This week’s review of Rioja served a couple of purposes. One, it cleared up a bothersome bit of karmic dead weight. Two, it gave me a chance to see how a strong-starting restaurant with a solid crew and a talented chef can get so much better in four years, when…
Although I dedicated nearly 2000 words to Rioja in my review this week (and an additional grand to Larimer Square, where Rioja is located, plus a few more hundred to a blog teasing my review of Rioja), I forgot to use any of those words to mention my favorite thing…
It’s already got four bars, a full menu, big crowds and, in my opinion, the best Guinness pour in the city. It has a prime location (at 1550 Court Place) for foot traffic, a big patio and an entire hotel’s worth of captive customers. So what else could Katie Mullen’s…
A reader recently e-mailed me a good question: Whether the Chinook Tavern — which left its longtime home at 265 Detroit Street last June, in hopes of reopening at the Landmark last fall — was ever going to reappear.That e-mail got me thinking, because it seems like, well, forever since…
Kurobuta pork belly, seared on the surface, rubbed with cardamom, properly rested so that it isn’t wet with fat, and mounted atop a chunky mound of curry-spiced garbanzo bean puree, green like smashed peas, smooth as whipped potatoes. It’s a singularly delicious plate — the best of a whole, long…
Most Mondays, I waste time at my desk by posing a question asked by one of the dining public, then answer it in my own special way.This week, I’m doing something different. This week, the question is mine and I’m looking for answers from all of you out there in…
Rough week for Big Red F. I wasn’t all tht happy with Happy Noodle House; wasn’t cuckoo for the Cocoa Puffs at Centro. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like some of Dave Query’s other restaurants. Matter of fact, he runs two other joints that are among my favorites in…
Spent the afternoon chasing down yet another restaurant world rumor, and this one? It turns out to be true. Yanni’s, the opa-and-ouzo Greek taverna, is finally abandoning its home of eighteen years — a strip mall at 2223 South Monaco — and moving out for the new Landmark development. According…
It was raining when Laura and I ducked into Centro. We’d already eaten twice at Happy Noodle House over the course of the long weekend and had gotten our fill of pickles and noodles, so we were looking for something a little different, a little more south-of-the-border. But mostly, we…
The nouvelle noodle bar is a fad that’s been building for years among the trend-humping foodies — a business model built on the restaurant industry’s love of all things Asian, on the passionate lust for getting ten or twenty dollars for two bucks’ worth of noodles, on the same cook’s…
There is no such thing as bad barbecue. Even bad cherry pie is better than no cherry pie at all. And I’ve never met a cheeseburger I didn’t like. I’ve met plenty I didn’t love, but when you’re in a cheeseburger kind of mood, even a Mickey D’s double is…
Yesterday was a big day. On Monday morning, the first finished copies of my new book, Cooking Dirty, rolled off the presses in wherever it is that they print books nowadays. That afternoon, one of the first (I like to think of it as the first) was dropped in an…
Okay, so it was never the greatest restaurant in the world. It was designed as a kind of culinary one-trick pony, hanging all its hopes and dreams on people’s uncontrollable craving for peanut butter on everything. But it still surprises me just a little that P.B. Loco (part of a…
The noodle bar is big business these days. In Manhattan, David Chang has elevated the simple, neighborhood noodle bar to celebrity status (and turned himself into a minor rock star in the process) with his Momofuku brand. In Denver, we’ve got one of the originals — Oshima Ramen, straight outta…
The XO menu basically breaks down into four categories: ramen (in three varieties: duck, beef and seafood), semi-dry noodles (using about half as much broth as the ramen), dry noodles (mostly Korean, plus yakisoba and a chicken pad thai based on Guerrero’s time as a stagier in Bangkok), then rice…
The staff at Jonesy’s EatBar and the Horseshoe Lounge are taking it all off (well, most of it, anyway …), and we’ve got the pictures to prove it! Check out the slideshow for pics from the 2009 pin-up calendar. And when you’re done with that, get down to Jonesy’s at…
Okay, so say you’ve got a friend. And this friend, for whatever reason (religious aversion, misguided sense of moral outrage, PETA brainwashing), has chosen not to eat meat. Still, you, as a proud carnivore, want to go out somewhere where both of you can have a decent feed. This week’s…
There are plenty of people in Denver who love nothing more than catching me out in a mistake. But one of the benefits (and perils) of living and working in this freaky William Gibson future of the interweb? People from thousands of miles away can correct me, and also teach…
At this point, it’s safe to say that I could commit myself to a full-time position of doing nothing but reporting on where the President (or VP) decides to eat his lunch every day. I mean, we’ve already had the Grey Poupon controversy (and the resulting, tongue-in-cheek marketing push by…
So I’m walking around over at Tony’s, just trying to get a feel for the place and the lay of the land. And it’s nice, sure. There’s ten kinds of barbecue sauce, so many different kinds of mustard that the shelving unit looks like my fridge at home on a…
This week’s review of China Jade gave me another excuse to bounce around the cuisine and culture of a faraway land without having to worry about the attendant shots, jet-lag or passport issues. More important, it gave me yet more examples of the myriad ways in which pigs can be…
Happening right now: The Counter at Park Meadows (a California-based chain, natch) is offering a free burger to the first fifty people willing to sell out their local team and say “Go Lakers!” Me? I couldn’t care less about basketball, but I do love burgers, so I say go for…
