While the Chen brothers now have their own Fontana Sushi in Littleton (see review, page 57), former partner Kevin Lin continues to run the original Fontana Sushi in central Denver. The two Fontanas have similar menus — both places offer tempura and gyoza, donburi plates and soba noodles — but…
We saw Hog Heaven Bar-B-Que coming from a distance. Laura and I had been out wandering — ostensibly making a quick, up-and-back run over Guanella Pass to see the aspens changing like good Coloradans, to ooh and aah over the foliage along with several thousand other day-tripping yuppies in their…
I had barbecue on the brain this week, and stopped by a spot that nearly killed me on my first visit just from the sheer volume of food a ten-spot can buy. L&L Hawaiian Barbecue has been around in its current incarnation since 1976 — a Big Island marvel that…
They asked if I spoke Spanish when I first walked into Los Cabos II, the beautiful Peruvian restaurant-slash-social club hidden behind the ugly facade at 15th and Champa streets. And I do, sort of. Mostly kitchen Spanish, which — if you cut out all the extraneous cursing and references to…
Denver’s ethnic eateries sneak up on you. La Praviana (first reviewed in Westword on May 20, 1999) is a stand-alone joint facing Broadway that in a previous life was a breakfast bar called the Omelet House. Then Hector and Maritza Gil took over, and today it still does three-a-day service…
“Lucky Star.” “Shining Star!” “The Star Chamber.” “Enough,” I said. “Star Quality!” I held up a hand. “That just sucks. Okay, who’s got that key lime thing?” The decimated remains of a key lime tart were passed my way, and I pressed my thumb into the crumbs, then licked off…
Cafe Star (see review) was brought to us by the same people who opened Trattoria Stella six years ago. And while there’s not anything wrong with Stella (in fact, there’s a lot I really like about it), if I were told to pick two places on absolute opposite ends of…
When I reach Tom Bird, owner of Pho Fusion, the first thing he does is apologize. He’s sorry that the place doesn’t look the way he’d like it to. It’s kind of empty, not yet finished to his satisfaction. “I know, you walk in and you can see that it’s…
After eating pad thai everywhere from Noodles & Co. to Alameda Square, I thought that maybe I just didn’t like pad thai. I suspected that all the pad thai I’d put away over the years had probably been just fine, and that I — being the bumbling dimwit that I…
I love expensive cheeses. The good ones — cave-aged, smeared in ash, riddled with veins of carefully tended mold, rubbed down by nuns and Italian virgins in towns whose names I can barely pronounce, made from the milk of animals whose teats I wouldn’t squeeze on a dare. Cashel Blue,…
No local discourse on comfort food would be complete without a few words regarding the humble breakfast burrito. And while there are many, many places in town that serve up great breakfast burritos at all hours of the day and night, this week I’m stumping for one that may be…
I hate admitting that I’m wrong. Up to this point in my somewhat spotty career, I would have insisted that certain rules govern a restaurant’s survival. A space that can only be located by satellite photography is never going to make it. A fusion menu that fuses the cuisines of…
Although fast-casual Mex is all the rage today — and with good reason, in the case of Tin Star — there was a time not long ago when Denver was inundated with white-tablecloth Mexican joints. But they were still years behind Las Brisas, which opened in 1987 and has real…
We have reservations for dinner — just the two of us, prime time on a Saturday night — but we don’t need them. Three months to the day after the opening of Nine75 — the high-gloss, high-concept, locationally challenged and oh-so-eager-to-please cafe/bistro that took over the former home of the…
During the first months of Mao’s existence, developer-turned-restaurateur Jim Sullivan (yeah, the same Sullivan behind Nine75, reviewed this week) probably took more heat than any other owner in town has taken for the opening of anything. Restaurants, check-cashing services, massage parlors. Anything. I mean, the guy plopped a Chinese restaurant…
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…
