Once upon a time, Daddy made the money and Mommy made the dinner, and Junior and Buffy would come home from school and do their homework while Lawrence Welk bubbles floated through the living room and the dog helped set the table. Daddy would ask what was for dinner, and…
Just for fun, try making Hamburger Helper for dinner every night. Make it the same way, with the same ingredients and the same side dishes. After two weeks, you’ll be sick to death of making Hamburger Helper. That’s what it’s like cooking in a restaurant. Many chefs circumvent kitchen tedium…
With all the action just a few blocks away, the 16th Street Mall is starting to feel like it’s off the beaten path. Most of the restaurants along this stretch rely on lunch crowds to help them make it through the night, and some have redecorated or changed menus to…
Longing to feel unwanted? Tryn walking into most restaurants with your kid in tow. Faster than you can say “high chair,” the place will put out the unwelcome mat. Assuming you stick around, you’ll be alternately ignored and stared at. When the waitpeople aren’t busy sighing by the side of…
This city’s mortality rate for Vietnamese restaurants is high, and any eatery that serves cheap, sloppily executed Vietnamese food has a better chance of stopping traffic on Federal Boulevard with a chopstick than it does of surviving. As soon as one restaurant closes, though, another seems to spring up faster…
Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. When Kevin Taylor, chef and owner of one of the city’s few nationally known restaurants, Zenith American Grill, decided to open a second, more downscale eatery, he thought it would be a surefire hit to import the unique flavors of…
When my arteries start clogging up like Colorado Boulevard, Indian food is just what the doctor ordered. While some cuisines cancel out vegetables and rice with sugary sauces and fatty pork products and still call themselves healthy, this is the real thing: meats marinated in low-fat yogurt, lentil-thickened sauces and…
A restaurant doesn’t have to serve big, important food designed by a celebrity chef who wallpapers the dining room with his diploma from a Serious Cooking School in order for a meal to be worthwhile. Sometimes it’s enough that the food comes from someone who loves to cook and that…
In the mid-Eighties, stadiums began upgrading the food service at sporting events. It changed my life. Before that, baseball games were something to be tolerated. During the give-and-take years of dating, my presence at a game usually came as a tradeoff for an evening at an art-gallery opening. And on…
My grandmother has a foolproof, color-coded formula for assembling a meal that balances all the basic food groups. It’s as simple as this: There has to be something orange, brown, red, green and white. If she’s serving steak (brown), then carrots (orange), noodles (white) and a salad of lettuce and…
We bring our family to a restaurant that bills itself as “family-style” and are promptly told to go to the bar with our child and wait thirty minutes, even though there are twenty empty tables within sight. When we are seated–thankfully only twenty minutes later–no one offers us a high…
In one evening, we saw two biker chicks in leather bras, a gaggle of businessmen bearing briefcases, four polyester-clad women double-checking their just-done hair, and two families celebrating birthdays. All aboard for the Denver ChopHouse & Brewery. The Rock Bottom Restaurants corporation–which counts among its holdings five Rock Bottom Breweries…
Since the only thing lying between Denver and the deep blue sea is a two-hour plane trip, the notion that we can’t get fresh fish here doesn’t hold water. The fact is, we can get our hands on seafood in less time than it takes the average Los Angeleno to…
In restaurant circles, you frequently hear the saying, “If you like to cook, don’t become a chef.” Seasoned chefs will tell you that they got into the business because they loved working with food and serving their beautiful creations to others. Until they became chefs, that is, and found themselves…
Some people are lucky enough to have fond memories of a mother calling out “Supper time!” to a horde of hungry youngsters who vied for the last bite of homemade meatball. But for those whose food pasts contained no more warmth than a cold can of SpaghettiOs twisting angrily against…
Destination: Denver International Airport. Fasten your seat belts tight across your stomachs–this could be a bumpy ride. Traditionally, the only people who eat at airports are either (a) so hungry they don’t mind paying $27 for two rubbery eggs, bacon that looks like it was torn from a running pig…
Eating a Filipino meal is like breaking into the jars in science lab and ingesting the contents–only to discover that the results of your experiment in eating can be downright delicious. That’s what we concluded after our visits to Nipa Hut, the area’s only Filipino restaurant. Why it’s our sole…
The fight is on. In this corner, we have a chain restaurant that advertises fresh, high-quality Mexican food, a fun family atmosphere and low prices. What it actually delivered, though, was sub-mediocre food, prices higher than those at any authentic Mexican restaurant I’ve ever visited, and a waiter who told…
Try to guess what these four things have in common: stripping, footsie, finger sucking and orgasms. X-rated movies? No way. These are all acts considered proper fare for restaurants–restaurants on the big screen, that is. From Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm–which surely provoked a few arguments on the way home from…
Buckingham Palace is veddy, veddy nice, thank you–if pressing your forehead against cold metal in order to peer at a bunch of palace guards with fuzzy black Q-tip heads is your cup of tea. And Westminster Abbey is quite lovely–if looking at dead monarchs interred in tombs worth ten times…
Considering the number of eggs we eat, it’s a wonder the chicken isn’t our national bird. According to a narrative on the back of the Dozens menu–inexplicably illustrated with a picture of a rooster, not a hen–Americans crack open an average of 314 eggs a year, which flies right in…
There are those folks whose routines sound like the instructions on a shampoo bottle. They work nine-to-five, sit through rush hour on I-25 to get home in time for Entertainment Tonight and then tumble into bed. Lather. Rinse. Repeat. Those folks are not Melvyn and Jane Master. The owners of…
