I wanted to get above thirty. Thirty sounded respectable: the number of days in June, the number of minutes it’s safe to stare at Rachael Ray before your head explodes. Thirty would be an accomplishment, something I could brag to people about and they’d stare back at me, impressed, and…
Three weeks ago, I had the worst shrimp scampi of my life. Two weeks ago, I wrote about it when I reviewed Grand Lux Cafe. The shrimp scampi there was so bad that even though I ate only a few bites before pushing it away, the horror of it (and…
“If you’re going to take Vienna, take Vienna.” Napoleon said that, and I’ve always liked the line. He was speaking, of course, not just about sacking Austria’s capital, but of a certain conqueror’s mindset: Don’t just say you’re going to do something; do it. And once you’ve started, see it…
Mark Schlereth isn’t a green chile expert. He doesn’t know how to make it, he doesn’t have any favorite places around Denver that make it, and he certainly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Colorado-style chile and New Mexico-style. Until recently, he admits, “I’d never had green chile…
I recently got an e-mail from Page Productions, a Minneapolis company that produces the show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives: “We are researching the Denver area for our Food Network show which will be filming 6 or 7 different establishments in Colorado in a couple of months. I keep stumbling across…
Talk about a raw deal! According to the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, the former owners of Osaka Sushi have been charged with human trafficking — because they allegedly made two South Korean immigrants work there for no pay, threatening them with deportation if they complained. Here’s the press release from…
At its most elemental, a great shrimp scampi consists of shrimp, garlic, lemon and white wine. It is shrimp in an Italian beurre blanc—the garlic (and shallots) used to start a sauté pan, seasoned with good olive oil, deglazed with white wine, spritzed with lemon juice and mounted, at the…
Can you digest a steel-belted radial? Are you goiter-popping iodine-deficient? If so, has Chubby’s got the lard-laced saltastic green chile you’ve been looking for! I understand why people don’t love this place. The north Denver landmark can put a hurtin’ on anyone’s bowels. Even those who were raised at the…
My Friends Tigger & Pooh Corn Puffs General Mills Rating: A half spoon out of four Cereal description: Not much innovation here. The enclosed corn puffs are, quite simply, corn puffs, as generic as they can be. Their hue is similar to to the color of Winnie the Pooh’s fur,…
Hamburger Mary’s (700 East 17th Avenue) has won the race to open the first new patio of the season. Its spacious back deck, with both a bar area (including heaters!) and seating for diners, made its debut on Tuesday, May 6. That beat Encore (2250 East Colfax Avenue), by three…
I forgot to mention this interesting little side note in my blog about Tazo’s sneak-preview, media-only dinner on Monday night (which also happened to be Cinco de Mayo)… We arrived a little early and were sipping some tea-infused cocktails when Chef “Goose” Sorensen of Solera appeared suddenly behind the bar,…
Tyler Wiard, chef at Elway’s at 3000 East First Avenue, is bringing home the bacon after taking down all comers at the Taste of Elegance — a national pig cookin’ competition organized by the National Pork Board out in California. Wiard bested twenty other chefs from around the country, and…
Funny thing about the way this job goes sometimes: I often don’t know exactly what I’m going to be writing about a restaurant until the minute I sit down and actually start writing about the restaurant. For example, this week’s review of Spice China? I hadn’t originally intended on talking…
One of the great things about being a gastronaut — one of the great things about living a food-obsessed life — is that you can engage in quests. And while you may not get to slay any dragons while you search out foie gras or Chinese soup dumplings in the…
Most restaurants in town serve both lunch and dinner. And while at most of those places, the difference between the two meals is minor (the lunch menu missing only the most high-end steaks and chops, the most complicated entrees, the dinner menu slightly less cluttered with salads and sandwiches), at…
SAME Café at 2023 East Colfax Avenue is closed through May 9 for spring-cleaning – and the installation of some new kitchen equipment. When SAME reopens on May 10, co-owner (with wife Libby) Brad Birky will be devoting all his time to the restaurant, which allows diners to pay what…
Here is how you make a proper Peking duck. First, invent a time machine, go back to the mid-nineteenth century, grab yourself a plot of land in one of the booming cities of mainland China and enlist the help of a bricklayer to build you an oven. Then practice. For…
Try the tea-infused duck at Solera. Photo by Matthew Staver. Dining in the dark and tea-infused dishes are two recent trends in restaurants; on Monday, May 5, I got to experience both at Solera Restaurant and Wine Bar (5410 East Colfax Avenue, 303-388-8429, www.solerarestaurant.com). Chef Christian “Goose” Sorensen created a…
While researching Georgetown weirdness, I learned that one of the places I wrote about in my April 24 Bite Me column — the Silver Queen bar and restaurant—once had none other than Roseanne Barr on staff in the kitchen, either as a prep cook or a sous chef. To quote…
“Pickles! Pickles! Hey, man, you want one of these pickles? One dollar.” I open my mouth to speak. “Uhhh . . .” I had just walked out of the cramped convenience store on the northeast corner of East Bruce Randolph Avenue and York Street, an intersection that I call the…
Chocolate Chex General Mills Rating: Three spoons out of four Cereal description: The typical Chex construction: square grids with a puff in the middle, like a pillow that would leave a tic-tac-toe pattern on your cheek. Approximately half the cereal, which represents a fusion of rice, corn meal and (the…
Earlier this week, Jason Sheehan rhapsodized about his dinner at Le Bernardin. His musings did not escape attention on the East Coast, where New York magazine’s food blog weighed in with this. All in all, quite a tasty read. But for the record: The paper is Westword. And Sheehan’s piece…
