Fore! Foods fit for the Masters

The Masters Tournament starts this weekend, which is always a great excuse to invite the guys over for some grub and stogies, and trade stories about that pay-for-play night during that last golf outing in Vegas. If you’re lucky, your indentured servant, err, wife will make you a smorgasbord of…

Frasca: The front of the house is friendly to kids, too!

Frasca Food and Wine scored “Best Front of the House” in this year’s Best of Denver, and with good reason. The employees are like epicurean Navy SEALs, making sure every guest’s needs are met instantly and unobtrusively. But what if that guest is just recently out of diapers? Does Frasca’s…

Guess where I’m eating?

While the rest of you are down in Denver doing whatever it is that you do on a Friday, I’m currently living the high life in Vail, wining and dining at some of my favorite restaurants, including this one, where the above photo — sweetbreads — was snapped during one…

Top five reasons why bacon will never be over

As long as there are pigs and people alive on the earth, bacon will never be over. Food trends have come, gone, lingered past their usefulness and then been recycled every week on the Food Network, but bacon remains an emotive staple, and a timeless culinary reality. Bacon has been…

Denny’s Baconalia: Seven new ways to clog your arteries!

Bacon can be used as a weapon. I visited the Denny’s at 900 West Alameda Avenue last evening, and was promptly greeted, not by a hostess or server (c’mon, that would be expecting way too much), but by a gigantic sign perched by the ubiquitous claw machine full of poorly-sewn…

Save your lame jokes for your lame friends

Welcome to In the Weeds. Kyle will be right with you — most likely to complain about something. Usually he is pleasant, but this is his place to blow off some steam. Don’t take it personally; he just needs to vent because he’s been doing this for about thirteen years…

Need to lay off the sauce? Try a mocktail at Euclid Hall

After all of the drinking we did in order to pick our booze-related awards in the Best of Denver 2011 — like Best Martini, Best House Margarita, Best Dive Bar and Best New Bar — (coupled with, uh, our normal food and booze pairing habits), we began to think of…

Guess where I’m eating?

The cookie was fine, and you can’t really screw up a from-the-bottle pickle. But the sandwich and potato salad? Not good at all. And that’s all I have to say about that. Can you guess where I’m eating? Special bonus: Anyone who gives the first correct answer to the week’s…

Second Helping: Pulcinella Pizzeria

“I got my passion from Tony,” Kelly Whitaker of Pizzeria Basta, which I reviewed this week, told me. “I carried that through everything else I did.” He was talking about Antonio Race, the native Italian who founded Pulcinella Ristorante in Fort Collins back in 1991; Whitaker got his kitchen start…

Round two with Pizza Republica’s Eric Chiappetta

Eric Chiappetta Pizza Republica 5375 Landmark Place, Greenwood Village 720-489-2030 www.pizzarepublica.com This is part two of my interview with Eric Chiappetta, executive chef of Pizza Republica. In part one of this interview, Chiappetta weighs in on why he believes the cook at Griff’s Hamburgers is a culinary god, and that…

Lucile’s is now serving in Littleton

Let the good times roll! Lucile’s Creole Cafe has now brought a taste of the bayou to Littleton. The fifth link in a chain that started in 1980 in Boulder, then added Fort Collins and Longmont, and stretched to Denver in 2005, is now in the south suburbs, too, occupying…

Reader: These places all deserve a pizza the action

The comments about Denver’s Five Best Burgers are still sizzling, and now people are getting hot about our Six Best Pizzas, adding five of our favorites to Pizzeria Basta, winner of the Best Pizza in the Best of Denver 2011. No Enzo’s? No Oven? At least Lipster was polite about…

Denver’s six best pizzas

You wouldn’t believe us if we told you how many times we stuffed our piehole in our quest to find the city’s best pizza in our lead-up to this year’s Best of Denver issue, which, of course, included pizza — several pizzas, as a matter of fact, starting with our…

SAME Cafe provides pay-what-you-can veggie delights

Westword ran a cover story on SAME Cafe (SAME stands for “So All May Eat”) more than two years ago — and the pay-what-you-can concept restaurant is still going strong, judging from the lunch crowd yesterday (not to mention the two other pay-what-you-can eateries that have opened around town). The…

Guess where I’m eating?

If you’ve been here before, then you’ll recognize the origin of those red, white, blue and spice-dusted chips immediately. If not, then you’ll want someone to guess correctly ASAP so you can run over there and get some. Can you guess where I’m eating? Special bonus: Anyone who gives the…

Pizza Republica’s Eric Chiappetta on why he believes the cook at Griff’s Hamburgers is a culinary god, and that whole molecular yada, yada, yada thing

Eric Chiappetta Pizza Republica 5375 Landmark Place, Greenwood Village 720-489-2030 www.pizzarepublica.com Eric Chiappetta’s first job in the kitchen had nothing whatsoever to do with a palpitating passion to actually cook. “I was sixteen, horny and I wanted to make enough money to take girls to the movies,” confesses Chiappetta, the…

Top five foods to eat on Hump Day

We’ve reached the middle of the work week, and as we all know, Wednesday has its own, well-earned nickname: Hump Day. Why? Maybe because from here, having gotten Monday and Tuesday out of the way, we can start contemplating the joys of the coming weekend, and some real hump days…