Word just came down that Dave Query -- right in the middle getting his new noodle house project, Happy Noodle House, up and running in Boulder -- has brought some new blood into the kitchen at Zolo Grill, his least press-pimped address, at 2525 Arapahoe Avenue in The Republic.
Actually, I guess that's some new-old blood because his new chef, Brett Smith (on the job now for just a couple weeks and backed up by Erik Rollings, ex of Radda, the Kitchen and Avec in Chicago), is actually a former Query staffer who did time at both Jax and Zolo before jumping off for an exec's gig in the Virgin Islands.
Nice work if you can get it, right? But whatever Query promised must've been equal to or better than wearing the big white hat on St. John, because Smith has now returned to Boulder to take over ops at Zolo.
Maybe what Query was offering was simply the freedom to do things his own way, because Smith wasted no time in tearing up the old Zolo board and writing a new one. He's now offering smoked wild boar shank, barbecued duck tacos, duck confit tamales, bacon posole stew and (at least on a first read) about seventeen other dishes primarily using duck, bacon, boar, bacon or duck in some integral fashion.
My kind of guy.
