Movember starts today with a kickoff party at Rackhouse Pub

This is the first day of Movember, the perfect excuse for men around the world to let their mustaches grow wild for a good cause. Businesses around town are joining in this hair-raising movement, donating funds to Movember and Sons, which distributes the money to various prostate and testicular cancer…

Baba’s Falafel takes to the street with fried vegan goodness

Falafel is like fried chicken for non-meat-eaters. It’s crunchy and flavorful and filling. And there are many, many different ways to serve it. Dalia Hannah and Chris Hernandez are experimenting with as many of those ways as possible in their new food truck, Baba’s Falafel, which took to the streets…

Guess where I’m eating a fancy breakfast burrito?

There was a bit of miscommunication with my order — I’d asked for the sausage inside my breakfast burrito — and I wasn’t anticipating tomatoes and leaves on top, but once I dipped my fork inside the tortilla, I found beautifully scrambled eggs and sharp cheddar, and the wreath of…

Hapa Sushi — sexy rolls, raw fish and edamame

I made my first foray into sushi at the relatively ripe age of twenty (I don’t count the gobs of bad California rolls that I squished down before that), and it was an instant, passionate love affair akin to the greatest romances of all time. Romeo and Juliet, Bogey and…

Round two with Mitch Mayers, exec chef of Black Pearl

Mitch Mayers Black Pearl 1529 South Pearl Street 303-777-0500 www.blackpearldenver.com Part one of my interview with Mitch Mayers, exec chef of Black Pearl, an yesterday; this is part two of our conversation. Favorite restaurant in America: Morimoto, in New York City. When I ate dinner there, Morimoto was actually eating…

The teenage Cafe Berlin is in need of an intervention

Hands on your buzzers, everyone! Here’s a trivia question: “High-school seniors share this in common with Cafe Berlin.” (Insert Jeopardy music here.) If you answered “What is 1995?,” you’d be right. In 1995, most of those seniors were in diapers, and Cafe Berlin, Denver’s longtime standby for hearty German fare,…

Five best restaurants for a schnitzel fix

With seventeen years and three homes under its belt, Café Berlin (which I review this week) has become synonymous with German food in Denver (the jagerschnitzel is particularly noteworthy). But this restaurant is not the only place in town serving spaetzle and sauerkraut. Here are several more options for getting…

Denver and Boulder bartenders to battle it out at the Cognac Ferrand Master of Hospitality & Mountain Mixology competition at Colt & Gray

On Monday, November 5, Colt & Gray will be the stamping ground for a bartender’s dream, especially those who have an affinity for cognac — very good cognac. Six local cocktail magicians — Melissa Durant (Green Russell); Carla Chang Sandoval (Hillstone Group); Anthony Giovanni (Gaetano’s); Jason Patz (Williams & Graham);…

The Boulder Burgundy Festival delivered the juice

“The first duty of wine is to be red; the second is to be a Burgundy.” So say many hard-core oenophiles around the world, for whom the sun rises and sets according to the vintage charts, weather forecasts and harvest projections associated with a relatively tiny (we’re talking roughly 200…

Guess where I’m eating tamales?

Here’s the good news: These are some of the best housemade tamales in the city. Now the bad news: You’ll have to wait until late next month to wrap your jaws around them, because the original off-the-eaten-path location of the restaurant that serves them has closed so that that the…

Mitch Mayers, exec chef of Black Pearl, on Mohawks and Agio

Mitch Mayers Black Pearl 1529 South Pearl Street 303-777-0500 www.blackpearldenver.com This is part one of my interview with Mitch Mayers, exec chef of Black Pearl; part two of our conversation will run tomorrow. Mitch Mayers wanted to cook; his parents insisted that he go to Cornell. He negotiated. “I made…