Restaurants

One of the reasons I’m staying married to Laura for the rest of my life: She’s got a real good eye for hot dogs. And it’s not just hot dogs, either. She can suss out a decent Mexican spot from a block away, will know — with just a glance…

Chicken-fried steak, chicken-fried steak, chicken-fried steak, gyros. All through lunch and well into the afternoon, this is what customers keep asking for at Diana’s Greek Market and Deli. Three out of five orders (and sometimes five out of every five) are for pounded, breaded and deep-fried beef, slathered in peppery…

I’m not going to order lobster anymore. Or perhaps I’ll just limit myself to lobster once a year. Twice, tops. One of the quirks of this very strange job is that every food-related luxury, every delicacy, every rare and wonderful thing is now available to me pretty much all the…

I have only one problem with Japon: the wasabi. It tastes chalky, pasty and dry, and its texture affects me like nails on a chalkboard. And since I’ve been known to order tekka maki to go just as an excuse to eat wasabi off my finger, a sushi bar’s wasabi…

In this cash-and-carry world, nothing is inviolate and everything is for sale. Even memory. Especially memory. There’s good money to be made in strip-mining nostalgia, and for those who find a ripe vein — like the folks at Wynkoop Holdings, who moved their heavy gear into northwest Denver this year…

While I’m not crazy about what the folks from the “Wynkoop Family of Restaurants” have done with Gaetano’s (see page 52), they’ve done just fine by the Cherry Cricket. Maybe that’s because rather than having a downright cinematic past like Gaetano’s — where dinner was served to gangsters and gun-runners,…

Walking into Sapa, the first thing you see are the green, green hills of home. Before that, it’s just a box — a nice box, fronted with a curving path leading to the door, lots of French windows and a nice patio wrapping around one corner, but a box, nonetheless…

10920 South Parker Road, Parker 720-851-8559 The two restaurants in the mini-empire of Yume Tran and Jeff Nghiem are almost exact opposites. Where Sapa is sprawling, Indochine is tiny. Sapa is meditative, Indochine is cozy. And while Sapa’s interior is cool and green, Indochine is all black lacquer and tapestries…

When I moved “out West,” I never thought I’d make it. Not really. Not way down deep, where a boy’s roots grow. When I first came here with thoughts of commitment — as opposed to the little visits I’d made in the past, tooling around Santa Fe and Boulder and…

For many years, Sam’s #3 on Havana Street kept Sam Armatas’s dream alive. When it opened in Aurora in 1969, it was the last Sam’s left — and now, 36 years later, it’s not only going strong, but it has been joined by a new, improved Sam’s #3 downtown. But…

Sitting in the calm, cool darkness, bathed in the blue submarine glow of the television, I see them coming. Infomercials, spreading like kudzu across the stations, filling those weird hours between 3 a.m. and dawn. Paid programming: the last refuge of the terminally insomniac. Get rock-hard abs with rubber bands…

When this spot was known as Burgers-n-Sports, before last year’s run-in with In-N-Out attorneys, it was a great burger joint, serving waxed-paper-wrapped singles and doubles, excellent hand-cut fries and killer milkshakes, all under the watchful gaze of Colorado’s own Goose Gossage. With its green paint, chain-link décor and gift shop,…

I love zombie movies. Of all the filmmakers in the world, I feel the most kinship with the guys who make zombie movies — freakish, obsessive man-children who know how to guiltlessly tell a ripping good yarn and who never got over that visceral thrill of being fourteen-year-old boys, up…

Sean Kelly and his chef, Seth Black, have been doing the Tapas Thing (see Bite Me/a>) for quite some time. They may have been the first in town — this time around, at least — to take the trend seriously, and they built the entire Somethin’ Else menu around the…

This is your father’s bad toupee. It’s a leisure suit, lovingly tended and preserved and worn regularly by a guy who still thinks he looks good. It’s an old Volvo kept running by unconditional love and duct tape, the ABBA record you listen to when no one else is home,…

Just because you’re not part of the problem doesn’t mean you’re part of the solution. I’ve become increasingly tired of Chinese restaurants claiming some sort of special capacity for greatness simply because they aren’t part of a chain. Most independent Chinese joints offer food that’s no more authentically Chinese than…

My first visit to WaterCourse Foods was on a bet. It was a bet with myself — a wager between my better and worse natures that revolved around my good self’s belief that every restaurant, no matter its kink, offers something tasty to those willing to really look, and my…

Bad business, like bad karma, generates its own sort of poison. The taint of failed enterprise can linger for years in the floorboards and hood vents of a space, sickening and killing new businesses indiscriminately. Realtors, consultants, accountants and other numbers types will point to things like parking, visibility, foot…

Sitting on the patio on top of the West End Tavern, gazing at the great view (and I’m not just talking about the unparalleled sight of the Flatirons), I sipped whiskey and smoked a cigarette in one of the few places where you still can in Boulder, and thanked God…

If restaurateur, chef and culinary man-about-town Dave Query has a signature spot that captures the evolution of his empire, that would be the Jax in LoDo. Here, in a retooling of the Boulder original, Query’s vision and his attempts to meld the upscale with the downhome come together most smoothly…

Every spring, Chinook Tavern celebrates white-asparagus season as long as the season lasts, getting only the best product overnighted from producers in Holland, Germany and France, using it in only the best ways. For ten years Chinook has been doing this, and just a whiff of the house’s special white-asparagus…

New and improved. I can’t imagine those two words ever being more appropriate — in a restaurant context, certainly — than when applied to Cafe Berlin in its new home downtown. Cafe Berlin’s original location on 17th Avenue, although quaintly charming and homey in a care-worn way, was definitely showing…