Restaurants

What could you buy with $117,000? A really nice luxury vehicle. Some sort of tricked-out boat. A home away from home. Or one bottle of wine…

I’ve been presented with many, many versions of beer bread over the years, and despite my love of both beer and bread, I’ve yet to try a loaf that I actually liked. Nothing against the people kind enough to share theirs with me, but they tended to choose darkish, full-bodied…

I’ve never been a fan of brunch buffets — or any buffet for that matter. That said, when there’s seafood on the dock, I’m more inclined to turn off the snob factor and forgive myself for partaking in the gluttony. Can you guess where I’m eating? Special bonus: Anyone who…

Frank Bonanno is about to expand his empire, adding Russell’s Smokehouse to the vast underground area in Larimer Square where Green Russell is already located. “I’m not doing traditional barbecue, or Texas barbecue, or Kansas City barbecue, or St. Louis-style barbecue,” he tells Lori Midson. “I’m doing barbecue my way…

I have never suffered food envy as intense as the first time I ate at Tao Tao Noodle Bar. I should have been satisfied. Begging for mercy, even, since I’d already polished off a steamer of eight juicy pork dumplings, then barely taken a breath before diving into a platter…

I usually go to Star Kitchen for dim sum. And I’m not the only one. At lunch time — especially lunch time on the weekends — the restaurant is a chaotic sea of people, with families huddled around tables, the adults passing dishes back and forth on a lazy Susan…

Late last week, we broke the very good news that Jensen Cummings, the ex-chef de cuisine at TAG, who resigned from Troy Guard’s Larimer Square restaurant after some high-voltage drama, had snapped up the exec chef position at Row 14, following the departure of Arik Markus, Row 14’s opening chef…

Patsy’s has been serving up red-sauce Italian fare in northwest Denver since 1921, and the bar and dining room — along with the menu itself — is a window into the neighborhood’s past. The restaurant keeps pulling in legions of diners, and now it’s added a new incentive to stop…

Close to a year ago, chef and restaurateur Frank Bonanno, whose colony of collections already included Mizuna, Osteria Marco, Luca D’Italia and Bones, inked a lease on a mammoth, 6,000-square-foot down-reaching space in Larimer Square that soon became the dwelling pads to Wednesday’s Pie, a one-day-a-week pie parlor, and Green…

The server made a mess of the French press coffee, serving it less than lukewarm and managing to spray coffee grinds all over the table with an unnecessarily severe push, but the kitchen, at least, has a deft hand, turning out a summery plate of prosciutto-wrapped honeydew forested with greens…

You’ve heard it all before: the local, sustainable, organic, farm-to-table, eco-conscious culinary buzzword chant that chefs, foodniks and food writers dispense to ballyhoo the food movement of the moment. Some chefs are professionally rehearsed in the hyperbole, despite the fact that a peek in their walk-ins raises skeptical eyebrows –…

After I ate at Bittersweet for this week’s review, I stopped by chef-owner Olav Peterson’s old stomping grounds, Bistro One, where owner Alex Waters has turned his three-year-old restaurant into a solid neighborhood joint with a menu full of Southern comfort food. And Bistro One is about to add another…

We’ve carped plenty about the lack of Colorado-created items at Denver International Airport, and a new program will not only introduce a few state-specific retail outlets, but will also be hiring some Coloradans to work at them at a job fair today. Over the next two weeks, up to fourteen…

Cafe Society served up five Guess where? contests last week, ranging from a still-unidentified plate of “ewww” to a steak at Westerkamp that inspired an interesting comment from “disapointed culinarian” to this duck duet. For correctly identifying it as coming from Bistro Vendome, where Dana Rodriguez is now the executive…

Denver is going very Euro. IKEA, with its 550-seat, meatball-rolling restaurant that will provide sustenance for all those furniture shoppers, officially opens Wednesday. And last Friday, Chloe Mezze Lounge made its long-awaited debut — and in both concept and crowd, the hipper-than-hip Chloe could not have been more unlike the…

Earlier this week, we rolled out a contest to Cafe Society readers, in which two people would win the privilege to eat and drink for free at the Food Truck Renegades: The Sequel party, which kicks off tomorrow at 4 p.m. in a mammoth parking lot at 23rd and Walnut…

I definitely missed the memo — the one that stipulated that stilettos; perfectly coiffed hair; jaw-dropping, butt-hugging and breast-spilling black dresses; and fresh-from-the-salon manicures were prerequisites for last night’s VIP launch party of Chloe Mezze Lounge, a new nightclub/discotheque, lounge-restaurant and social garden (complete with its own bar and a…

Less than a year after opening a second location in downtown Louisville, In Season Local Market has branched out yet again, adding beer, wine and spirits to its repertoire of locally sourced products. “We wanted to provide something that Louisville lacked, a local marketplace as well as a quality liquor…

In the Best of Denver 2011, we named Common Grounds the Best Coffeehouse for Finding a Date, thanks to the constant crowd of young professionals who mingle there over cappuccinos. And because we’re big proponents of ditching online dating and blind set-ups every now and then in favor of meeting…

Two weeks ago, when we broke the news that more than a dozen staffers from TAG, Troy Guard’s restaurant in Larimer Square, had walked out the door or submitted their two-week notice as a result of personal issues between Troy and his wife (soon to be ex-wife) Leigh Sullivan, people…

I promised myself I’d eat just one, but one led to two and two led to three, and now I’m in a sausage stupor, thanks to Brad Arguello, the co-owner of Über Sausage, a weeny-size sausage parlor that opened two weeks ago at 2730 East Colfax Avenue in the former…

When it comes to food, I’ll try anything once — I’ve happily eaten tarantulas, ant eggs and ant dust, grasshoppers, crickets, duck tongues, rubber, crayons and toenails — but this Sicilian dish, the texture and flavors of which were pure funk and stink, is not something that I’d rush to…