Empty restaurants make me nervous, skittish, worried that everyone knows something I don’t. I always get the feeling that I missed the ambulances or the SWAT team by a few minutes — that some weird action cleared the place out just prior to my arrival. Empty movie theaters affect me…
Saturday nights at Duo are loud and boisterous, a cacophony of sensualism that washes like crazy rogue waves back and forth across the floor and bar. The front door never stops swinging, releasing a blast of piano jazz out into the evening every time it opens, and the bar is…
I was so close to walking out of the new Udi’s in Stapleton last week. Seriously, like thirty seconds away. I’d strolled into the casual, dimly lit bistro on a half-full night intending to order some takeout, had been handed a couple of fairly impressive menus at the counter, and…
Is this your first time here?” our server asked as he stood over our table — the last one available early on a Saturday night in the small dining room at Parallel Seventeen. And we nodded, meekly, acknowledging that yes, in fact, this was our first time. I hate doing…
There’s one thing that Mary Nguyen and her crew at Parallel Seventeen (see review) don’t do too well, and that’s make a decent cup of Vietnamese coffee. They have all the correct materials — Café du Monde coffee, sweetened condensed milk, a tin-drip filter, tall glasses filled with ice –…
Andouille gumbo and tortilla soup, fried mushrooms with truffled dipping sauce, enchiladas con queso and steak frites, crabcakes with chipotle coulis, pierogi, Asian pot stickers with ginger sauce, chicken piccata, cheeseburgers served with a bottle of Chimay Red, miso soup and Hawaiian tuna salad. And sushi (on request) from the…
Lafayette has only one sushi bar. Fortunately, it’s a good one. Not just good, but creative. And not just creative, but intelligently so — which, when you’re dealing with a cuisine as rigidly structured yet infinitely adaptable as sushi, is even more necessary than good rice. Sushi Mara’s sushi bar…
I hated Black Pearl. I hated it before the place even opened. I hated the hype, the website, the menu. Even the building — the old Oodles space getting an expensive makeover to house the new restaurant — bothered me on some level I couldn’t quite grasp: the building just…
All this talk about New American food got me thinking about Matt Selby and his crew at Vesta Dipping Grill. Since it opened almost nine years ago — if you can believe that — Vesta’s concept has been simple: Take something and dip it in something else. But the restaurant…
Drinking, smoking and screwing. That’s what hotel restaurants are really for — for doing the first two as prelude to the third. Waiting, too. Hotel restaurants are good for waiting. And for drinking and smoking while you wait — for a friend, a business associate, your mule or that bartender…
The Rialto Cafe is one of those rare exceptions to the rule (see page 53) that hotel restaurants are good for nothing but drinking, smoking and screwing. Sure, you can drink here, and smoke (if it’s to your taste), and even take a room next door at the Marriott Courtyard…
The wait at the Cherry Cricket was twenty minutes, shading into thirty, late that Saturday afternoon. “That’s a long time to wait for a burger,” Laura said. “How’s it look in there?” “Busy,” I told her. “It’s always busy.” And we sat down on the low wall in front of…
As the Chipotle IPO took off last week at a near-record pace, I visited another Colorado born-and-bred chain. Good Times — which was founded in 1987, six years before the first Chipotle went up — is a drive-thru burger joint in a world crowded with competition. To date, there are…
This place reminds me of someplace else,” my friend says, leaning his chair back against the wall and tracing a finger along one of the cracks in the broken plaster. That wall — multi-colored painted plaster over crumbling brick, the brick exposed where the plaster has fallen away — looks…
There was a time when Java Moon was hailed as the conquering hero of the Golden Triangle. It was a coffeehouse in a neighborhood that desperately needed one (you know, to balance out all the dive hotels and new lofts and pawnshops and galleries and whatnot), a coffeehouse that also…
Once upon a time, in a land not so very far away, there was a restaurant ruled by a king named Larry. Now, King Larry wasn’t an evil king. He wasn’t cruel or ruthless, as kings so often are. He didn’t abuse the peasantry of Hotcakesland, didn’t cut off peoples’…
When I wrote my original review of 3 Sons (“Same Old, Same Old,” September 11, 2003), people called me an assassin. They called me a thug and an asshole and a brainless, potty-mouthed jerkoff who didn’t know nothin’ from nothin’. What I didn’t get was a single letter sympathizing with…
It’s not often that a fellow like myself — a dedicated carnivore, shameless bacon addict, fan of all things larded, bloody and fat-spackled — goes looking for health food. Ten cups of coffee a day, taken as preventative medicine against potential lifestyle complications like sleep; ice cream for breakfast, Cuban…
Okay, so John Holly’s Asian Bistro in Lone Tree isn’t Super Star Asian (the incredible dim sum place at 2200 West Alameda) or the old Mee Yee Lin (another incredible dim sum place that became a merely passable dim sum place with great shu mai and incredible dumpling soup after…
Mama T is leaving. She’s moving to Cincinnati, where her husband is working a factory job now, where there’s another apartment waiting, another community expecting her. She’s going with her son Rafael, and she’s taking her pots and pans. She’s taking her living-room set with the white lace doilies. She’s…
I consider it one of the great fortunes of my life that, for as long as I have been my own man, I have never had a normal year — one that could be anticipated, seen through end to end, navigated on an even keel. All of my years have…
I have not always been a good guy, and I have not always lived a good life. I have committed sins venial, carnal and culinary, have knowingly done wrong and sometimes enjoyed it quite a bit. I have vices, secret shames, public hatreds, a checkered past — and remain, in…
