The Fort Restaurant

The Fort is a theme restaurant. Sure, it's been called better things (a museum of culinary history, a gastronomic time capsule) and worse things (the fabulous obsession of one of the New West's great hucksters), but it's still a theme restaurant — part Old West reliquary, part Planet Hollywood with cowboys. The servers all wear costumes, the walls are hung with artifacts of the trapper/trader/Indian-fighter culture of Olde Timey Colorado, and the menu is an intellectual exploration of the West's close-to-the-land culinary past. On top of all this, the place itself is, well, a fort, a brick-by-brick replica of Bent's Fort. That all said, the kitchen is not to be underestimated: The Fort handles a piece of meat (be it bison, elk or beef) very, very well, and the appetizer board boasts adventurous bites such as bison tongue, raw bison liver and delectable bone marrow.