First Look: Soda Club isn’t playing it safe

Some people like their Italian food familiar and safe: saucy, cheesy, meaty. And for that crowd, Denver has served bowl after bowl of copycat “East Coast red sauce joints” in the past year that have — somewhat admirably — delivered on mainstream expectations with very few surprises. 

But for those seeking a different, intriguing, and downright challenging spin on the Italian kitchen, pull up a velvet chair and settle into the experience that is Soda Club Denver. It’s one of our most-anticipated restaurants of the summer, and just soft-opened this week ahead of its Sept. 1 official opening.

The menu at this newly opened restaurant occupying the former Super Mega Bien space on the ground floor of the Ramble Hotel makes no effort to pander to Sopranos-style Sunday supper fare, instead bravely lining its menu with largely unfamiliar pastas (gigli, casarecce) with double-take sauces (borlotti ragu, cashew pepper butter), all complemented with one of the most adventurous wine lists of recent memory. 

Oh, and did we mention it’s completely vegan? 

For those doing their homework, none of this should come as any surprise. Soda Club debuted in New York City’s East Village in 2021, earning a Michelin Bib Gourmand award shortly after for its take on fresh-made pasta with a plant-based approach. Serial restaurateur Ravi DeRossi, a Colorado native who grew up in Boulder, founded Soda Club with partner and wine director Drew Brady. DeRossi now owns nearly a dozen NY restaurants, all featuring plant-based menus. (He is also a founding member of the Death & Co cocktail bar, which is also located in the Ramble Hotel building.)

Behind the menu is executive chef Amira Gharib, a New Jersey native who spent her formative years in Cairo, Egypt, leaning very heavily into the North African influences of Sicilian cuisine. Overseeing the operation locally is chef de cuisine Jon Robbins, formerly of the recently closed Bistro Barbes, which took a Middle Eastern approach to a French-inspired menu.

But none of this was known when we sat down for a recent sneak peek dinner at Soda Club this week. We just walked in blind (read: unprepared). The result was a refreshing, if at times confounding, roller coaster of surprises and delights that has us plotting our imminent return. 

What we ate at Soda Club

Soda Club’s service is family-style, with small, shareable plates that serve as a snacky accompaniment to the killer wine list (more on that below). But together, they make a filling meal. 

An easy place to start was the arancini, a large deep-fried ball of risotto tinged with harissa, served with a saffron aioli and crisp fennel salad ($10). Arancini is a surprisingly easy thing to screw up, but there’s no fear of that here, as the arancini boasted the exact ratio of crunch to chew you want in the Sicilian snack, and the acidic bite of the fennel salad was a welcome addition. 

We’d usually add a veggie side dish, like the roasted cauliflower ($9) or broccolini ($9), but in this case skipped both in favor of the wildly creative Roman-style “pinsa” pizzas on the menu ($26). The Qarwani practically reinvented the format with a topping that included roasted cumin carrots and feta, serving almost like a salad in its own right. The other pizza was equally fascinating, with fresh apple, smoked mushroom and fried artichokes. 

But the star of the show was the pasta, all made in house daily. The pro-tip here is to get the pasta tasting menu. For $75 a person, you get sample sizes of all five “classic” pastas on the menu plus a bottle of wine for every two people, something I wish we had noticed before ordering.

This time, we started with the gnocchi ($22), a delicate potato dumpling seared crisp and drizzled with a sweet soubise sauce over which a layer of crispy shallots sat. Like Lays potato chips, you can’t have just one. 

Among the options that might be worth a revisit to sample include the rigatoni dressed with a pistachio pesto ($22), the lumache with a vodka sauce spiked with harissa and charred cipollini onions ($18), the tortellini with a puttanesca sauce and castelvetrano olives ($22), and a pappardelle in an arrabbiata and tomato ‘nduja sauce ($18). 

As you can see, this is a menu that challenges. It takes risks. But when you take big swings like this, a few small misses are inevitable, particularly at this early stage of opening.

The gigli ($26), a fan favorite at the New York location, is an easy dish to love, with fried leaks and lemon zest leading the charge. But the truffle crema didn’t deliver on the truffle flavor. If it didn’t say “truffle crema” on the menu, there would be no issue, as it’s delicious without it. But if it says truffle, it should taste like truffle, particularly if you’re charging more for it. 

The casarecce in borlotti ragu ($22) turned out to be more of a brodo than a ragu, and lacked any hint of the promised smoky paprika. The result resembled a soup, which would have been fine if the pasta was smaller. Instead, it was pasta meant to be eaten with a fork in a broth best eaten with a spoon.

In both cases, we still cleaned our plates, so none of these nits are even close to dealbreakers, and we’ll happily return to try these and other dishes again.

The Wine at Soda Club

Soda Club originated as a wine bar before it started serving pasta, and that spirit remains ingrained in the overall experience. With a 200-plus-bottle list of natural wines from small and independent producers, the wine list here is an absolute monster. Nearly every by-the-glass option raises an eyebrow, with selections rarely seen on any wine menu in town. 

“The whole goal is to remove the barrier of entry to wine,” wine director Brady told us while pouring some of the more interesting samples from the list. “Remove the posturing and the intimidation from it. All these are interesting wines with a unique story, but they’re all drinkable, clean-drinking and fun.”

Among the more notable was a Vincent Couche pinot noir-chardonnay blend from Burgundy ($25) that takes the two grapes typically used to make sparkling wine in the Champagne region and turns them into a non-sparkling version unique to Burgundy. It’s such a bat-shit crazy wine it commands its own section separate from the “reds” and “whites” on the menu, listed appropriately as “Huh?”

Another outlier was the sole “blanc de noirs” (white wine made from red wine grapes) option of nerello mascalese Etna bianco ($17), as well as a chilled red from Colorado’s own Aquila Cellars, blending a red pinot noir with whites riesling and chardonnay ($16). 

There’s also plenty of “normal” choices throughout. Sure, you have your Sicilian and Piedmont options. But they’re mixed in with reds, whites and oranges spanning the globe: Spain, Portugal, Chile, France, Slovenia, Oregon, New York and South Africa. 

The result is a bar worth seeking out if only for the wine alone, and earns a spot among Denver’s best wine destinations, particularly given the wonderful vibe created by the space itself. 

The Soda Club space

The Denver version of Soda Club is almost twice the size of the original New York location, which allows the team to create the environment they always wanted without the space limitations faced on the East Coast. The result is effortlessly classy, refreshingly real and authentic in an era of mass-produced facades. Purple columns frame knee-to-ceiling windows, which, combined with the tall trees and plants that dot the floor, give it an atrium-like appearance. 

Stained glass chandelier shades hang from a cage-like ceiling, each a unique shape and design. Velvet chairs and booths project elegance, but not in a fussy way — think more warm and welcoming than cold refinement. Everything is hand painted, down to the tiles that line the bar seating space and the custom artwork that lines the walls. 

Bustling, but not too loud or raucous, it’s a space you want to sit and spend time in. In a space this pretty with wine this good, we’re happy to return again and again to see it how it evolves. 

Soda Club Denver is located at 1260 25th St., and is open from 5 to 11 p.m., Sunday through Thursday, and 5 p.m. to midnight on Friday and Saturday. For more information, visit wearesodaclub.com.