Audio By Carbonatix
The rest of the best: Every year as we approach the Best of Denver finish line, some hot contender suddenly comes up short. This time around we lost our early favorites for Best Cheap Breakfast (although Speedy Gourmet, at 1430 Arapahoe Street, still has great fast lunches, it’s dropped its early-morning meals altogether) and Best All-You-Can-Eat (the Park Tavern, at 931 East 11th Avenue, discontinued its barbecued-rib feast). Fortunately, Westword’s hired bellies were up to the task of finding replacement meals that more than made up for those losses.
And in the case of one eatery, time was actually on our side. It was a sad day this spring when the doors to the Mexico City Lounge, at 2115 Larimer Street, were chained shut, with a note to go to the Bamboo Hut up the street at 2449 Larimer while the lounge was “closed temporarily.” We all knew what that meant–or so we thought, and we consoled ourselves eating one chicharrone burrito after another at the Hut.
But amazingly, exactly one week before the Best of Denver 1998 was scheduled to hit the streets, the Mexico City Lounge reopened its doors. Alicia Muniz and her husband, Bob, have taken over the old family business, using the same old family recipes. But could it have been our imagination? Did the place seem a little cleaner? Had the floor, for example, always been green under all that grime? You bet, says Alicia; she and Bob spent weeks scrubbing the joint. Even the tacos tasted brighter, not quite as decadently greasy as they had before.
Thinking the reopened Mexico City might have been a Best Of-induced hallucination, we stopped back the next morning–just in time to tuck into the Best Breakfast Burrito, smothered in that killer green.
Sometimes it pays to return to the scene of the grime.
