Best Seafood Restaurant 2004 | McCormick's Fish House & Bar | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Seafood Restaurant

McCormick's Fish House & Bar

First clue that you're in a good seafood restaurant: no ambulances out front. The second? A menu that changes every day, and sometimes twice a night. At McCormick's, the dozens of varieties of sea critters available each day are grouped like some kind of aquatic U.N., by their nationality or ocean of origin. Everything is beautifully fresh, presented simply and treated with great care by a kitchen now in the competent hands of chef Steve Vice. Great crabcakes, crawfish, lobster and classics like baked salmon and fillet of sole are the mainstays, but if you're looking for adventure, jump in. The water's fine here.

Best Steakhouse With History

Bastien's

Molly Martin
Bastien's isn't retro; the rest of the world is. If you're looking for the cocktail culture of the '50s, a time capsule of early-'70s swinger swank still sealed and unchanged, then head straight for Bastien's. If anything in this place has come around again into a third generation of recycled cool, it's only a happy accident. The Bastien's we know and love today came to life on January 1, 1959, and was an instant hit, a destination in a time when there weren't many. Truman Capote hung out here, fer chrissakes. And forty years later, the trappings of Bastien's best years are still intact. So are the deals: You can still get an entire dinner -- good steak, drinks and dessert included -- for under thirty bucks, and eat like a successful aluminum-siding salesman would have on a Friday night forty years back. Like they say, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and the batteries on Bastien's Timex ran down a long time ago.

Best Nine-Dollar Steak

Club 404

Club 404 is unique to the Denver dining scene, an irreplaceable landmark in a city that doesn't have many left. There are regulars who've been coming here since Nixon was in office, and one owner, Jerry Feld, who's had the 404 since the Eisenhower administration. There are twinkle lights behind the bar, as well as an albino frog in the aquarium and souvenirs of fifty years' service pinned up everywhere, like the fetishes of cargo cultists. But what's best about the place is the menu, another relic from a bygone era. At Club 404 you can get a steak -- the 404 T-bone -- for $8.95. It's preceded by a salad in a plastic bowl and dressing in a giant syrup jug, and when your meat arrives, it does so with out-of-the-box mashers on the side topped with gravy from a can. Still, the steak is good -- bloody, tender, meaty but not too thick, a rind of grill-crisped fat running all the way down the edges -- and a meal at 404 is exactly what you'd expect in a joint like this: generous, filling, handled with decades of experience, and cheap. There are steakhouses downtown where it costs twice as much to park as it does for an entire dinner here, and if you're willing to suffer a cut less delicate than the prize T-bone, dinner can be had for five bucks.

Best Seafood at a Steakhouse

The Capital Grille

Okay, we all understand that the only seafood that should be eaten in a steakhouse is that queen of the deep blue sea, the lobster, right? The Capital Grille gives lobster the royal treatment, serving up crustaceans that weigh anywhere from two pounds to the-monster-that-ate-Cleveland size. Bibs are available (and necessary), as are an array of nasty-looking shell-cracking implements, but the best way to get at the sweet meat hiding inside all that armor is a hammer. Too bad this dining room is a little too classy for the mallet-and-cocktail-fork approach.

Best Bargain Seafood

Le Central

There are few foods in the world as perfect as the mussel, few foods so filled with potential greatness, few so often mucked up by incompetent kitchens trying to do too much with a thing that's so good when left pretty much alone. Luckily for us, Le Central not only knows how to handle mussels properly, but it offers them in huge portions for under ten bucks, sided with excellent pommes frites in all-you-can-eat quantities. Le Central's kitchen prepares the moules nine ways, including a simple white-wine mariniere; a less simple, Pernod-rich provenal; and the exotic au saffron, with tomatoes, saffron and onions in a cream-and-shallot broth.

Best Seafood Restaurant

McCormick's Fish House & Bar

First clue that you're in a good seafood restaurant: no ambulances out front. The second? A menu that changes every day, and sometimes twice a night. At McCormick's, the dozens of varieties of sea critters available each day are grouped like some kind of aquatic U.N., by their nationality or ocean of origin. Everything is beautifully fresh, presented simply and treated with great care by a kitchen now in the competent hands of chef Steve Vice. Great crabcakes, crawfish, lobster and classics like baked salmon and fillet of sole are the mainstays, but if you're looking for adventure, jump in. The water's fine here.

Best High-Mountain Shrimp

Bear Creek Tavern

Chuck and Martha Koch, owners of the Bear Creek Tavern, have family living on the Alabama shore, and while visiting there in 1991, they discovered Royal Reds. These beauties have been on the menu ever since, shipped in fresh every week straight from the Gulf Coast shrimpers to Kittredge. As far as the Koches know (and as far as we've been able to determine), Bear Creek Tavern is the only restaurant in the Rocky Mountain West that serves them. These are deep-sea shrimp, huge, with pale red shells, a meaty texture softer than that of most Asian varieties, and a flavor like very good crab dressed up as lobster. They come to the table in a massive, salty pile, with heads, legs, antennae and shells intact, attended by real drawn butter and lemon (no cocktail sauce unless you ask, and you shouldn't), Handi Wipes, a roll of paper towels and directions for coaxing the big monsters out. What they should come with is a pistol or something, so that you can defend yourself in case one of the bigger ones is only playing dead.

Best Seafood at a Steakhouse

The Capital Grille

Okay, we all understand that the only seafood that should be eaten in a steakhouse is that queen of the deep blue sea, the lobster, right? The Capital Grille gives lobster the royal treatment, serving up crustaceans that weigh anywhere from two pounds to the-monster-that-ate-Cleveland size. Bibs are available (and necessary), as are an array of nasty-looking shell-cracking implements, but the best way to get at the sweet meat hiding inside all that armor is a hammer. Too bad this dining room is a little too classy for the mallet-and-cocktail-fork approach.

Best Bargain Seafood

Le Central

There are few foods in the world as perfect as the mussel, few foods so filled with potential greatness, few so often mucked up by incompetent kitchens trying to do too much with a thing that's so good when left pretty much alone. Luckily for us, Le Central not only knows how to handle mussels properly, but it offers them in huge portions for under ten bucks, sided with excellent pommes frites in all-you-can-eat quantities. Le Central's kitchen prepares the moules nine ways, including a simple white-wine mariniere; a less simple, Pernod-rich provenal; and the exotic au saffron, with tomatoes, saffron and onions in a cream-and-shallot broth.

Best Sushi

Sushi Tazu

Classic edomae sushi has no better avatars than the guys behind the bar at Sushi Tazu. Sitting in this beautiful, understated space in Cherry Creek, you can indulge your purist's cravings with everything from perfectly simple tuna nigiri to the bizarrely addictive sea urchin sashimi, from lovely tuna belly o-toro to more modern interpretations like giant crab-tempura rolls that look like big, leggy deep-fried spiders on the plate. Tazu also does less daring plates -- simple tempuras and bento box lunches -- and rounds out its offerings with cold Japanese beer and a good selection of sake. Sit at the bar, get to know the cooks, be brave, save room for unusual palate-cleansing desserts like frozen orange quarters, but always remember: Adding wasabe to your soy sauce before tasting the hand rolls is an insult. And at Sushi Tazu, you'll never need the extra spice, anyway.

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