Kendall frequently hosts beer dinners at some of the city's top breweries using local, in-season ingredients that are thoughtfully paired with beers, and has built a loyal following in the process.
Upcoming Thistle & Mint beer dinner dates include January 28 at River North Brewery, February 10 at Burns Family Artisan Ales, and February 18 at Fiction Beer. Kendall is also doing a Shared Tastes program at Burns Family Artisan Ales' TapHouse location, which includes an appetizer, dessert and a flight of beer for two priced at $40. Tickets for that program and the dinners are available on Eventbrite.
“I grew up cooking with my family,” says Kendall. “My mom taught me how to cook, Alton Brown taught me how to cook. When I was sixteen, I decided I wanted to cook for a living.”
He attended a three-month-long quick-start program at Cook Street — "You don’t need a two-year degree to work in restaurants,” he notes — and went on to work in various restaurants. When a Fort Collins eatery where he was working shuttered in 2015, Kendall bought the client list, equipment and van for just $1,000 and launched his own catering business.
He moved back to Denver and continued catering while managing a few restaurants. “I started foraging, exploring the woods,” he recalls. “I asked, how can I figure out what Colorado food means to me and means to everyone else? And how can I bring those flavors to people?”
The answers led Kendall to the personal-chef side of the business, where he explored flavor profiles like juniper, pine and local mushrooms. He also got into cooking for guests at Airbnbs. “That brought in some clients, but the cost was higher than I liked,” he says.
Summer vegetable tart with ricotta, pickled carrots, chard, broccoli flowers, radish and fresh cayenne.
Thistle & Mint
Kendall was fortunate to work with some of the top breweries in the area from the start, which he says was more by chance than anything else. “I just contacted every brewery when I first started,” he says. Today, he’s more picky. He’ll go into a brewery a few times, trying the beers over a few weeks or months before broaching the idea of having a beer dinner.
He also has a few requirements. “The brewery shouldn’t have a kitchen,” he says, "because I don’t want to detract from their current business — I want to pull in more business for the brewery.” Other requirements include partners that have the same commitment to high standards that Kendall has for himself, like Diebolt. “My sous chef, Ada, connected me with [Diebolt]; they’re fairly intense about their commitment to the beer,” he says.
After partnering with a brewery, Kendall looks to its flagship beers. “I want to know what their best sellers are, and I try to highlight one or two of those [on the dinner menu],” he says. He then looks at new releases — beers that are unique and special that will be available for the dinner. And finally, he looks at what the brewery excels at, like a particular style of beer. He tastes those beers and starts to pull out ideas to see what comes to mind.
About a month from the dinner, the menu starts to come together, but only in a fairly generic way. This is purposeful, as Kendall will finalize the details a few days before, when he’s picking up ingredients from local farms. “I have flexibility, adaptability,” he notes. “A farm may be out of something, or I may find a vegetable that I feel pairs better with the beer.”
While there are some differences between pairing food with beer versus wine, the basic principles are similar. “Darker beers are going to go well with roasted meats, while lighter, poached meats go well with lighter beers,” he explains. “With sauces, if it’s a more acidic sauce, it’ll go well with a lighter beer,” he adds.
Kendall finds Vienna lagers and Oktoberfest Märzens particularly challenging. Both are malty lagers, yet aren’t too high in alcohol strength. “They don’t do well with heavily acidic food,” he notes. “You can’t have them with pizza or anything with sauce, so you have to walk that edge and be careful about how much acid is in the dish.” The conclusion? Sometimes you need to keep it simple. “Bratwurst and a pretzel,” he says. “That’s what you’re having with a Märzen at a festival anyway, so it just makes sense.”
One of his favorite pairings was at a recent beer dinner at Diebolt Brewing. “Rayon, a dry-hopped saison: We paired it with blue cheese and apples,” he says. “We took a risk with that one, but the [dish] played so well with the beer.”
Another favorite was a beer dinner for a private client — one who requested that every dish incorporate mushrooms. “For the final course, we did a crème brûlée with mushrooms, thyme and pine nuts and paired it with a red-wine beer from Black Project,” he says. “Red wine and crème brûlée should not go together at all, but the mushrooms really helped out there. It was beautiful.”
Kendall also regularly works with Talnua Distillery in Arvada. For beer dinners, he’s usually adjusting the food pairings to match the available brews, but at spirits dinners, he can reverse that approach. “We sit for hours trying whiskeys, different cocktails off of the menu, and then we come up with ideas for cocktails,” he says. “We can really adjust the drinks according to what we’re going to eat."
In addition to the beer dinners, Kendall also runs a permanent food truck at Goldspot Brewing called Perifery Kitchen. The truck serves nachos, chips and salsas, plus a variety of tacos such as chipotle-braised pork belly and curry carrot with applewood smoked squash and green chile crema.
While the local beer scene is competitive with anything out there, the food can sometimes be an afterthought at many breweries, but Thistle & Mint is helping push the culinary side of beer forward.
