There’s nothing like having a child of your own to give the phrase “family-style dining” real meaning. Finding restaurants that are kid-friendly is only slightly more difficult than finding restaurants that are happy to have you pay your bill with Monopoly money. Enter Armando’s Trattoria, which not only calls itself…
A cure for the common cold: The ice cream in Italy is unlike any other in the world–and certainly unlike any in Denver. Although the term “gelato” is used to advertise the products of several local companies, none really comes close to the super-rich, super-creamy Mediterranean stuff. I should know:…
If there are people somewhere on the face of the earth who don’t know about The Fort, it’s not because Sam Arnold hasn’t tried to reach them. A shameless promoter who hawks his Morrison restaurant like a culinary snake-oil salesman, Arnold has made this replica of a southwestern trading post…
Throwing a Fit: Call me crazy, but it seems to me that instead of paying for a product to remove pesticides and wax from our produce, consumers instead should be supporting our local organic-produce farmers. The product is called Fit Produce Rinse, and it’s being tested only in Denver right…
The cash-poor college years can push many people to extremes. So it was only slightly surprising when, during a budget-minded trip to Pizza Hut, my then-boyfriend accepted a dare to down the entire contents of a shaker full of cracked red pepper. The stakes: $50–but he probably would have done…
Get it while it’s hot: Now here’s reason to celebrate. So far, the section of Larimer Street up near Coors Field–now known as the Ballpark Neighborhood–has managed to keep its classic character relatively intact. While nearby LoDo is suffering through the invasion of the insipid sports bar, the only new…
If Jimmy the Greek were putting odds on Jimmy’s Greek restaurant, he’d probably say it was a sure thing. But then, Jimmy the Greek doesn’t know that Denver diners are a real handicap for Greek restaurants. The Jimmy of Jimmy’s–really Demetrios Lemonidis, “but everybody calls me Jimmy because of the…
Bawk is cheap: A crew of media cheapskates–myself not included, although I have firsthand reports from reliable sources–met recently at the Broadway Brewing Company to swill microbrewed beer and conduct a blind (as opposed to blind-drunk) taste test of three rotisserie chickens. Bird #3, which was later unveiled as Boston…
At the beginning of the year, Pour La France! got the seven-year itch and decided it was time to try something new at its Denver and Boulder locations. So out came fresh paint, a snazzy set of china–and a revamped menu that no longer pulls solely from French roots. Still…
French kitchen god Escoffier advised that an omelette is “really scrambled eggs enclosed in a coating of coagulated egg.” And in The Way to Cook, one of Escoffier’s disciples, Julia Child, writes that “the eggs should be soft and tender inside, enclosed by a cloak of lightly browned coagulated egg.”…
They’re out: If you’re wondering about the picketers in front of Greens restaurant, at 1469 South Pearl Street, last week, here’s the scoop: Taylor St. John and Madrid St. Angelo, a gay couple charged in the January 1993 Mt. Olivet cemetery desecration incident (they cut a deal with the Jeffco…
The word on Carmine’s on Penn: You either love it or you hate it. If you love it, as I do, you appreciate the casual, fun setting and the huge portions of inexpensive Italian food. If you hate it–as many others apparently do, judging from the calls I’ve received from…
The evening Westword’s Best of Denver issue came out, my husband and I stopped at Carmine’s on Penn–which had just been named Best Italian–and were amused to overhear owner Larry Herz chatting with a table of twenty or so diners sitting right next to us. They were talking about…me. The…
It’s hard to imagine, but as recently as a hundred years ago, no one but a few goats and some crazy rugged individualists cared much for traveling into the mountains. Hey, who could blame them? You either had to pack in your own food, live on berries–or kill your dinner…
Jerk-offs: Soda fountains always make me nostalgic for a time I never even lived through (growing up, though, I was enamored of my grandmother’s Norman Rockwell print of two nerdly types on a prom date nervously sharing a soda). Denver still has a handful of soda fountains, some of which…
A few months ago, the mere thought of another Southwestern restaurant had me howling like a rabid coyote. But that was before I visited the Zolo Grill, now the clear ruler of this peculiar patch of the culinary world. Southwestern food covers a lot of territory–its evolution includes contributions from…
Thrown for a loop: Not surprisingly, it was in a bar that John Hickenlooper, an owner of the Wynkoop Brewing Company, came up with the idea of paying a $5,000 bounty to whoever introduced him to the future Mrs. Hickenlooper. So far, though, all the scheme’s paid off with is…
Long the food of choice for those who want to avoid the eggs-and-bacon routine at brunch, dim sum is catching on as a great way to eat a little bit of a lot of different Chinese foods at any time of the day. For the uninitiated, the term “dim sum”…
Growing pains: After over two decades as a mainstay of Denver’s dining scene, Little Shanghai, at 460 South Broadway, recently revamped its menu to match its expanded, updated interior. “We hired new cooks and wanted to make the menu more healthy,” says Ching Lei, the co-owner with her husband, Kim…
Since delicatessens have been around a bit longer than New York has–the first tangible documentation was in a publication printed around 1183 that refers to a burglary of cooked meats from a shop along the Thames–you have to wonder what people said when the first deli opened in the Big…
Deadbeat diners: The term “no-shows” is sure to strike fear into the heart of any restaurateur. You know, customers who make reservations and then don’t show up, without even the courtesy of a cancellation phone call. Look at it this way: You’re having a party for fifty friends. Everyone says…
The temperature had topped a hundred, with no relief in sight. Clearly, it was time to fight fire with fire–so we headed to the nearest Mexican restaurant. Tafolino’s, which sits almost on the Lakewood-Golden border, took over a plaza space formerly occupied by an Italian eatery. “When I bought the…
