Vietnamese cuisine had a long, noble history before the French arrived in the 1940s and launched their ill-fated adventures through Indochina. But the French army didn’t just come with rifles, trucks and funny hats; they were also considerate enough to bring along their cuisine. Though historians would no doubt disagree…
“Is this your first time dining with us?” she asks, smiling. In response, I just bob my head like a moron—completely gone on whatever weird cocktail of hormones and brain chemicals it is that makes a grown man fall in love with a menu, with nothing more than words on…
Denver has had newspaper wars for as long as there have been newspapers, and just because the size of the papers is shrinking doesn’t mean this war is any less intense. But another, newer battle between media outlets took place last week, and it was even more…heated. The Women’s Bean…
Mel Master, current owner of three restaurants in metro Denver, former owner of a half-dozen more in Denver and Manhattan, wine guy, ex-street musician, enthusiastic raconteur of all things boozy and delicious, and the guy I blame for loosing Bobby Flay on the world, is not in the house tonight…
Originally, my review of Agave Grill was supposed to be a two-fer — a kind of culinary Entebbe Raid whereby Laura and I would roll in fast on slow nights to the King Soopers plaza at Orchard and Holly, where both Agave and Mel’s Greenwood Village incarnation are located, have…
About three weeks ago, Chad Clevenger put Agave Grill through a mid-season menu overhaul, altering or outright dumping about two-thirds of the opening board. While the result could have been a return to the mixed Chihuahua-meets-Lyon Old World/New World fusion of the Cherry Creek Mel’s during Clevenger’s days there, he…
I wanted cheeseburgers. Cheeseburgers and beer, a shot of whiskey. Laura wanted Mexican food — chips and salsa, top-shelf mezcal and tamales. New Mexican would’ve been all right with her. A bowl of pozole, a plate of tacos and thee. She was chasing after some memory of our destitution and…
Crepes ‘n Crepes is uncompromisingly, unabashedly and unstintingly French. The cooks are French. Owners Kathy Knight and Alain Veratti have imported all their iron crepe griddles from France. The ingredients and preparations — the Camembert and Chambord, ratatouille and sauce aux champignons — are French. And the space itself –…
I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’m now old enough to remember when a pizza was just a pizza, a round crust (though the occasional square-crust party pizza was okay, too) that was always thin, but not too thin (certainly no cracker crusts, and outside of the high-school cafeteria,…
Anthony’s Pizza and Pasta (or, as it’s known around my house, “Ant-anees”) has long been my reliable Denver standby for New York-style pizza in a hurry. Do the locations do slices? Yes. Do they offer the triumvirate of New York styles? Absolutely: a thin-crust cheese and pepperoni, a thin-crust double-cheese,…
As reported in Off Limits this week, absinthe is now legal in the United States! And I don’t mean that phony shit that’s like anisette dyed green or that Eastern European stuff that tastes like cough syrup or that legally gray gunk shipped under cover and marketed specifically for its…
I remember the first time I saw someone eating a pizza with pineapple on it. My friend Nick was sitting in his living room in Buffalo with a sixer of Molson Export and Beverly Hills 90210 on the TV, eating a Hawaiian pizza from La Nova covered with thin-sliced ham…
There are some foods that become sacred through nothing more than fierce love and attachment. Your mother’s meatloaf, Sunday-morning pancake breakfasts, the roasted chicken your wife made the first time she cooked for you, pressed with the indents of her thumbs and speckled with fresh thyme. And there are entire…
Tokyoya Bowl & Bowl had every chance to be a restaurant I would love. It’s a small, stand-alone operation about the size and shape of a Taco Bell, stuck back in the corner of a commercial plot, and offering rice bowls and udon, gyoza, yakitori and tonkatsu — the classic…
A few months ago, I got an e-mail from Sean — one of my original commandoes, a hired gun whose long and noble service to the cause dated back to my first days here. An ex-chef and patissier, Sean was one of the first guys to eat with me professionally…
My personal commitment to the Froggish arts is nothing when compared to the two-line backstory of Uttam Lama, chef at the five-month-old Tibet’s Restaurant in Louisville. Uttam spent fourteen years as the chef at a Tibetan monastery. While there, he cooked for the Dali Lama. For culinary street cred, Uttam…
It was long after midnight, and I was hours late for home, but it had been a great party — the tenth or thirtieth or fiftieth in a row; I’d lost count. We’d closed the restaurant, seen the last lingering tables out the door, then occupied the place like a…
I don’t know why it surprises me so to find good Vietnamese food outside the neighborhoods with which I am comfortable. Federal and Alameda? No shock. Aurora? The town’s spilling over with great Vietnamese restaurants. But even though I’d heard that the stretch of Federal Boulevard running through Westminster was…
Radda is a great restaurant, but it’s also a comfortable restaurant, an unassuming restaurant, a restaurant where families come to eat penne al cinghiale and chicken soup in a parmesan broth, made with winter vegetables, lemon and faro, and where rogue CU economics professors sit and argue vehemently about the…
I love fried cheese. Of all the things that man has invented over the course of history — the wheel, zombie movies, Gary Busey, the interweb — fried cheese has to be in the top ten. I mean, penicillin is great: You go to Thailand, drink a few too many…
At Big Hoss Bar-B-Q (see review, page 44), owner and Buffalo native Hoss Orwat does chicken wings – because every restaurant guy who’s ever spent time in Buffalo is bound by law and tradition to do chicken wings at his joint, no matter its official cuisine or location. But, being…
Next to me was a man old enough to know better drinking Jager shots with Guinness back, and when Green Bay made an ultimately pointless fourth-quarter fumble recovery deep in Giants territory, he found it reason enough to grab me around the neck and shake me like a kitten he…
