For two years, Holly Hartnett worked the floor as a manager at Table 6 (609 Corona Street) and dreamed of a place of her own. She’d inspected space after space after space, but there were problems with all of them. Actually, there was the same problem with all of them:…
While employed in my last-ever cooking gig before coming here, I got to know grits pretty well, because I worked the night-shift at an Albuquerque Waffle House and one of my many responsibilities (along with tossing the drunks and cooking the hash browns and cleaning the grease traps) was fixing…
So, a few weeks ago, I wrote this little piece titled “How to Create a Great Irish Bar.” It wasn’t something I put a lot of thought into. It wasn’t something that groaned under the weight of background research (unless drinking counts as research). Really, it was just a way to…
A couple days after the Second Helping I wrote for Parisi went up — the one in which I reported how I’d accidentally tried to order spaghetti at a real estate office and proved, once again, what a boob I truly am — I got a note from Christine Parisi…
Since I discovered DJ’s Berkeley Cafe (right), I’ve had breakfast on my mind. Here’s a list of the best places in town to get your morning fix.Breakfast King, 300 West Mississippi Avenue. Still the king, always the king. And it’s just been tagged by Esquire magazine as one of the…
At the bottom of this week’s Bite Me, I wrote about my troubles getting a decent hoagie out of Taste of Philly — specifically the one at 18121 East Hampden Avenue in Aurora, but I’ve had similar issues at other locations. Although every once in a while I’ll get a…
Squeaking in just under the wire before one of the biggest dining nights of the year is Arugula, a very-very-Boulder restaurant that’s scheduled to throw wide the doors at 2785 Iris Avenue on February 13 — just 24 short hours before the big Valentine’s Day rush. That’s a helluva way…
A Brief Primer on Oysters in the West Oysters have been a staple food for thousands of years. The ancient Greeks ate them. The Romans had them imported from the British Isles and then kept them alive in saltwater pools, feeding them pastry and wine (because smart as they were,…
DJ’s Berkeley Cafe (this week’s review) blows the current economic bell curve by being not just full, but overflowing at a time when most restaurant owners would strip naked and hang coupons from their ding-dongs just to get a few more people through the door. A five-page wait list for…
See more photos of DJ’s at westword.com/slideshow Laura and I are in bed, sheets pulled from the corners, blankets mussed and tangled. I can feel her, warm beside me, and from the sweet edge of exhausted sleep, I can hear her voice. “Dammit. Why didn’t we order a pizza first…”…
For Jason and Devin Stallings, who opened DJ’s Berkeley Cafe in August 2006, one restaurant wasn’t enough. Maybe that’s because their first place was so ridiculously successful. Maybe it’s because of the brothers’ weird compulsion to work 24 hours a day (you can see what a job it was to…
Think you want to open a restaurant of your own? Well, before you get too excited, I suggest you check out djscafe.blogspot.com — a website that Jason Stallings put together to detail every phase of the construction at DJ’s Berkeley Cafe and all the nightmares that went along with it…
Bad news for you fans of serious Vietnamese food: Ha Noi Pho, my Best Taste of Hanoi, has been sold. This happened just yesterday, but already the joint is operating under another name: Can Tho Pho. At least according to the sign out front at 1036 South Federal. When I…
We get a booth against the wall, where we drink tea and watch the neighborhood turn over on the floor; the clock rolling from breakfast rush into lunch. Almost everyone in the place seems to be a friend, a regular — making the Sunday morning or afternoon pilgrimage for eggs…
This week’s review of Locanda del Borgo got me thinking about other spots in town where the view of Italy stops at the door — which exist wholly as Colorado restaurants that just happen to serve Italian food. What follows is a list of those places which most closely hew…
I’ve had an on-again/off-again love/hate relationship with Kevin Taylor over the years I’ve spent on this job. But one thing that’s been unswerving has been my respect for his eponymous flagship, Restaurant Kevin Taylor at the Hotel Teatro (1106 14th Street). I’ve had a couple of the best single plates in…
I was driving through Denver’s old Italian neighborhood Friday, looking for a restaurant that might pair well with my review of Locando del Borgo. Unfortunately, being all weirded out on caffeine and Scotch cordial (check out Cafe Society for my diatribe on drinking glayva for breakfast), I first landed at…
See more photos of Locanda del Borgo here. Here’s something that annoys me: people who, when talking about a restaurant, use some version of the phrase “transports you straight to blank” or “is like a little piece of blank right here in Denver.” I have resorted to this verbal tic…
I just got a note from the Brown Palace regarding the Palace Arms’ participation in Denver Restaurant Week — which calls for meals priced at $52.80 for two, a nice trick at this high-priced spot. But the announcement went on: Palace Arms restaurant has created ways for guests to pinch…
New exec chef Jason Rogers has just put up his new menu at Second Home (150 Clayton Lane), in an attempt to recover from the bland and affectless fried-cheese-and-crab-paste board that’d been assembled by Home’s opening chef, Che Frey, and oh-so-tenderly deconstructed by yours truly in my review of Second…
Until fairly recently, Denver’s culinary universe had a gaping black hole at the center that consistently swallowed the vain attempts of well-meaning chefs and barfed out scads of pretenders offering “Colorado-accented” Italian cuisine that rarely rose above the level of a tomato-and-mozzarella tamale with an Italian flag stuck in it…
After my disastrous meals at Beaucoup Burrito, I thought it might be helpful to list for its owners, employees and customers six local fast-casual concepts that actually work. They are, in no particular order: Chipotle: Founder Steve Ells gets credit for inventing the entire fast-casual concept at his now-ubiquitous burrito…
