It’s hard enough starting a restaurant from scratch, but taking over an established, much-loved place can be even more difficult. Some customers are so loyal to the old regime that they refuse to give the new one a try. Others pretend to keep an open mind, but any changes clearly…
Best of the West: First the New York Times comes to town and manages to review half a dozen Denver restaurants without ever biting into a buffalo burger or snarfing down salsa. Then the August Travel & Leisure weighs in with its opinion on where to dine in Denver–but author…
Raise your hand if your mama told you never to make promises you can’t keep. The owners of the eltinMg Pot should be hearing from their mothers any day now. Despite its grandiose claims, the Melting Pot’s Littleton outpost delivers nothing more than a lick and a promise. Although I…
Happy new beer: Foodwise, at least, Thornton doesn’t have much going for it–chains already choke 120th Avenue, and more are planned. But Thornton residents can at least drown their sorrows at their first microbrewery, the six-month-old Colorado Brewing Company, at 12160 Pennsylvania Street. This is undoubtedly the strangest location for…
That’s Mr. D to you: Little did I know that a chance visit to Mr. D’s, at 2121 South Sheridan Boulevard, would turn into a history lesson on Denver dining. But then, I didn’t know Mr. D’s was owned by Todd Goldman, a trained pilot with a master’s in marketing…
Where I grew up, you had your fancy, expensive French restaurant that everyone’s parents went to for anniversaries, one good red-sauce Italian spot that neighbors whispered had some kind of “family” connections, a decent seafood place reserved for special-occasion lobster and coquilles St. Jacques, a pizza parlor, a couple of…
Getting the Runza-round: While loosemeat is what matters in Iowa, Runzas run the show in Nebraska. A Runza is like a pasty, only in addition to meat–and sometimes instead of it–it’s stuffed with potatoes, cabbage and cheese. Like Iowa’s Maid-Rite, the franchise that made loosemeat its own, a fast-food chain…
Loosemeat sandwich. Throw those words out at a party and you’re guaranteed to elicit some sort of snickering response, if not an out-and-out vulgarity. Unless you happen to be talking to a Midwesterner. Because as anyone from Iowa, Nebraska or South Dakota can tell you, a loosemeat sandwich is not…
Wine, wine, wine: Simon F. Cocks, part-owner of Enoteca LoDo, apparently popped his cork when I expressed surprise that the Readers’ Choice award for Best Wine List–Price in the June 27 Best of Denver issue went to Enoteca (Mouthing Off, July 4). Enoteca’s prices are “way up there,” I wrote,…
It’s not easy keeping up with the Janeses. Two years ago, as co-owner of Coos Bay Bistro, Jane Myers helped bring a touch of the Pacific Northwest to a University of Denver-area storefront previously occupied by an old, increasingly tired Italian joint. Seemingly within minutes, Coos Bay became a popular…
Sometimes a restaurant owner has to kick some butt to turn a place around. It worked at Cucina Colore, the Cherry Creek North link in the Momo family chain that originated in New Jersey, stretched to Boulder with Teresa’s Pizza Colore nearly six years ago and then added Pizza Colore…
Bested of Denver: When compiling the Food and Drink portion of the annual Best of Denver, my toughest task is keeping up with the places that either close two weeks before the issue comes out, lose the chef who made the kitchen cook, or drop the item we’re about to…
You can have your low-fat, cholesterol-free, vinegar-sparked, olive-oil-slicked, healthy Mediterranean diet. I’m listening to my inner Julia Child. At the Aspen Food & Wine Magazine Classic a few weeks ago, Julia, the woman who made French cooking user-friendly, titillated the closet fat addicts hanging on her every word by dumping…
Food and whine: It’s easy to point out all the negatives at the Aspen Food & Wine Magazine Classic held in the resort town last month. There were the cooking seminars packed with hundreds of people, some of whom brought their wailing newborns and some of whom asked really irritating…
Two restaurant critics for competing dailies visited a restaurant several times in the same week, ate nearly identical meals and published their reviews on the same Friday. One said the meals were among the best he’s had. The other said the meals were among the worst he’s had. What gives?…
When they reign, it pours: Even before the calls started flooding in from readers regarding this year’s Best of Denver issue, there’d been some fallout in the city’s shaky restaurant scene. Checking on picks just days before publication, we learned that the House of Bunbuster, in line for a “Best…
Good homestyle cooking. Friendly atmosphere. Reasonable prices. Sounds like an advertisement for one of those chain restaurants that bills itself as your neighborhood eatery, doesn’t it? Yeah, your neighborhood and the neighborhoods of three dozen other cities across the country. But what if those words accurately describe a real neighborhood…
Steaking a claim: This year concert promoter Barry Fey did us a favor and called the Westword office before the annual Best of Denver issue–scheduled to hit the streets June 27–so that when we pick the wrong places for awards, we’ll at least do so with full warning. A few…
John M. Wallace is a trucker. During his fifteen years on the road–the last three driving for a national furniture chain–he’s been through 32 states and eaten at “near about three, no, make that four hundred truck stops.” He’s dropped by Deno’s 6 & 85 in Commerce City at least…
Truckin’: If it hadn’t been for the price of gas, my visit to the Denver West Travel Center–otherwise known as the Union 76 at the Ward exit off I-70–would have been really boring. As it was, the heated arguments about where to find the best prices–cries of “I just paid…
Tommy knockers: The Larimer Group is getting ready to expand outside Larimer–about a hundred feet away, actually, into the parking structure that the company built one street over in LoDo. The folks responsible for Cadillac Ranch, Mexicali Cafe, Champion Brewing Co. and Josephina’s, among others, will soon open Tommy Tsunami…
When a trio of restaurant veterans bought the venerable Mary & Lou’s Cafe, the surrounding neighborhood cheered. Sure, they’d miss the 99-cent breakfasts and the all-night hours, but that part of Broadway was experiencing a rebirth, and the area could use a restaurant that reflected the changing times. From the…
