The Food Is Almost as Bad as the Owner's Racist Jokes at Legends of Aurora Sports Grill

It's the day before I turn forty. What better way to celebrate than spending lunch with my drunkest friends at a sports bar owned by a guy who makes racist videos on Facebook?

There has been plenty of discussion about Steve Sundberg, the owner of Legends of Aurora Sports Grill and an Aurora City Council rep, in recent days. On his promotional videos, he does stereotypical accents. He wears culture as a costume. And for a guy who has had several incidents involving inappropriate comments of a sexual nature, he seems to shoehorn in comments about his dick and balls wherever he can.

Imagine if Michael Scott from The Office was a real person and had access to an iPhone in 2022: This is roughly Sundberg’s vibe.

The video that caught my attention was a particularly cringe-inducing reading of various online reviews in a voice that is vaguely Middle Eastern. In it, he enlists his prop department for a scimitar and a slice of bacon, because in his world, there is nothing that’s too on the nose. He cherry-picks some reviews that specifically mention him and his beard, and repeats that he’s “always humble, always learning.”

When I watched him try to food-run soup to the wrong table during my pre-birthday outing, Sundberg struck me as the kind of guy who would be much better served by staying out of his employees' way.

“The eagle has landed,” I told my friend Brett, noticing Sundberg’s ineptitude as he fumbled around the dining room in jeans and a tucked-in green flannel. Of course, this was the same guy who'd called his own bar twenty minutes earlier, prompting the employee he asked to speak with to utter, “I don’t have time for Steve’s shit," under their breath.

We were the youngest people at Legends by thirty years, if you don’t count the guy in all Broncos orange at the end of the bar vaping or the construction workers who came in a minute behind us. There were two tables of septuagenarians playing mahjong at different ends of the dining room, I assume separated by a feud that I’ll never know about. The walls were adorned with kitsch that’s broken up by flat-screen TVs and printed posters with fuzzy Legends logos that Canva can’t improve the resolution of.
We started with an order of the bone-in wings tossed in a Jamaican jerk dry rub that would offend anyone from the island. Missing any hint of Scotch bonnets or discernible heat, the gritty, bland rub sitting in a heap at the bottom of the basket clearly caters to this bar's clientele that fondly remembers LBJ’s administration.

I would guess it’s simply old, like the fryer grease that leaves the wings with an off taste that my buddy Zac swears is fish-like. A paltry assortment of celery sticks and baby carrots distance themselves from the all-drums basket, with a thick ranch that elicits memories of an ’80s crudite plate going unused.

The special of the day is a large pizza, so the boys grab the bartender’s recommendation of the Snakebite: bacon bits, cream cheese, roasted jalapeños and cheese, with a drizzle of ranch on top. As far as Colorado pizza goes, I’ve had worse offenders, but there are elements that fundamentally don’t work.

Having a base of cream cheese topped with more cheese leaves the whole pie woefully dry, save for the thinnest ranch sprayed across the top that bears no relation to the one served with the appetizer course. The jalapeños are not roasted, which actually works and gives the pizza some necessary kick and texture, along with the sparse bacon bits. Based on the cook on the crust, I would guess it’s a frozen Sysco special. For me, it falls somewhere between “pizza for drunks” and “pizza you’d be surprised to find at a gas station, but in a good way.”
If a menu contains an item with the name of the restaurant, I presume it must be a signature dish. Here, the Legend Burger feels like a dry joke. Maybe that’s not fair: The meat ranges from well done to medium rare, depending on which half you’re biting. A hastily applied slice of cheddar is broiled to death on top of my open-faced burger, exposing the alternately charred and undercooked bacon underneath. The patty is bereft of any seasoning, as gray and mournful as a Midwestern February.

A pile of greasy, limp fries lightly dusted with seasoning salt is worth picking through for the crispy ones, but they’re mostly beyond redemption. The only legend I will tell of this plate is that somewhere in Aurora exists the microwaved burrito of burgers: simultaneously hot and cold at the same time.

Was it a bad day for the kitchen? Entirely possible. Could morale be down with the recent negative publicity? Sure. But I choose to believe that putting out food this awful is simply a small act of rebellion from a kitchen staff that has been asked too many times to be part of a video that, despite their boss's claims, isn’t funny whatsoever.