Show me a plate of bad food, and I’ll show you an unhappy chef. A chef who thinks his mood doesn’t have any bearing on a diner’s experience should think again: Anger makes a lousy sauce. Miserable chefs cook uptight, cranky food, which is delivered by servers who always look…
No cuisine has its roots more deeply buried in this country than Southwestern, a cooking style that originated with the region’s first inhabitants and evolved as Spanish, Mexican, Texan, Cajun and Creole elements were added to the indigenous ingredients used by Native Americans. As a result, Southwestern cooking is full…
Like any road that’s well-traveled, the Silk Road sprouted many resting places along the way. At first these were simple teahouses that offered yum cha, the tea ritual, and a place to put your feet up; back in the tenth century, the Chinese thought that eating food while drinking tea…
As the hostess seated us, she asked if this was our first visit to Déjà Vu. “Yes,” we replied, adding that we’d eaten at the restaurant that had previously occupied the space. “Oh, we’re exactly the same,” she said. But even if that were true — and it wasn’t –…
It’s 4:42 p.m. on a Friday when I get in line at the Trail Dust Steak House, which opens for dinner at 5 p.m. every night. Since I last ate there (“Cattle Call,” February 4, 1999), the restaurant was ravaged by fire and then rebuilt; when it finally reopened this…
If there’s a time and a place for everything, 3rd Ave. Eclectic Burgers and Cuisine is halfway there. The time is certainly right for restaurants: People are eating out more than ever – not just at trendy spots, but at comfortable, casual eateries where you can have a fast dinner…
Since the word “pho” can mean “your own bowl” in Vietnamese, you’d think that a restaurant named Pho 79 was prepared to bowl you over with 79 different soup possibilities. In fact, Pho 79 misses by about fifty — but what it does offer is more than enough for me…
The early bird gets the Sunday brunch at The Tuscany. The all-you-can-eat gourmet smorgasbord at the Loews-Giorgio Hotel is so popular that you sometimes must book a late meal in order to get in. That means 1 p.m. or so, and by that time, hungry diners have been at the…
I think I’m gonna hurl,” the teen announced to anyone within earshot. His girlfriend, the one with the blank stare and bare midriff who’d been holding his hand so tightly it looked like she might be hurled into space if she let go, didn’t even blink. “Ohhhh,” he moaned, holding…
The diner sitting on my left has stomach cancer and isn’t sure what treatment he’s going to try. The diner sitting on my right has a seventeen-year-old daughter who’s pregnant. Fifteen minutes into a beef curry bowl at Kokoro, and already I know more about these two than I do…
You can’t judge a cook by its cover — particularly not when you’re dealing with Mexican restaurants. Some of the best I’ve eaten in looked the worst: dark and dirty, with busted windows or no windows, hand-painted signs or signs about to fall off, cigarette butts scattered all over the…
Eating at the new Rose’s Cafe is a little like sitting in your grandmother’s rocking chair after she’s passed away: It’s still shaped like her, it still smells like her and feels like her, and you can’t quite avoid the uncomfortable sense that it still very much belongs to her…
The server didn’t bat an eye when a member of our party asked for a Bud Light. The sommelier did. “Hey, maybe you have some in your car,” he joked, poking our server in the ribs. The server thought for a moment, then shook his head. “I think we do…
A hungry visitor from another city — hell, a hungry visitor from another planet — dropping into Denver would recognize in a heartbeat that we’re a little short on exciting cuisine right now. The few interesting restaurants we have are often doing exactly what the other interesting restaurants are doing…
In Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the characters played by Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard stop by the venerable jewelry store to ask if a ring from a Cracker Jack box can be engraved as a gift from him to her. The stately, stuffy gentleman behind the counter looks the ring over…
Dressed in a too-tight denim mini-skirt with nothing on her legs but little white bobby socks, the waitress bounded over to a nearby booth to make her announcement. “The nice lady who was sitting over there says Grandma bought your breakfast,” she proclaimed with a big grin on her face,…
The more downtown changes, the more the Rocky Mountain Diner remains the same. The Diner marks its tenth anniversary this month, so it can rightfully claim that it hit downtown long before the boom did. Office workers whose employers fled their 17th Street digs years ago, because of high rents…
A forty-something woman was staring at a case full of frozen seafood, muttering aloud to herself. “Oh, my God, those are gyoza!” she finally exclaimed and then turned around, wildly searching for her shopping companion. “Did you see these?” she asked, dragging him over to the display and nearly shoving…
Between nine straight hours of slogging through the outlet stores and several more writing Christmas cards, the holidays always cry out for us to find time to get away from it all and pamper ourselves. For that, I turn to the Old Stone Church in Castle Rock. Still looking like…
Ever since Molly Brown returned to Denver after her dunk in the Atlantic, diners here have complained about this city’s lack of decent seafood restaurants. For a long time, the blame lay with Denver’s landlocked location — but that obstacle was removed a generation ago, with the advent of improved…
It’s not as American as apple pie, but barbecue is firmly entrenched in this country’s culinary heritage. Although some food historians suggest that “barbecue” was derived from the French barbe à queue, which means “beard to tail,” the majority of reference works agree that it really came from the Haitian…
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…
