Best Meal in a Bun 2008 | Kolache Factory | Best of Denver® | Best Restaurants, Bars, Clubs, Music and Stores in Denver | Westword
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Best Meal in a Bun

Kolache Factory

They could be the new breakfast burrito, or maybe the new office sandwich, or even the new family dinner. Kolaches have the potential to be all these things — and more. A novel food idea brought to us by those not-so-waistline-conscious Eastern Europeans, kolaches are slightly sweet, freshly baked meals that stuff a bun with everything from eggs and bacon to ham and cheese to barbecued beef. The Kolache Factory, a Houston company with more than thirty franchises in five states but only one in Colorado (so far), offers versions with biscuits and gravy, mushroom and pepperoni, and even turkey and stuffing (in November). It's time to make your first kolache run; we guarantee it won't be your last.

Best Melting-Pot Dinner

Cowbobas

Cowbobas is a combination cowboy steakhouse and Vietnamese boba tea shop that serves coffee and corn dogs. You can get a cheeseburger and a crystal jelly fruit tea, a ten-dollar steak that tastes exactly like the steaks Dad charred on the backyard grill when you were a kid, a grilled cheese sandwich and a jackfruit smoothie so syrupy sweet you'll think you're having a heart attack. Cowbobas is a fiercely neighborhood spot in a neighborhood where it's easier to find a great taco or a cow's stomach than it is a fifty-dollar porterhouse or a fatted goose's liver, but this socio-culinary melting pot translates into delicious meals.

Best Mid-Range Italian Restaurant

San Lorenzo Ristorante

Carpaccio di bue dressed in lemon and oil, grilled salmon with roasted potatoes, garretto d'agnello — spring lamb braised in red wine, served with grilled eggplant and potato purée. Those are just a few of the dishes that chef/owner Craig D'Alessandro has in regular rotation on his menu at San Lorenzo. Amazingly, this restaurant isn't some highfalutin' downtown joint, but a simple and unassuming strip-mall suite — the kind of place you'd probably walk right by if someone didn't point it out to you. So we are, because D'Alessandro and his crew at San Lorenzo are worth a stop. They've got the moves of a fine-dining crew and the menu of a Michelin hot spot, but they're executing it in a space that could just as easily have been a hair salon or muffler shop.

Best Middle Eastern Restaurant

Ya Hala Grill

Ya Hala isn't much to look at from the outside — just a squat cement bunker hunkered down on Colorado Boulevard. As a matter of fact, it isn't much to look at from the inside, either. The lobby/bakery is a bit run-down, the dining room looks roughly used. But the food coming out of this place more than makes up for the unsightly digs. The hummus alone is so good that we'd gladly eat it while sitting on an old crate in an alley, if that were our only option. And yet the hummus is just the beginning. Everything Ya Hala makes is superb, from the simple grilled kebabs and chicken to the shawarma, balilla and sambusk. And its baklava is not just the best in Denver, but possibly the best baklava ever made — an unbelievably addictive, honey-sweet and perfectly crispy dessert.

Best Neighborhood Italian Restaurant

Radda Trattoria

Everyone should be so lucky as to have a restaurant like Radda in their neighborhood. It's a great restaurant, but it's also a comfortable restaurant, an unassuming restaurant, a restaurant where families come to eat penne al cinghiale and rogue CU economics professors argue over plates of golden-brown pressed chicken. The board is made up mostly of small plates, little tastes, brilliant snacks and expert whetters of appetite, and the kitchen crew — led by Matt Jansen and exec Don Gragg — executes everything brilliantly, with a beautiful simplicity and a passionate understanding of ingredient over artifice. In Manhattan, Radda would be wickedly hip and successful. But in Boulder? It's just a little neighborhood spot, with plenty of parking and always room for another customer, another table, another party waiting to sing its praises.

Best Neighborhood Sushi Restaurant

Osaka Sushi

Osaka Sushi isn't easy to find, but it's worth the search. Regulars love this place with a fervor bordering on obsession and even have their own personal sake boxes, stacked like a child's blocks behind the bar. The menu focuses on sushi, but also features other Japanese convenience foods — gyoza and donburi, yaki soba and bowls of multi-colored fish eggs for those who just can't get enough tobiko and ikura. While on the surface, Osaka might seem no different from the dozens of neighborhood sushi bars in this town, its excellence reveals itself in small ways.

Best New American Restaurant

Fruition

Fruition
Today Fruition is getting play all over the country as one of the best restaurants in the United States, with stories in glossy mags and big awards. But you know what? We loved Fruition before it was cool, when it was a great neighborhood restaurant and the entire town its neighborhood. Fruition wasn't even two months old when we named it Best New Restaurant last year, and since then, it's only gotten better. Still, someday the national attention hoopla will disappear, and we'll still be here — sitting in Fruition's too-small dining room, eating chicken soup and pork belly, appreciating just how good New American cooking can be. Fruition is the sort of place where you want to make sure you get a table on Friday night — and then never leave.

Best New Neighborhood Restaurant

Big Hoss Bar-B-Q

Not only do Hoss Orwat and his crew make some wicked barbecue, but they've made that wicked barbecue the focus of a great neighborhood restaurant — the kind of place that, in a perfect world, would exist within walking distance of every person's home. This joint draws a crowd from every imaginable demographic — from families out for a meal together to drunken hat boys to weird old guys yelling at the televisions to couples on dates to blissed-out restaurant critics with barbecue sauce under their fingernails. The atmosphere is all convivial weirdness and charm, and the kitchen keeps that good feeling going by turning out great grub in large portions. And above it all is Hoss himself — walking the floor, chewing the fat, buying drinks and generally acting the part of benevolent dictator in this small, delicious and ideal kingdom on Tennyson Street.

Best New Restaurant

Izakaya Den

Izakaya Den
Izakaya Den is a beautiful restaurant — dimly lit, with a lovely, blonde-wood sushi bar and huge beams made from imported cedar, set and carved by Japanese craftsmen — but that's not why it's the year's best new restaurant. The menu, designed by Toshi Kizaki and executed by one of the most talented crews in town, is ridiculous, a Japanese-Mediterranean fusion (with hints of northern Spain and France and America shot through it like rogue strands of culinary DNA) that's amazing, awe-inspiring and should never work in a million years but somehow does — but that's not why. Izakaya has wonderful service, a great vibe and a rich crowd of regulars — but none of those are why, either. Instead, Izakaya takes the crown for being an exemplary example of that finest restaurateur impulse, which is to do what you love without compromise and hope that the people come to love it, too. And they do love Izakaya Den, for so many reasons. Denver is lucky to have a restaurant, a kitchen, a crew and a menu as audacious and weird as you find as Izakaya, and we can only hope that its success inspires others to follow the same brave path.

Best New Restaurant Neighborhood

Lower level, 250 Steele Street

There have been good restaurants in this subterranean space (Bistro Adde Brewster, Sketch), and there have been truly horrible ones. But never before have there been two great restaurants, operating side by side and on completely opposite ends of the spectrum. Defying both real-estate and restaurant law, Tambien and French 250 have managed to make their underground digs and odd shapes pay off — one by pulling in the late-night crowd for lowbrow Mexican cantina food and super-call tequila, the other by drawing down the moneyed status-seekers, frog-leg fanatics and oenophiles. And while one successful address does not define an entire part of the city, the combined success of Tambien and French 250 could spell a return to culinary relevance for Cherry Creek North. Taco by taco, bowl of bouillabaisse by bowl of bouillabaisse, 250 Steele is turning this neighborhood around.

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