This is the way many of my conversations with owners of small Asian restaurants start out: “Hi, this is Kyle Wagner from Westword newspaper. I have visited your restaurant and would like to ask a few questions for the review.” “Newspaper? We don’t have advertisement.” “No, I’m not selling advertising…
Mug shot: “I would be very interested in doing a review of hot chocolate from best to worst,” the letter began, and its writer, Hannah Temple, went on to explain just why she would be the right woman for the job. “I drink it a lot,” she said. Since the…
Only the rigors of founding a new nation could have kept infamous foodie Thomas Jefferson from doing what one out of every four restaurateurs in this country (and what seems like one out of every two in this city) feels compelled to do: open an Italian restaurant. In fact, Jefferson…
Hot to trot, Part I: Chile peppers are hot, all right, and a new store that sells nothing but products containing chile peppers in some form or other may have just the recipe for success. Richard Reed, a Denver musician (formerly of the Hot Pickles and other bands), opened The…
Living out in the boonies has its advantages: There’s no pollution (we see Denver’s brown cloud from a healthy distance), people shoot each other only after they’ve listened to too much country/ western music, and you can run around the house naked, because the neighbors are too far away to…
Cafe society: Every traveling foodie dreams of discovering some out-of-the-way, small-town cafe that serves incredible homemade bread or meat loaf or pie or marinara sauce made lovingly from an Old Country recipe by a ninety-year-old woman who’s been doing this since she was ten. The reality, however, is that you…
For fifty years Dolcamino’s held forth in a South University storefront, cooking up big batches of pasta and red sauce for hungry students and other locals. Then the Coos Bay Bistro moved in–and suddenly the street is flooded with folks from all over town hungry for the restaurant’s excellent Italian-based,…
Mag, mag, mag: My predecessor, John Kessler, is now at the Denver Post, which recently ran his assessment of cooking magazines under the headline “Post’s Food Writer Critiques Publishers’ Servings.” Maybe the grind of daily journalism has worn Kessler down, but I think he was far too charitable to a…
If the first rule of creating a successful restaurant is location, location, location, the second is to come up with a marketable menu. Ogden Cafe owners Jin and Mercy Lee had the location thing locked when they settled into the old home of Footers, located in the heart of Capitol…
Our mission was clear: to try as many beers as possible without throwing up or forgetting that one of us had to drive home. It sounded easy–until we were faced with the 1,200 beers available for tasting at the Great American Beer Festival put on a few weeks ago at…
If the dinosaurs had known ahead of time that all they needed to stave off extinction was a fresh, up-and-coming chef and a revamped menu, they would have put an ad in the Cretaceous Times posthaste. The Normandy didn’t have to go that far, however. Pierre Wolfe, owner of the…
A tip of the hat: A recent letter from two local waitpersons–Michael Rhodes and Heidi Hilliker–on the issue of tipping got me all wound up over that barbaric institution. As a former waitress, one who has worked at both Chinese joints where the average check was $25 and high-class French…
Without Chinese takeout, the falling-in-love scenes in movies just wouldn’t be the same. First, there’s the montage of the couple walking around the city, her in an oversized shirt, him in high-top sneakers; they’re just getting to know each other. Then they stand by whatever body of water is near…
Sometimes you feel like a Nut: The product Wheat Nuts (“the crunchy-good, nutty-tasting snack”) crossed my desk last week, and, as always, I shared a jar with hungry co-workers. The response was unanimous: They taste like dry dog food. Further confirmation of this came from one five-and-a-half-year-old whose mother, a…
Barbecue was once the province of the poor, an inexpensive way to entertain. Three days before the big party, the host would drop the pig into a smoldering pit. By the time guests started arriving for the festivities, the meat was dripping off the bone. As the smell of barbecue…
Strike while the irony is hot: Maybe it was only coincidence that the biggest freebie bash of the year, last Thursday’s opening party for the new Rattlesnake Grill, was held on the same night as an open house at the Tivoli, where the original Rattlesnake Club once reigned supreme. When…
The owners of Greens restaurant have a few things to say about the importance of location. “Don’t underestimate it,” says Michael Nolting, speaking for himself as well as for wife Clare and Greens’ chef, Hugh O’Neill. “We now know that the incantation `location, location, location’ is the absolute truth.” And…
Warming trends: It’s that time of year when restaurants start implementing their seasonal menus. Exhibit A: the Creekside Grill. I’d love to tell you all about two recent meals I ate there, but most of the things I tried aren’t on the revised menu. This time, the dishes land deep…
Restaurateurs keep stampeding into LoDo–but frankly, the joints already there are starting to run together. They attempt to offer the newest, the hippest and the hottest, but instead of a wide range of choices, we all seem to be dining at cadiranchchampbrewfirewazkoophousegrill, ordering brewchew (overpriced food that goes well with…
Diamond in the roughy: When I can’t stomach another bean burrito but still long for those south-of-the-border spices (and prices), I opt for the less-refried Peruvian cooking. Although one of my favorite places, Sergio’s in Lakewood, recently closed its doors, El Chalan, at 2257 West 32nd Avenue, is still going…
Blessedly spared from Catholic schooling by a mother forced to convert long before Vatican II, I nonetheless endured the rigors of CCD (that’s Catholic Sunday school to the lay folk), with its ruler-wielding nuns and interminably long prayers. One Sunday Sister Agnes didn’t appear at class, and half an hour…
Brew news: Oktoberfest always reminds me of one splendid autumn evening when we sat in Munich’s ridiculously touristy but fun Hoffbrau Haus with a bunch of eighty-year-old Germans who spoke not a lick of English. In lieu of verbal communication, they kept nodding their heads at us, grinning and drinking…
