PASTA TENSE

By A waitress’s first day on the job is never easy. It’s worse when the food she’s serving is hit or miss. And it’s sheer hell when her first customer is an anonymous restaurant critic. Still, the poor woman we encountered at Vella’s Italian Restaurant was a sweetheart who did…

CHILE TODAY, HOT TOMORROW

We were craving great Mexican food–great cheap, greasy, hot Mexican food–and there seemed just one place to go: Larimer Street, where the shadow of Coors Field falls on a strip of pawnshops, vacant lots, shelters, bars and a few fabulous, if modest, Mexican restaurants. With an eye to the baseball…

OIL IN THE FAMILY

It was the best of foods, it was the worst of foods. At Mr. Steak’s Firegrill, the Omnivest Corporation’s first attempt at an upscale, hipper version of its Mr. Steak chain, the difference between the good dishes and the bad is as obvious as the night-and-day light show played out…

OUT OF AFRICA

The French use the term “la casbah” as slang for “party.” It’s fitting, then, that La Casbah is the name of a festive new North African restaurant. La Casbah is only the second restaurant to bring the foods of the Arabian west–Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, with a heavy emphasis on…

WINNER TAKE GAUL

We never made it to Jim Morrison’s grave, but that was because we were determined to find an authentic Parisian bistro during our trip to France several years ago. After wandering for almost an hour in Montmartre–past all of the places that suck up most tourists–we stumbled up a side…

Tandoor Mercies

As a kid I did not trust the cuisine of India. Hey, there could have been anything in there–monkey brains, for all I knew, or even worse: green peppers. Because ethnic food had not yet reached our little pocket of suburbia (pizza was as exotic as it got), we had…

A Pizza the Action

If you thought Lower Downtown didn’t need another hangout, stop by Wazoos on Wazee some Friday night and watch as hundreds of people jostle for elbow room. Where were they before this cavernous beer/pool/music hall opened in October? The answer can’t be that they were frequenting another LoDo hot spot,…

Cafe

The first step in dealing with an addiction to Thai food is admitting that you have a problem. The second is accepting that there are no more steps — because who can contemplate a cure that bans curry?Chile peppers can be physically addicting, according to recent medical evidence. The reasons…

2nd Helping

‘ve eaten at Le Central many times over the past six years, and I’ve always encountered some kind of problem. Often they’ve been production-oriented glitches, ranging from tardy courses to overcooked seafood (“Waiting for Gateau,” October 17, 1996); sometimes servers have failed to refill water glasses or replace silverwear. Out…