In most other cities, a restaurant with a name like the HandleBar & Grill would immediately evoke images of leather, lowriders and lots of tattoos. It’d be the place the cops visited nightly to break up fights, where the drink of choice was beer with a shot of tequila and,…
Missing links: Happy third anniversary to the Cracker Barrel at 350 West 120th Avenue in Northglenn. It’s one of four Cracker Barrels in the Denver area–and the corporate office says at least four more will open by the end of next year. Yikes! To mark the august occasion, I suggest…
Lookin’ good: What do a ceramic clown, a stuffed fox, baseball trophies, a houseplant, a couple of statues of mariachi musicians and a plastic parrot have in common? They’re all on a shelf lining the entry to the dining room of El Tejado, a Mexican restaurant (complete with live mariachis…
The owners of Budapest Bistro are having fun. “Yes, we are absolutely having a good time,” says Rudi Hellvig, reiterating a sentiment he’s already mentioned several times during this phone conversation. “We are having a good time. Yes, we are.” And it shows. The comfy little Hungarian bistro has a…
Critic’s choice: After eight months of searching for a new restaurant critic, the Rocky Mountain News finally decided on Greg Moody, Channel 4’s critic at large and, until recently, the restaurant reviewer for 5280 magazine. Okay, see if you can follow this: Moody replaced Thom Wise at 5280 last year…
Not all vegetarians are happy to kiss meat goodbye. “Sometimes I miss meat,” says Dan Landes, owner of Denver’s latest vegetarian eatery, Watercourse Foods. “I love good food, and I love for it to have flavor. So even though I’ve been a vegetarian for the last four years, I can…
Here today, gone tamale: Diners making their weekly pilgrimage to the Mexico City Lounge, 2115 Larimer Street, for last Wednesday’s steak-taco fix were shocked–shocked!–to find the doors chained shut, with a note announcing that the restaurant was temporarily closed and offering the Bamboo Hut at 2449 Larimer as a taco…
Kevin Taylor’s trying hard to make Denver a real city. He was one of the first to introduce this old cowtown to New American cuisine at his gone-but-not-forgotten Zenith American Grill. Then he took the concept up the road to Boulder with Dandelion, where business is still growing like a…
I’ll never forget my first Irish breakfast. I was sitting in a small Dublin pub whose bartender looked startlingly like a well-known painting of Jesus, reproductions of which hung in the dining rooms of my parents, my grandparents, my cousins and every other good Irish-Catholic family in Pittsburgh (usually with…
Comings and goings: Boy, there’s nothing like raving about a general manager in a review only to find out on the day the paper hits the stands that the general manager has packed up and moved on. Salvatore Galati was reason alone to visit Mediterra at 1475 Lawrence Street (“Med…
School’s in: If I needed more education in the culinary arts, I would go to a place like the Cooking School of the Rockies in Boulder. After spending a recent afternoon there to observe a class and–my favorite part–eat lunch prepared by the students, I came away impressed with the…
It’s good to be at the top of the food chain. I get letters all the time from diehard vegetarians who don’t want to see animals killed for meat–but who delight in describing my impending demise in less than humane ways. And some of these letter-writers are quite articulate, such…
Top this: The tapas craze continues as a new bar pops up in Denver about every forty seconds. Add Sevilla at the Ice House (1801 Wynkoop Street) to the list; it opened last week in the mini-restaurant row that’s formed at the base of the historic building (Sevilla joins Rodizio…
Salvatore Galati could be the ideal restaurant manager. He’s personable. He’s easygoing but serious about the restaurant business; he’s knowledgeable about wine and food and passionate about both. He knows how to make people feel welcome. He’s traveled extensively, and he understands that there’s a world of difference between canned…
After a mere ten minutes of standing by the door to Sushi Den, waiting to get a table and watching diners come and go, I realize the tragic truth: I am not one of the beautiful people. But just about everyone else who frequents Sushi Den is. The fourteen-year-old Japanese…
The sweet taste of success: Black tie and breast enlargement were optional at the eighth annual Taste of Vail earlier this month, when more than a thousand really beautiful people gathered for the Grand Tasting (read: great gorgefest). After sipping about twenty of the hundreds of wines available, my tastebuds…
French kissed: I’ve just returned from a two-week vacation in France, and, boy, am I pissed to be back. Spending most of the time in Provence–and primarily eating meals we cooked in the kitchen of the house we’d rented–gave us a native’s perspective on the day-to-day procuring of quality ingredients…
In France, love and food and passion and wine and sex and cheese are all mixed up, a steamy potage of appetites as intoxicating as it is exhausting. How fitting, then, that La Chaumiere, a charming French restaurant just outside Lyons–Colorado’s Lyons, that is–is the culmination of a decades-old romance…
Got milk? While Broncos lobbyists continue to press the flesh at the Colorado Statehouse, John Elway is doing his bit to remind fans of the Super Bowl victory–through poster versions of Elway’s milk-mustache advertisements published in USA Today and Sports Illustrated after the win in San Diego. “The only thing…
A waiter is never just a waiter. He also serves as a restaurant’s ambassador, guiding a diner through unfamiliar territory. A good waiter can make a bad meal better and a good meal great. But when a server is bad, it flavors the entire meal. Morocco was in dire need…
Authenticity–now, there’s a concept. If more restaurateurs understood what they were trying to do–and why–there would be more good restaurants out there. Instead, all too many restaurateurs cook up some half-baked “concept,” then proceed to force-feed it to customers. Exhibits A through Z: the Olive Garden. This national chain recently…
Aspen extremes: James Caan glanced over the booth in Aspen’s Boogie’s Diner and gave me that look of his that says, “You want a piece of me?” No thanks, I decided. I’d rather have another piece of Boogie’s banana cream pie. Or anything at Boogie’s, for that matter. Although the…
