The Next Great Chef

What are you doing tomorrow? If the answer to that question is “nothing” and you happen to love cooking challenge shows like I do, then you should check out tomorrow’s taping of The Next Great Chef. The show will be taped for the Food Network between 10 a.m. and 4:30…

Milking It: Barbie Cereal

Barbie Multi-grain Cereal with Marshmallows Kellogg’s Rating: Two-and-a-half spoons out of four Cereal description: The cereal pieces consist of hearts evenly split between red and purple – the latter apparently a tribute to men and women of the Armed Services who’ve been wounded in combat. There are also five different…

Free French Underground

I’ve quit a lot of things in my life. Sometimes it seems as though my entire adult life has been just one long bout of giving things up. Often, I feel like I can split my life cleanly down the middle: on one side of the division, the years I…

Introducing Milking It: Cereal Killers & Thrillers

Welcome to the inaugural edition of Milking It: Cereal Killers & Thrillers, a blog dedicated to that most beloved culinary delight, breakfast cereal. And not just any cereal. These pages will review a specific sort – the sugary kind, typically featuring a cartoony character on the box. The stuff that…

Grand Lux Cafe

I’m supposed to be anonymous in this job, and while I don’t always perform with perfect super-spy cool and élan in the dining rooms and back alleys of this city (my own private Berlin, the secret agent’s Valhalla), I do recognize a few hard and fast rules. First, never do…

Does Novo Have the Best Beans?

Keen readers may have noticed we didn’t give an award for Best Coffee Shop in this year’s Best of Denver issue. There’s a reason. Coffee shop awards are the third rail of best-of editions. Most people rabidly adore their favorite java joint with the same passion usually reserved for a…

Lots of Lux

I felt I had to set down my initial impressions of the place before I lost them — before they were blown clean out of my head with shotgun severity by the next outrage. So there I was, hunched up against the wall, frantically scribbling on the back of an…

Dinner at Le Bernardin

I finally made it back to New York for what was not “one of,” not “among” the best meals of my life — but, plainly and simply, was the greatest meal of my life. It was only the third most expensive (coming in behind a dinner last year at the…

Westfalen Hof

Coming down from the mountains, I was eating tafelspitz with my fingers. I was scooping up spaetzle — sticky with gravy, dyed purple by the pickled cabbage it had snuggled up against on the plate — and shoveling it into my mouth. Like a caveman (or just another unprepared culinary…

Raven Hill Mining Company

Much as I might enjoy them, man cannot live on caramel corn and kartofelpuffer alone. So while I was experiencing springtime in the Rockies, I stopped by another Georgetown favorite, the Raven Hill Mining Company, for a quick lunch. Like T-shirt shops on the boardwalk and shacks selling coconut boats…

Head for the Hills

I spent a long time talking with the Candy Company’s Rube Goeringer last week, and got a fascinating glimpse into the history of Georgetown – particularly that part of Georgetown now occupied by his candy shop. I got even more of a peek into the past just by hanging out…

Breakfast of Champions

We don’t do a lot of reporting on food recalls here, but this recent one really caught my eye. “On April 5, Malt-O-Meal announced that it was voluntarily recalling its unsweetened Puffed Rice and unsweetened Puffed Wheat Cereals produced with ‘Best If Used By’ codes between April 8, 2008 (coded…

Must See TV

Calling all couch potatoes! Check out the Food Network this Sunday at 7 p.m. for the Iron Chef America battle between Bobby Flay and Martin Rios of the Inn of the Anasazi in Santa Fe. Why? Because Chef Rios brought along his brother Daniel Rios as one of his two…

GB Fish and Chips

I used to be afraid of going into new places. And not just regular afraid. This was real terror — the kind of knee-knocking, heavy-breathing, anxiety-ridden fear that some people (like me) feel when forced to go to the dentist and others (unlike me) would experience if, through some unfathomable…

Hats Off to Encore

No sooner had Jason Sheehan’s review of Encore and its crooked tables hit the streets than those tables disappeared. The timing was pure coincidence, Sheehan reports in the current Bite Me. But the new hats on the chefs — replacing their Strawberry Shortcake: The Musical toques — was no coincidence,…

Batter Up!

GB Fish & Chips used to be a computer store before owner Alex Stokeld got his hands on it last year. But the place really looks more like the kind of place where computers might’ve been operated in secret, like maybe during the run-up to a nuclear war. It is…

Burrito Bombshell

We are gathered here today to mark the passing of one of the oldest Chipotle restaurants in Denver, the location at 13th and Pennsylvania streets. One of the original, 15-20 pre-McDonald’s Chipotles, the store opened in 1998, back before the big-burrito chain — founded in Denver five years earlier –…

Neighborhood Flix Cafe & Cinema

Neighborhood Flix Cinema & Cafe, which opened in November in the Lowenstein project, is a combination movie theater and cafe with a menu gleefully designed by gallivanting knife-for-hire James Mazzio and a full bar, a place where a man willing to lay down the coin can drink his way through…

Movie Tavern

If Neighborhood Flix is an independent, high-end exemplar of the dinner-and-a-movie concept, then Movie Tavern — part of a multi-unit, food-and-movies chain out of Texas — is the McDonald’s, Olive Garden and T.G.I. Friday’s of the industry all rolled into one. While the basic idea of combining food and film…

There Will Be Boredom

They say that everyone — even the guy with the best gig in the world — dreams occasionally of doing something else with his labors. I know chefs who dream of being musicians, musicians who’d love to be chefs, real estate brokers who spend their nights writing strange novels, and…

There Will be Grub

I’d been looking forward to seeing There Will Be Blood. It had been nominated for about a hundred Academy Awards, and my more serious film-nerd friends talked about it like it was a singular work of staggering genius that would shape the way Hollywood made movies for decades — the…

The Rest of Denver

Last week, I received this e-mail (reprinted verbatim) from a Mr. Jason Mason: Sheehan (Mr Anthony Bourdain wannabe) Can you or will you ever give a true review w/stars, forks, diamonds, pokadots, liquor bottles, etc? I’ve been in the business a long time and have never seen anyone like you…