Start small and keep it simple — that’s the advice I’d offer anyone wondering how to open a successful restaurant. A restaurant doesn’t need to feature a hip gimmick, or offer an enormous menu of enormously portioned dishes, or have a thousand wine bottles in its collection, or bear a…
WaterCourse Foods serves great vegetarian food. But it serves that food very, very slowly. Chef/owner Dan Landes opened his flesh-free restaurant almost three years ago, and it was a fast hit with vegans, carnivores, macro heads and lackadaisical chicken-and-fish-eating vegetarians alike (“Go With the Flow,” May 21, 1998). To please…
It’s a typical workday, and you have thousands of tasks ahead. You’ve just come out of a meeting, dozens of clients are waiting for you, and before you can take care of anything, your co-workers are signaling that it’s time for you to do that special part of your job,…
Late last year, when Sam Kraydie opened Sinbad on South Colorado Boulevard, he knew he had something, and he let everyone else know it, too, by placing a sign in the front window that boasted, “The best there ever was. The best there is. The best there will ever be.”…
It may be time to bring back the vomitorium. For those who forget their history — don’t worry, we’re all condemned at this point to repeating it — Rome was just an anno Domini teenager when excessive feasts were all the rage, with the average banquet involving five or six…
When the host of a popular national cooking show on bread devotes a segment to some of the country’s best pizzas, you don’t expect a Denver area pizzeria to rate a starring role. As anyone who’s tried to find decent pizza in this town knows, you’re better off showcasing kosher…
Americans will eat cheese that’s been pasteurized, emulsified and homogenized so much that it can be sprayed through a nozzle. We’ll ingest worm-shaped snacks made from nothing but sugar, water and enough preservatives to embalm a hippo, and happily munch on deep-fried pieces of skin that once covered a farm…
An Applebee’s is an Applebee’s is an Applebee’s. In fact, one of the primary reasons people frequent chain restaurants is their predictability: The Applebee’s doesn’t fall far from the tree. Those absurd riblets you love at the outlet back home will taste just the same, look just the same and…
In Under the Tuscan Sun, Frances Mayes talks of “shadow gatherings,” when Venetians would meet in the shadows of San Marco, wandering from bar to bar, eating tapas-like tidbits and sipping half-glasses of wine. But while ombra is the Italian word for “shadow,” Denver’s Ombra offers only a dim reflection…
The Denver Tech Center is so hungry for decent restaurants (any restaurant, really) that people get weepy every time a new Taco Bell opens. Still, it’s a crying shame that the hot-hot Cool River Cafe serves such so-so meals. By placing his $5 million venture in the heart of the…
When Markus Georg opened his Chinook Tavern back in 1995, it looked like the sort of place that would be a hit for a short time — the baby boomers of Cherry Creek are always willing to try a new watering hole — but then business would dry up and…
Directly in front of our table, a G-stringed blonde was scraping her nipples across what must have been a very cold floor. From behind us came the sounds — just barely audible over the shriek of Billy Idol covering L.A. Woman — of someone getting his lap danced upon; to…
The odd things that happen in restaurants are stranger than any fiction I could cook up. For starters, how about a moldy piece of cake, with big, green, slimy rings in plain view of the server as he set it down? Another server tried to tell me that the chardonnay…
Dennis Miller’s prime-time rants have yet to veer too far afield from football, but give him time. For now, he has the luxury of slurping down beef tenderloin and shrimp cocktail in a private box at the stadium after each game. But he’d fast lose that chipper demeanor — not…
It’s lean, it’s healthy, it’s hairy, and it sure makes for a more marketable mascot than some thick-headed bovine that doesn’t have sense enough to gum the people injecting it full of hormones. It’s buffalo — or, to be precise, bison — and the list of reasons to eat it…
Fondue brings out a person’s true nature. First there are the control freaks, the folks who begin coordinating the fondue forks the second the pots start heating up. “Okay, Sally, Jim and I will use the court bouillon for the first fifteen minutes while you guys cook in oil, and…
When the Melting Pot opened, it featured one of the cheesiest campaigns imaginable. Diners were supposed to order their servers to “fondue me” — and, in fact, the resulting service was so bad that those diners probably would have preferred being dropped in boiling oil to suffering through another meal…
Question: What do you get when two California lawyers decide to open up their own pizzeria? Answer: A lot of pizzerias. But the California Pizza Kitchen is no joke. As of last week, when a second Colorado location opened at FlatIron Crossing, there are 83 full-service CPKs, as they like…
It was the first restaurant I reviewed for Westword , and in the years since, both Fratelli’s and I have gone through a few changes. Fratelli’s made its debut as a Colorado pizza kitchen more than twenty years ago, which puts it way ahead of the California Pizza Kitchen (see…
Skydiner, bo-biner, banana-fana fo-finer, fee-fi mo-miner, Skydiner. Before they opened their second venture, the principals from The Hornet — Dave French, Brewster Hanson, Paul Greaves and Lisa Quinn — held a contest to name the space they’d taken over at 1700 Vine Street, the spot long occupied by Juanita’s Uptown…
You are not finished,” the seventy-year-old waiter scolded as he grabbed a spoon and scooped the bottom out of my seafood-filled potato boat, plopping the sauce-soaked spuds mound in the center of my plate. “You eat this, and then you are finished.” I wasn’t about to argue. After all, this…
I thought I was done for when the Bay Wolf went down,” says Rich Salturelli, remembering his Cherry Creek hot spot. “I got a divorce, and I gave the restaurant to her, and then she ran it into the ground. Me and my brother, Thom, who has the Cricket on…
