It may have been the Year of the Pig on the Chinese calendar, but in Denver, 1995 will go down as the Year of the Restaurant. Through official announcements, phone calls, word-of-mouth tips and simply stumbling into places, I counted no fewer than 67 new restaurants in the city alone…
We screeched to a halt in front of the Brown Palace Hotel in our luxury Toyota, two minutes late because the first movie we’d seen in a theater in sixteen months–yes, that’s how old our kid is; how’d you guess?–had 27 previews, 5 more than we’d counted on when we…
Try to remember the last time the tuxedo-clad manager of a restaurant ran, actually ran, outside into the parking lot so that he could breathlessly call “Thanks again for coming, and drive safely” because he’d missed saying goodbye to you at the door. Can you recall arriving for dinner at…
By now, even Americans raised on Spaghetti-Os know the infamous differences between Italy’s northern and southern cuisine–but that’s just the tip of the boot. In fact, anyone who’s been to fewer than half of the country’s twenty or so major regions can’t claim to be an expert on Italian food…
Heaven help us if someone does a study that shows eating dog food lowers cholesterol and helps us live healthier, longer lives. Within weeks Denver would be overrun by “poocherias,” and restaurants could get a leg up on the competition by offering the freshest, just-kibbled ingredients. All it took was…
Over the past year the neighborhood around Coors Field has exploded with new eateries. Now, with the baseball fans gone and a long, cold winter ahead, some of those restaurants are going to make lunchmeat of the competition. But until they do, people who work in LoDo have a smorgasboard…
Even a restaurant that set up shop in the Sistine Chapel and employed Capuchin monks who devoted their lives to serving others would eventually have to rely on the quality of its food to keep it in business. You can only drink in beautiful scenery and subsist on sheer subservience…
Few caterpillars crawl as much as Radek Cerny has on his way to the butterfly stage. After the Communist government took away his family’s farm in Czechoslovakia, Cerny (pronounced “chair-nee”) had to fight hard for his culinary training in Prague. He ultimately escaped the country by slipping away from a…
You can’t make all the people happy all of the time–especially if you’re a restaurant. A few years ago, trendy dining establishments tried to offer something for everyone: a few beef and chicken dishes, some fish for the pretend vegetarians, a selection of pastas and maybe some pseudo-ethnic dishes. But…
Judged by its cover, the Fourth Story is looking good. This restaurant has what might be my favorite dining room in Denver. There’s an endless supply of books to pull down and peruse, and in this library, eating and drinking are not only allowed, they’re very much encouraged. All the…
It started with wine dinners at a handful of restaurants, monthly culinary happenings where cellared vino was uncorked and paired with complementary dishes. Next thing you knew, everyone but McDonald’s was doing wine dinners. Then came the boutique wine sellers, a handful of small, focused stores that catered to the…
Facing the unappetizing prospect of unemployment when their company laid off a third of its workforce last year, two couples decided to ensure that they’d always have food on the table–by opening a restaurant. But they didn’t stop there. To guarantee that they’d always have plenty with which to drown…
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…
