
The sultans of sirloin who blithely run up $300 dinner tabs at gilt palaces like Morton’s and Del Frisco’s would never deign to set foot in the Columbine Steak House & Lounge. At the scruffy Columbine, on scruffy Federal Boulevard, they’ve been tossing skinny slabs of beef on the fire…
Q: On Saturday, I had something called “duck prosciutto” at a chi-chi wedding; on Sunday, more duck prosciutto showed up during a fancy dinner at the Brown Palace compliments of the chef at the Palace Arms. No matter what you call it, it was delicious — but isn’t prosciutto supposed…
Fondue brings out a person’s true nature. First there are the control freaks, the folks who begin coordinating the fondue forks the second the pots start heating up. “Okay, Sally, Jim and I will use the court bouillon for the first fifteen minutes while you guys cook in oil, and…
