I tried to stay out of this fight. Really, I did. Way back in January, I made a promise to keep my nose out of politics and stick to food. I managed to give the whole Freedom fries/Freedom toast controversy a pass, because, frankly, it seemed too insipid to even…
Tom Collins High Street Speakeasy 3862 High Street 303-298-9333 I’ve always wished I could have partied through the Roaring ’20s — with their bathtubs full of gin, fabulous fashions and gangster-owned, back-alley bars. But now, at the High Street Speakeasy, it’s easy to go back in time and drink to…
It was the end of my third meal at Indigo. The dinner plates had been cleared, the white tablecloth combed down. While Julie — my cover for this night’s clandestine activities — and I were picking at the rag ends of the dessert we’d shared, I waited for the hammer…
Comfort food is dead. I keep hoping that if I say that enough, it will actually come true. Comfort food should be pronounced dead, because it’s gone as far as it can go in the white-tablecloth-and-heavy-silver restaurant cosmos. It’s a horse that has been ridden hard, whipped to within an…
Five minutes, okay?” “Five minutes. I’ll just run in and run out.” “Okay.” I fiddled with the radio, trying to get something good on the vintage-’70s push-button console. Matt got out of the car, two plastic bags full of Styrofoam takeout boxes in his hands, then leaned back toward the…
Carol Fenster was raised on wheat produced on her family’s Nebraska farm by her father, an internationally acclaimed wheat grower. For forty years, she, like most Americans, ate a diet heavy in wheat flour. But she also endured four decades of recurring sinus infections, colds and poor health, even though…
As Denver’s wet and wild spring continues and the South Platte River roars like the mighty, muddy Mississippi, why not head south to New Orleans — or maybe just Greenwood Village — and dive into a Streetcar Named Desire, the signature drink at Bourbon Street Pizzabar & Grill. Named for…
When I’m in need of an energizing, centering, head-clearing taste of the Big Apple, I usually go to New York Pizzeria, a little hole-in-the-wall strip-mall joint in Glendale. But last month, I realized it had been a long time since I’d made a trip back to the state that spawned…
I miss Leon a little already. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad to be back from my East Coast adventure — but he was something special. To lift a line from the good doctor (Hunter Thompson, that is), Leon was “one of God’s own prototypes — a high-powered mutant of…
A new moon’s rising over Denver’s bar scene with the Luna Hotel, a super-chic boutique inn that just opened in the heart of LoDo. Saunter up to the stylish street-level bar for some out-of-this-world high-end cocktail creativity, including the signature Luna-Tic, which comprises a hush-hush mix of fresh juices and…
Bennigan’s. We have Bennigan’s to thank for Christian “Goose” Sorenson, executive chef at Solera. Coming to the Mile High City from his native Wyoming, where he’d been a frat-house cook in Laramie, Sorenson thought that working the line at Bennigan’s was the top restaurant job to which he could aspire…
While the food Solera serves all us regular folk on regular days is just fine (see review), the food coming out of the kitchen on Monday, April 28, was better. And not better by a little, but by leaps and bounds. Better by orders of magnitude. Better in a way…
For many people who work in Denver’s City & County Building, the basement cafeteria is a feared, last-resort stop. But Jacques Yang, the cafeteria’s new chef, is out to change that. He sees it as the perfect spot for a homestyle meal, one that can sustain a person through a…
With his natty British accent and talent for wooing the ladies, James Bond and his “shaken, not stirred” martinis are the epitome of cool. And if the debonair 007 happened to hit Denver during his his never-ending mission to quash evil, you’d probably find him sipping one of Indigo’s namesake…
When I am through with this industry — when I no longer feel (as I sometimes still do) the strong magnetic pull of kitchen life, the strange urge to put on my old whites and checks and stumble blearily into the 5 a.m. quiet of a house not yet awake;…
The duck feet did me in. I’ve eaten some pretty freaky stuff in my time and have had duck (and chicken) feet on more than a few occasions, but after spending several days gorging myself up, down and across Denver’s Far East intersection at Alameda Avenue and Federal Boulevard, the…
As friends and family can attest, I have many quirky habits, such as only eating candy that is yellow or red. (Forget green M&Ms and blue Skittles — bring on the Hot Tamales and lemon drops!) So naturally, when it comes to alcohol, my new favorite libation is the Strawberry…
It would be so easy to make fun of the Royal Hilltop. It’s just another theme restaurant, after all. A British pub theme restaurant. A non-smoking British pub theme restaurant, tucked away in the back of a strip-mall so far out in southeast Aurora that it might as well be…
We have had an interesting 24 hours at Luna.” That’s how the conversation started when Wendy Aiello, who’s doing PR for the new hotel, got me on the red phone here at Bite Me World HQ last Friday. First, the easy stuff. The space at 1612 Wazee Street that had…
Leave it to Uncle Sam to kill a good buzz. Heavenly Daze tapped the first kegs of its Hemp Lager in late March, and the beer quickly become the Denver brewpub’s second-best seller. Credit for that goes to the beer’s exceptional flavor (it’s made with hemp seeds), eye-catching tap handle…
As tulips pop up and ski resorts shut down, patio season hits Denver with almost as much force as last month’s Blizzard of 2003. With the sky staying light later, this is the perfect time of year to linger on the patio of the Park Tavern & Restaurant with a…
It was a cold night in Boulder when Laura and I walked out of Rhumba, the three-year-old Caribbean stepchild of the Jax/Lola/Zolo Grill family. The sky was silvery-gray, like old steel, with clouds hanging close over the Flatirons and a mean wind whipping scraps of newspaper, cigarette butts and crushed…
