The battle for the bottle: Denver’s chapter of the Beer Drinkers of America met with state representatives Mike Salaz and Alice Nichol at a recent rally to protest ongoing attempts to raise beer taxes. “We’re hearing a lot of indecision from Colorado lawmakers on this issue,” says John Fajardo, BDA’s…
Given the miserable survival rate of new restaurants, Willie Nelson could have sung a different tune: “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Restaurateurs.” Better the babies should grow up to be businessmen who buy a key piece of real estate and fill it with kitschy, pricey eateries…
End of an era: If, like me, you’ve never had the pleasure of participating in a Hotluck, well, hots of luck. Private investigator Scott Keating started the Hotluck ten years ago as a way of bringing together a diverse group of people–around a hundred each party, including such notables as…
The first Thai restaurant in the United States opened in 1961–in Denver, of all places. La-Iad “Lily” Chittivej fell in love with the area when her husband was serving in a Thai military unit stationed at Fitzsimons during the Korean War; she returned years later to open the Chada Room…
Male restaurateurs, chefs and managers who don’t respect their female employees had better take note: Finally someone has had the courage to say “no more” to the sexist, degrading treatment women are subjected to in the restaurant industry (and I’m speaking from experience). Ramona Brooke is the winner in this…
Ethiopian food makes me think of sex. Really sloppy, messy, no-holds-barred sex, the kind people in the movies have with things like clay and old Righteous Brothers tunes as marital aids. Sure, almost any food can be sexy (especially with the right dining companion), but few cuisines invite such total…
Bacon bits: Serious BLT fans might want to give J. Beatty’s, at 321 East Colfax, a try. I had their regular ($5.50) for lunch the other day and could barely finish the thing. It contained a half-pound of thick-sliced, hickory-smoked pork, fried to your request and layered with green leaf…
Pizza is not the first thing that pops into your mind when you think about the food of New Orleans. Oysters, sure. Crawfish, you bet. But pizza? Like most cities, of course, New Orleans has some decent pizza places (my favorite is Mama Rosa’s on Rampart Street), but few people…
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I had my first Guinness Stout; I’d have to say it was somewhere around the age of five or six, when Grandma Donovan (a stout woman in every sense of the word) told me the head tasted just like milk. At the time I…
Food can be an icebreaker, an educational opportunity, even a great social equalizer. Never was this more apparent than on my first day of college, when my new roommate Kelli and I came face to face and realized that she is black and I am white. Up until that point,…
A recent visit to 240 Union left me unmoved by the restaurant’s renovation–and even less impressed with its kitchen. The place looks nice, all right, if you like that Spago-style, streamlined stuff, and I do appreciate a bathroom (such as the one at Strings) that provides several types of hairspray,…
Opening a new restaurant is always a crash course in diplomacy, but there can’t be a much more trying ordeal than telling a diner the valet just smashed his car. Nonetheless, China Cowboy manager Rebecca Sparks (a veteran of the Aspen Ritz-Carlton) made all the right moves, up until the…
The recent incident outside China Cowboy involving a valet and a dinner guest’s vehicle raised some interesting questions about liability, propriety and whether the valet was someone you’d normally allow to drive anything that cost $16,000. When we arrived at the restaurant we noted that the valet setup was less…
By A waitress’s first day on the job is never easy. It’s worse when the food she’s serving is hit or miss. And it’s sheer hell when her first customer is an anonymous restaurant critic. Still, the poor woman we encountered at Vella’s Italian Restaurant was a sweetheart who did…
Taking back the neighborhood: Denver’s most controversial drinking spot, Pic’s Corner Bar on West 32nd Avenue, finds itself under fire for the umpteenth time in nine years from a group of neighborhood activists who claim it’s a denizen of drug-dealing, drunkenness and debauchery. The question is whether the Department of…
We were craving great Mexican food–great cheap, greasy, hot Mexican food–and there seemed just one place to go: Larimer Street, where the shadow of Coors Field falls on a strip of pawnshops, vacant lots, shelters, bars and a few fabulous, if modest, Mexican restaurants. With an eye to the baseball…
For once, the food was better than the wines and I actually got enough to eat. The evening was also a first for Emily’s Fine Dining Parlor, in Harrah’s Central City Casino: its first wine dinner. Executive chef Scott Montgomery plied us with such goodies as buffalo mozzarella layered with…
It was the best of foods, it was the worst of foods. At Mr. Steak’s Firegrill, the Omnivest Corporation’s first attempt at an upscale, hipper version of its Mr. Steak chain, the difference between the good dishes and the bad is as obvious as the night-and-day light show played out…
Back on the chain gang: This year 26 national restaurant chains are expected to plop down outlets in Denver. Granted, we’re going to need ways to employ all of the people who are moving here from California. And we’ll have to have some way of feeding them, too. But this…
The French use the term “la casbah” as slang for “party.” It’s fitting, then, that La Casbah is the name of a festive new North African restaurant. La Casbah is only the second restaurant to bring the foods of the Arabian west–Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, with a heavy emphasis on…
The group that lambasted Chinese food last year has now spent still more money (purportedly in the “public interest”) to learn that fettuccine Alfredo is like “a heart attack on a plate” and that spaghetti with tomato sauce is low in fat. I’m so surprised. You mean a dish made…
We never made it to Jim Morrison’s grave, but that was because we were determined to find an authentic Parisian bistro during our trip to France several years ago. After wandering for almost an hour in Montmartre–past all of the places that suck up most tourists–we stumbled up a side…
