Our Food Editor's Recent Favorite Bites, Including a Stellar Cubano

Monday mornings are tough, but this series isn't. Social Sightings is a quick taste of recent food tidbits that goes down as easy as your first cup of coffee, and should whet your appetite for the week ahead.

While I spent much of August specifically seeking out wings to update our list of the ten best places to score that game-day favorite, I went on plenty of non-wing dining adventures,too. I checked out Blackbelly's recent expansion in Boulder and found a lot of reasons to be impressed, including the lunch sandwich offerings at its butcher shop/market. The Cubano loaded with ham cured in-house as well as roasted pork is a great way to get a taste of Blackbelly's meat expertise. Its bread and pastry programs are also notable, with a selection that includes a particularly decadent chocolate brownie that just happens to be gluten-free.
While I've been to the Crypt quite a few times for late-night drinks since it opened in Uptown in January 2022, I hadn't tried its burger until I recently met up with a group of friends around dinnertime. While the menu is mostly vegan, there are a few exceptions. One is the double burger, an excellent example of the type of classic smash burger that's popular these days; it includes two quarter-pound beef patties, Swiss and American cheese, housemade dill pickles, onions and caramelized leek mayo on a brioche bun. It's also available as a single.
Even before it opened in the Lowenstein Complex on East Colfax Avenue, Sap Sua was getting a lot of buzz both locally and nationally — and deservedly so. While the Vietnamese restaurant's most well-known offering, a take on bắp cải luộc consisting of charred cabbage, anchovy breadcrumbs and egg yolk, lived up to the hype, my favorite (so far) was its spin on bánh ngọt chiên: crispy veal sweetbreads dusted with gochugaru (Korean chile flakes) over a salty, savory and sweet fish sauce caramel that I continued to eat long after the sweetbreads were gone.
My favorite classic steakhouse, Columbine, was closed for part of August while its owners and staff took a well-deserved vacation, so when the craving for a steak dinner hit, I went to another one of the best longtime staples in that category, Mickey's Top Sirloin. It delivered not only a good time — thanks to the arcade games in the dining room and the server who was clearly a pro at bantering with guests — but also a very good steak. Go for the garlic butter addition if you want to really amp up the flavor.
After discovering that I now live within the delivery zone for one of our picks for the ten best pizza places in Denver, Redeemer, I promptly placed an order for a pie. But it was the last-minute appetizer add-on that I could not stop eating. The simple combination of marinated Castelvetrano olives and fourteen-month-aged Gouda was downright dreamy, especially when scooped onto its housemade focaccia.
If you're planning to cook salmon at home, the best in town can be found at an East Colfax store that's been open since the 1940s: Town & Country Market. In the 1980s, Duffy Fanganello, the nephew of the shop's original owner, began going on commercial fishing trips in Alaska. Flash-forward to today: He now runs Town & Country and also operates his salmon business out of the space. My partner recently picked up two fillets from Fanganello and cooked one bathed in garlic butter and another with a miso soy glaze, both of which left me swimmingly happy. Learn more about the background of this unique business and the man who runs it, then treat yourself to some damn good fish.