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…
The Beef Council couldn’t have put it any better than Mark Twain did in A Tramp Abroad: “Imagine a poor exile, and imagine an angel suddenly sweeping down out of a better land and setting before him a mighty porterhouse steak an inch and a half thick, hot and sputtering…
There’s no surer way to send an executive chef running for the aspirin bottle than to tell him that the pastry chef served forty slices of pie burned black on the bottom, or that the prep cook forgot to grill the shrimp required for that evening’s special, or that the…
So you want to open a restaurant? The recipe for success has gotten quite simple: pasta and whatever. The beauty of something made from flour and water and a little egg is that it goes with everything. Pasta with jalapenos! Pasta with 75 kinds of cheese! Pasta with a microbrew!…
Looking through the open window into the closet of a kitchen, the first thing you see is the top of her black-haired head, and before the front door closes, her smiling face pops up in greeting. Someone else takes you to one of the tables in an adjoining room, but…
Cement with a side of cabbage. That’s the way most of the world sees German cuisine, the fat, jolly cousin of the food family. We’re talking heavy, heavy, heavy here: potatoes and dumplings and thick, greasy sausages and–ach du lieber!–next thing you know, you’re laying down a foundation for a…
Like the reptile it was named for, the Rattlesnake Grill began making noise long before it struck. The hum started about a year ago when rumors ran rampant that, yes, the Jimmy Schmidt would be opening a new version of his Rattlesnake Club, the tony, very expensive (and therefore much-maligned)…
Dad was “in Vietnam”–the polite way my family referred to that whole mess of a war–for three years, so it was only natural that some of the country rubbed off on him. I didn’t realize how much, though, until years later, when I began to recognize that Vietnam had flavored…
In the virtual reality of the future, we won’t need to leave our La-Z-Boys to travel (much less venture out to Denver International Airport)–we’ll just insert tapes in our video monitors and play tourist without suffering through the hassles of sore feet, lost luggage and stolen wallets. In the meantime,…
For years Village Inn has encouraged people to drop on in at Cherry Creek–and no one complains. But let some of the newer, hipper chain restaurants move into the area and all hell breaks loose. Chains rattle other restaurants for two reasons. The first, and most galling, is that the…
It usually starts with the word “ribs.” Maybe someone tickles me there, or a television commercial talks about something sticking to them, or I’m at church and the preacher mentions Adam. No matter how the word gets there, though, once it’s in my brain, it begins turning over like a…
The bleached blonde wet her lips, leaned forward and pressed her hand dramatically against the mammoth mammary glands that were on the verge of busting out of her black evening dress like two fat kids escaping an overheated car. “The problem with DIA,” she said, “is that a minority mayor…
Either they’re uptight about wearing pajamas in public, or that salmon was the last friend they had, because the guys behind sushi bars rarely smile. They solemnly wield their knives like sculpting tools, quietly creating works of art and then handing them over like so much dead fish. But then…
Good things come in small packages. And truly exceptional things are coming out of a tiny, nine-table restaurant in northwest Denver. Reservations have been a must almost from the moment the clumsily titled Today’s Gourmet Highland’s Garden Cafe opened seven months ago. Its modest size was only part of the…
