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…
Unlike Aquarium — the fish restaurant at the Downtown Aquarium (see review) — Eat Street at the Denver Children’s Museum is not serving any of its less successful exhibits for lunch. Nor did operators Jay and Emily Solomon (who also own the nearby Jay’s Patio Cafe on 15th Street) feel…
Planned communities creep me out. It’s something about their zero-down homogeneity, the Stepford-ness of their razor-straight streets and perfectly manicured medians, their covenant controls and faux-utopian doubleplusgood Orwellian weirdness. It’s the way they build their own parks, schools and churches on the same templates that govern the placement of their…
This is a good week. Why? Because Second Helping is finally getting to do what I’d always hoped it would do: give a second shot to a restaurant savaged in a previous review, a place that’s now worthy of being welcomed into the fold. Although many of the good spots…
Up to this point, I had given about as much thought to the foods of Argentina as I had to the high peaks of Cincinnati or the beaches of Kansas. And I had given about as much thought to Argentina in general as I had to Victorian haberdashery or the…
Bonnie Brae Tavern has no windows, which may explain why few modern influences have slipped in over the past seventy-odd years to mess up the place. Instead, four generations of the Dire family — which opened the onetime roadhouse right across the street from the headquarters of the Denver Temperance…
Here’s what I like best about Lucile’s, the insanely popular, quarter-century-old Creole restaurant: It’s in a house. Just a plain, not very large two-story house with an enclosed porch. The place is comfy, tattered, worn smooth by thousands of days of service. There are specials every day, but the core…
With Cajun on the brain this week, I made a run down to Littleton for NoNo’s Cafe, long a local favorite among a certain clientele despite its decidedly Cracker Barrel-lite style of decor and inauspicious strip-mall location. Who, exactly, is this certain clientele? Beats the hell out of me, but…
ayne Conwell has an eye for detail. His work, his career, everything he is and everything he does depends on detail, on seeing the things that no one else can. He’s a fifteen-year veteran of the sushi game, in which detail — a single grain of rice, a single slip…
Last week I dropped by the new Japon space (right next door to the old Japon space), sat down in the hip, bright, dining room, ordered up a nice, cold plate of chirashi sashimi (assorted raw sea creatures over ginger and rice)…and couldn’t finish it. The components were all top-shelf…
If Colman Andrews can come clean over his love for the crab rangoons at Trader Vic’s and Ruth Reichl can fess up to her preference for coffee and doughnuts bought on the street in front of her old office at the New York Times, there’s nothing weird about my admitting…
India’s has always had one of my favorite buffets, but I’ve loved it for other reasons, too. I love the clutter of the dining room filled with art and knickknacks and statuary. I love the smell — that deep, rich, infinitely complex aroma of curry and warm bread and burst…
Chef Patrick Dupays is in the kitchen. I can see him through the big four-pane window at the end of the line, working a pan with one hand, giving directions with the other — his fingers loose, his arm moving like a conductor’s trying to keep a runaway orchestra on…
Back in the day — and I’m talking six months, maybe a year ago — Le Central had a taste that was all its own. Put three orders of escargot in front of me, three orders of anything in béarnaise sauce, three orders of lotte au basilic, and I, with…
The last time I was at Sabor Latino, I heard a recorded pan-flute rendition of the Titanic love theme so sappy that it silenced an entire dining room — except for the laughter. An order of arepa fell just as flat: The white-corn pancake was so nasty, thick, heavy and…
I was sitting in the dining room at Milagro Taco Bar scratching hieroglyphs into the mole with my fork: hearts and squiggles, my initials. It was a good mole — dark and glossy, thickened enough to stick, with a flavor like coffee beans and charcoal and bitter chocolate and fire…
While my meals at Milagro Taco Bar (see review, page 59) left me with mixed feelings, my opinion about another Frank Bonanno operation remains unwavering. Mizuna was Bonanno’s first restaurant (with late partner Doug Fleischmann), and it remains his best. Ever-changing, impeccably serviced by a thoroughly professional floor staff and…
We argued right up to the front door about how I ought to dress for dinner. What shoes to wear. Jacket or no jacket. Tie or no tie. I’d climbed into the car wearing everything: white button-down and dress slacks, my best tie (meaning the pleasingly muted and abstract one,…
When I stopped by the new, improved Mickey’s Top Sirloin for lunch last week (a few months ago, it had moved from its decrepit, decades-old home across the parking lot to a shiny, family-friendly, cookie-cutter space with bright-green corrugated siding), the strangest thing about it was the pictures of the…
