A restaurant doesn’t have to serve big, important food designed by a celebrity chef who wallpapers the dining room with his diploma from a Serious Cooking School in order for a meal to be worthwhile. Sometimes it’s enough that the food comes from someone who loves to cook and that…
A pizza the action: Of all the calls I get asking for restaurant recommendations, the majority involve pizza. People want to know where to get thin crust, thick crust, New York sloppy, Chicago deep-dish, Spago gourmet. Unfortunately, Denver is not the greatest place for pizza–I’ve tried every place I’ve heard…
In the mid-Eighties, stadiums began upgrading the food service at sporting events. It changed my life. Before that, baseball games were something to be tolerated. During the give-and-take years of dating, my presence at a game usually came as a tradeoff for an evening at an art-gallery opening. And on…
Covering all the bases: Coors Field is the first ballpark to feature its own in-house microbrewery, the Coors-owned Sandlot, but it won’t be the last. How many sports arenas across the country plan to put one in? “All of them,” says Richard Hesse, food-and-beverage director for Aramark Corporation, which runs…
My grandmother has a foolproof, color-coded formula for assembling a meal that balances all the basic food groups. It’s as simple as this: There has to be something orange, brown, red, green and white. If she’s serving steak (brown), then carrots (orange), noodles (white) and a salad of lettuce and…
Over the Barrel: Since Cracker Barrel cracked open its combination restaurant/country stores in Thornton and Colorado Springs in May, I’ve been bombarded with phone calls and letters from citizens who are boycotting the national chain. This quote from one writer pretty much sums up why: “We cannot allow a company…
We bring our family to a restaurant that bills itself as “family-style” and are promptly told to go to the bar with our child and wait thirty minutes, even though there are twenty empty tables within sight. When we are seated–thankfully only twenty minutes later–no one offers us a high…
The bested of Denver: Now that I’ve put a few weeks between myself and the June 28 Best of Denver issue, I can finally stomach thinking about all the food I consumed for it–and all the questions I received after it came out. For every restaurant that receives an award…
In one evening, we saw two biker chicks in leather bras, a gaggle of businessmen bearing briefcases, four polyester-clad women double-checking their just-done hair, and two families celebrating birthdays. All aboard for the Denver ChopHouse & Brewery. The Rock Bottom Restaurants corporation–which counts among its holdings five Rock Bottom Breweries…
Hello, Dolly: Without the wig, the makeup and the five-inch heels, Melissa Lee looks like any other pretty bartender, albeit an unusually well-endowed one. But when Lee, one of Denver’s best drink mixers, dons the fringed leather, the skintight pants and the ear-to-ear smile, she’s Dolly Parton–or close enough to…
Since the only thing lying between Denver and the deep blue sea is a two-hour plane trip, the notion that we can’t get fresh fish here doesn’t hold water. The fact is, we can get our hands on seafood in less time than it takes the average Los Angeleno to…
Try to come up with a more obvious recipe for disaster: I get an invitation to dine at the home of a woman who tells me that she and the entire “Filipino community” of Denver are upset over my recent review of the area’s only Filipino restaurant, Nipa Hut. The…
In restaurant circles, you frequently hear the saying, “If you like to cook, don’t become a chef.” Seasoned chefs will tell you that they got into the business because they loved working with food and serving their beautiful creations to others. Until they became chefs, that is, and found themselves…
Here today, gone tomorrow: Back in January, Leo Goto challenged his Wellshire Inn staff to make the restaurant “five-star quality.” When they failed to do so, Goto fired chef Steve Ford (and quite a few others) and brought in the talented Lance Katcher from Marvin Gardens. Five months later, Katcher…
Some people are lucky enough to have fond memories of a mother calling out “Supper time!” to a horde of hungry youngsters who vied for the last bite of homemade meatball. But for those whose food pasts contained no more warmth than a cold can of SpaghettiOs twisting angrily against…
Cooking the books: At the end of each spring, publishers shower the food world with new cookbook releases. Although no copies of To Serve Man have yet crossed my desk, it wouldn’t surprise me if one did, considering the variety of books that have been appearing lately. For those who,…
Destination: Denver International Airport. Fasten your seat belts tight across your stomachs–this could be a bumpy ride. Traditionally, the only people who eat at airports are either (a) so hungry they don’t mind paying $27 for two rubbery eggs, bacon that looks like it was torn from a running pig…
Something’s brewing: Civilization moved south last December, when Columbine Mill Brewery and Pizza opened at 5798 Rapp Street in Littleton. This renovated, century-old former grain mill now turns out five microbrews–a stout, a red, a light, a pale ale and a raspberry wheat–and serves Italian food and pizza. That’s a…
Eating a Filipino meal is like breaking into the jars in science lab and ingesting the contents–only to discover that the results of your experiment in eating can be downright delicious. That’s what we concluded after our visits to Nipa Hut, the area’s only Filipino restaurant. Why it’s our sole…
Bay watch: A few local restaurateurs are eating crow over a recent food column in Westword’s sister paper, San Francisco’s SF Weekly, which pretty much trashed two of Denver’s supposedly finest spots–Zenith and Morton’s of Chicago. The name of the writer, restaurant critic Barbara Lane, may also sound familiar to…
The fight is on. In this corner, we have a chain restaurant that advertises fresh, high-quality Mexican food, a fun family atmosphere and low prices. What it actually delivered, though, was sub-mediocre food, prices higher than those at any authentic Mexican restaurant I’ve ever visited, and a waiter who told…
Where it’s at: The restaurant mantra of “location, location, location” is becoming more significant as the rest of the United States–chains and independents alike–converges on Denver to snap up savvy spots in LoDo and Cherry Creek. But as veteran Denver restaurateur Adde Bjorklund knows, it’s not just where you put…
