Tip down!” And the people cheer. Servers, cooks, busboys, regulars — those in the know — send up a loud, brief shout. Sometimes it’s “Thank you!” Sometimes it’s just “Yeah!” — but they always do it. Every time someone pokes a few crumpled dollars into the little treasure box by…
For a restaurant, looks aren’t everything. Pretty is nice, no doubt. Pretty will get you places, but on its own, pretty ain’t enough. The business is tough and getting tougher. A lot of sharp young chefs and blooded, veteran operators out there are hungry for what little cash is flowing…
In fourteen syllables, the sign out front — a small thing, almost understated, the color of wet slate — manages to capture the kind of arrogance, the brash hubris, that would be celebrated in Los Angeles or Vegas with spotlights and names spelled out in hundred-foot-tall bonfires of neon. That’s…
We stepped outside, Laura and I, our arms loaded down with takeout boxes, protected by an invisible force field of fennel, anise, clove and curry smells that pushed back the gray ugliness of another suburban parking lot in another suburban strip mall. Before us were too many SUVs, greasy puddles…
What is patriotism but the love of good things we ate in our childhood?” wondered Lin Yutang. Lin, I’m guessing, was not thinking about fettuccine alfredo when he wrote that, but I am. I’m thinking about gloppy alfredo sauce out of a jar from the grocery store, the dim ghost…
There’s a method — rigorously tested and refined by my friend Andy, an old kitchen buddy — for determining the quality of a Mexican restaurant before you even sit down. It’s quick, scientific and nearly foolproof, and it simply calls for tallying the bullfighting paraphernalia on the walls. A single…
Remember Murphy Brown? I used to watch it a lot, because it was a show about reporters, and since I wanted to be a reporter someday, I considered that research. I didn’t know any actual journalists back then — the closest I came was a high school journalism teacher who…
Christ, it’s hot. A zillion degrees hot, and this is the thing about Colorado that they never put in the tourist brochures. It’s all mountains and deep powder in the winter ads, young ski bunnies with wind-pinked cheeks. In the summer, it’s sun-dappled forest glades, cool streams, the variegated shade…
I approached Sunflower like a nervous hunting dog: my nose in the air, all my hair on end. From half a block away, I tried to suss out the vibe of the joint, watching the crowds milling around the doors and patio, sniffing the breeze for any hint of patchouli,…
Jeff Cleary is in the house. Seen through the swinging doors leading into the kitchen, the chef-owner of Intrigue appears calm and entirely collected. There are seated tables — a few two- and four-tops waiting for dinner — but Cleary seems strangely unmoved. He’s not smiling, he’s not frowning, and…
If you serve prime and it’s not bone-in, you may as well be a fucking Sizzler.” That’s Barry talking. Mister Fey, to some. Concert promoter and ticket broker, the guy who’s rumored to have once pulled a gun on a recalcitrant Axl Rose when the kilt-wearing prima donna dared to…
When I moved to Denver almost a year ago, I knew next to nothing about the local restaurant scene. There were a few places along the Front Range with which I had a passing acquaintance. I knew Johnson’s Corner outside of Loveland, because it’s the second-best diner in the United…
I ran out of books on Father’s Day. I read fast, so this happens a lot, but like a drunk who always keeps a fresh bottle on hand for when his current one runs low, I like to have another book in the pipeline before I hit the last chapter…
There are two items on the menu at Zaidy’s Deli: potatoes and everything else. Zaidy’s does great things with potatoes — truly phenomenal things for which it deserves a medal. Now if only those bastards at the American Farm Council’s tuber division would get off their asses and start planning…
It had been two years and three days since I last put on my whites and checks, and the ex-chef was convinced I was getting soft. I used to love my chef’s clothes: the clean white jacket — heavy cotton, starched stiff as a board — and loose-fitting check pants…
The dining room at Cafe Berlin was empty when Laura and I walked past. Next door, Dario’s had a few tables, and the smell of roasting meat, garlic and red sauce licking out onto the street would ensure that it soon had a few more. A couple of early drinkers…
It was the end of my third meal at Indigo. The dinner plates had been cleared, the white tablecloth combed down. While Julie — my cover for this night’s clandestine activities — and I were picking at the rag ends of the dessert we’d shared, I waited for the hammer…
Comfort food is dead. I keep hoping that if I say that enough, it will actually come true. Comfort food should be pronounced dead, because it’s gone as far as it can go in the white-tablecloth-and-heavy-silver restaurant cosmos. It’s a horse that has been ridden hard, whipped to within an…
When I’m in need of an energizing, centering, head-clearing taste of the Big Apple, I usually go to New York Pizzeria, a little hole-in-the-wall strip-mall joint in Glendale. But last month, I realized it had been a long time since I’d made a trip back to the state that spawned…
Bennigan’s. We have Bennigan’s to thank for Christian “Goose” Sorenson, executive chef at Solera. Coming to the Mile High City from his native Wyoming, where he’d been a frat-house cook in Laramie, Sorenson thought that working the line at Bennigan’s was the top restaurant job to which he could aspire…
When I am through with this industry — when I no longer feel (as I sometimes still do) the strong magnetic pull of kitchen life, the strange urge to put on my old whites and checks and stumble blearily into the 5 a.m. quiet of a house not yet awake;…
It would be so easy to make fun of the Royal Hilltop. It’s just another theme restaurant, after all. A British pub theme restaurant. A non-smoking British pub theme restaurant, tucked away in the back of a strip-mall so far out in southeast Aurora that it might as well be…
