First Look: Uptown’s Monarch Brings the Fire With Pizza, Chicken, and… Spinach!

After attending the soft opening of chef Justin Freeman’s Monarch, his wood-fired pizza concept inside Urban Cowboy Public House, I didn’t think I’d start off writing about spinach. Yet here we are. 

Before the event, we all had a pretty clear idea of what Monarch was going to be. Freeman’s many pop-ups and previews over the years made no secret that pizza and chicken would be leading the way. And they do, in all their wood-fired-oven charred glory. 

But you’re supposed to like pizza. You’re supposed to like chicken. You’re supposed to like fire-kissed vegetables with spicy and acidic sauces. Monarch delivers all these and more to great effect.

You’re not supposed to like spinach. But I predict that Monarch’s spinach will be the dish your table fights over and the item that brings you back again, begging for more. 

On paper, it’s a simple dish: spinach from Esoterra Culinary Garden, deep-fried until crisp, and then tossed in a vinegar that Freeman has soaked for four months in peppers, and sprinkled with salt. The result is a crispy — but still chewy — vegetable chip that’s immediately addicting and as hard to put down as a bag of potato chips. Which is exactly what Freeman was going for. 

“I was thinking it would make a great bar snack,” he says, noting that the technique stems from a dish he learned while at New York’s Nobu. 

That Freeman is able to coax such deliciousness out of vegetables is perhaps expected, given his additional gig as executive chef at Somebody People: a vegan restaurant where vegetables are by design treated as the star instead of an afterthought. But this surprising burst of flavor redefining an otherwise overlooked ingredient highlights the approach that Monarch is taking to the whole menu. Including the pizzas. The dough used features a blend of Dry Storage spelt whole wheat and flour from Utah’s Central Milling. It’s mixed to 70 percent hydration and cooked lower and slower than traditional Neopolitan style pizzas (at 700 degrees, compared to the typical 800 to 900). The result is a distinctly textured, flavorful artisanal crust augmented with a variety of toppings, from the traditional to the unique.

There’s the ubiquitous simplicity of the margherita, for example: sauce, cheese, and basil. There’s also a veggie-forward Swiss chard layered with pickled cherry pepper and a garlic hemp cream that carries an earthy, vegetal punch. And then there’s the welcome turn from the now-overused pizza expressions of Roman pastas like cacio e pepe and carbonara, as Freeman instead opts for the less-used gricia (a simple mix of guanciale, cheese, and pepper). 

Expect a constantly rotating selection of pizza toppings from week to week, he says, as the seasons and available produce change. 

“Come back next time, and there will be all new stuff,” he says. “Whatever’s interesting and fresh. We’ll use whatever farmers have left over. We don’t care. We’ll make something from it.”

The other half of the Monarch oven features chicken, a wonderfully crispy and unctuous bird that manages to merge the flavors and textures of both rotisserie and grilled chicken into one. According to Freeman, the chicken is cured for 24 hours in salt (“there’s no such thing as a dry brine,” he explains) and then pre-cooked in the wood-fired oven and put aside for service.

The juices collected from this process are combined with seasonings and used as a baste when fired for orders, similar to how a rotisserie chicken cooks in its own drippings. The crisped-up bird is finally plated in a Peruvian aji verde sauce concoction of cilantro, peppers, garlic, and lime, and served with pickled shallots. It’s highly effective (and goes great with that spinach, too). 

At any given time, you might find four pizzas and two chickens in the domed, wood-fired oven. 

“We’re just loading everything we can into it and seeing how far we can push it,” Freeman says. 

For having only four days to familiarize themselves with the ins and outs of an unfamiliar wood-burning oven, including initially how to light it, the food coming out this kitchen is remarkably consistent. Cooking with fire isn’t easy. It requires constant attention, tending, and adjusting by a team of three, which also includes Freeman’s business partner, Daniel Matthews. 

Before Monarch moved in, the house concept at the Urban Cowboy bar was the much-beloved Little Johnny B’s. But that group moved out once the owners established Wash Park’s Johnny Bechamel’s, where the pizzas that Denver fans had grown to love live on. 

Freeman brings with him a resume with years in both New York and Denver kitchens, and is now enjoying the creative license of a chef who’s free to do whatever he wants. With only a wood-fired oven, as well as an induction burner, a single fryer, and a convection oven that trips the breakers when used, the Monarch kitchen may seem limiting to a chef who’s served time in some of New York’s most prestigious kitchens.

Quite the opposite, though, and we’re all the better for it. “We’re just changing things up and cooking what we want to eat,” he concludes.

Monarch is located within Urban Cowboy Public House, in the George Schleier Mansion at 1665 Grant Street. Starting May 9, it will be open from 4 to 10 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday through Thursday, and 4 to 11 p.m. Friday and Saturday. For more information, visit monarch-denver.com or follow @monarchdenver on Instagram.