Eating at the new Rose’s Cafe is a little like sitting in your grandmother’s rocking chair after she’s passed away: It’s still shaped like her, it still smells like her and feels like her, and you can’t quite avoid the uncomfortable sense that it still very much belongs to her…
The server didn’t bat an eye when a member of our party asked for a Bud Light. The sommelier did. “Hey, maybe you have some in your car,” he joked, poking our server in the ribs. The server thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I think we do…
A hungry visitor from another city — hell, a hungry visitor from another planet — dropping into Denver would recognize in a heartbeat that we’re a little short on exciting cuisine right now. The few interesting restaurants we have are often doing exactly what the other interesting restaurants are doing…
In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the characters played by Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard stop by the venerable jewelry store to ask if a ring from a Cracker Jack box can be engraved as a gift from him to her. The stately, stuffy gentleman behind the counter looks the ring over…
Dressed in a too-tight denim mini-skirt with nothing on her legs but little white bobby socks, the waitress bounded over to a nearby booth to make her announcement. “The nice lady who was sitting over there says Grandma bought your breakfast,” she proclaimed with a big grin on her face,…
The more downtown changes, the more the Rocky Mountain Diner remains the same. The Diner marks its tenth anniversary this month, so it can rightfully claim that it hit downtown long before the boom did. Office workers whose employers fled their 17th Street digs years ago, because of high rents…
A forty-something woman was staring at a case full of frozen seafood, muttering aloud to herself. “Oh, my God, those are gyoza!” she finally exclaimed and then turned around, wildly searching for her shopping companion. “Did you see these?” she asked, dragging him over to the display and nearly shoving…
Between nine straight hours of slogging through the outlet stores and several more writing Christmas cards, the holidays always cry out for us to find time to get away from it all and pamper ourselves. For that, I turn to the Old Stone Church in Castle Rock. Still looking like…
Ever since Molly Brown returned to Denver after her dunk in the Atlantic, diners here have complained about this city’s lack of decent seafood restaurants. For a long time, the blame lay with Denver’s landlocked location — but that obstacle was removed a generation ago, with the advent of improved…
It’s not as American as apple pie, but barbecue is firmly entrenched in this country’s culinary heritage. Although some food historians suggest that “barbecue” was derived from the French barbe à queue, which means “beard to tail,” the majority of reference works agree that it really came from the Haitian…
Start small and keep it simple — that’s the advice I’d offer anyone wondering how to open a successful restaurant. A restaurant doesn’t need to feature a hip gimmick, or offer an enormous menu of enormously portioned dishes, or have a thousand wine bottles in its collection, or bear a…
WaterCourse Foods serves great vegetarian food. But it serves that food very, very slowly. Chef/owner Dan Landes opened his flesh-free restaurant almost three years ago, and it was a fast hit with vegans, carnivores, macro heads and lackadaisical chicken-and-fish-eating vegetarians alike (“Go With the Flow,” May 21, 1998). To please…
It’s a typical workday, and you have thousands of tasks ahead. You’ve just come out of a meeting, dozens of clients are waiting for you, and before you can take care of anything, your co-workers are signaling that it’s time for you to do that special part of your job,…
Late last year, when Sam Kraydie opened Sinbad on South Colorado Boulevard, he knew he had something, and he let everyone else know it, too, by placing a sign in the front window that boasted, “The best there ever was. The best there is. The best there will ever be.”…
It may be time to bring back the vomitorium. For those who forget their history — don’t worry, we’re all condemned at this point to repeating it — Rome was just an anno Domini teenager when excessive feasts were all the rage, with the average banquet involving five or six…
When the host of a popular national cooking show on bread devotes a segment to some of the country’s best pizzas, you don’t expect a Denver area pizzeria to rate a starring role. As anyone who’s tried to find decent pizza in this town knows, you’re better off showcasing kosher…
Americans will eat cheese that’s been pasteurized, emulsified and homogenized so much that it can be sprayed through a nozzle. We’ll ingest worm-shaped snacks made from nothing but sugar, water and enough preservatives to embalm a hippo, and happily munch on deep-fried pieces of skin that once covered a farm…
An Applebee’s is an Applebee’s is an Applebee’s. In fact, one of the primary reasons people frequent chain restaurants is their predictability: The Applebee’s doesn’t fall far from the tree. Those absurd riblets you love at the outlet back home will taste just the same, look just the same and…
In Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes talks of “shadow gatherings,” when Venetians would meet in the shadows of San Marco, wandering from bar to bar, eating tapas-like tidbits and sipping half-glasses of wine. But while ombra is the Italian word for “shadow,” Denver’s Ombra offers only a dim reflection…
The Denver Tech Center is so hungry for decent restaurants (any restaurant, really) that people get weepy every time a new Taco Bell opens. Still, it’s a crying shame that the hot-hot Cool River Cafe serves such so-so meals. By placing his $5 million venture in the heart of the…
When Markus Georg opened his Chinook Tavern back in 1995, it looked like the sort of place that would be a hit for a short time — the baby boomers of Cherry Creek are always willing to try a new watering hole — but then business would dry up and…
Directly in front of our table, a G-stringed blonde was scraping her nipples across what must have been a very cold floor. From behind us came the sounds — just barely audible over the shriek of Billy Idol covering L.A. Woman — of someone getting his lap danced upon; to…
