“Here. Try this.” I handed over the small, green Jagermeister bottle and grinned. Because he’s a good sport (and, like me, completely susceptible to even the weakest sort of peer pressure), my comrade-in-arms Jonathan Shikes screwed off the top without question and made a move to drink the mystery fluid…
Once again, SPAM — everyone’s favorite potted meat product — is in the news. And this time, there’s a Colorado hook: Ron Pearman of Colorado Springs won the grand prize in the Great American SPAM Championship. (Read Melanie Asmar’s interview with the champ here.) The contest, held at state and…
Word just came down that Dave Query — right in the middle getting his new noodle house project, Happy Noodle House, up and running in Boulder — has brought some new blood into the kitchen at Zolo Grill, his least press-pimped address, at 2525 Arapahoe Avenue in The Republic. Actually,…
I don’t know what it is with me. I can love a restaurant — seriously, get all twelve-year-old girl about it, just luuurve it to death — and write about it endlessly for a week, two weeks, whatever, and then not go back for two years. But when I hate…
I have missed many things in favor of a meal. I’ve cut classes for sushi or cheeseburgers or just a shitty cup of diner coffee, skipped work for tacos, flown halfway across the country for a fish dinner, and abandoned like dead weight friends who weren’t interested in dim sum…
Good food starts with good ingredients, followed by good ideas, finished by good execution. And greatness follows only in the laborious improvement of all three. This, as I discuss in my review of Beaucoup Burrito, is about as close as you’re going to come to the core of kitchen wisdom…
As I ducked inside Beaucoup Burrito, my fantasies briefly sustained me, filling in for the abject lack of anything approaching decor. The spot looked like a poverty-stricken imitation Chipotle: bare white-on-white-on-electric-lemon-lime-on-white walls, a soda machine, a counter and sneeze guard with handwritten grease-pencil notes demarcating what was what, a menu…
This is awesome. No, I mean really awesome. A silver lining to this shitty economy. A perfect fusion of two things I like: free booze and dumb bar games. I’m talking about “Rock paper scissors” Mondays at Nine75 (975 Lincoln Street), the new promotion whereby customers get to challenge their…
Lala’s Wine Bar + Pizzeria is a bright light in a former black hole. It also happens to serve the only almost-cracker-crust pies that interest me in Denver. Still, there are other good pizzas to be found, including at the Oven, which has won the Best Pizza prize in the…
Yesterday, I noted that Aix’s website had gone dark — as its dining room was last Saturday night. But because 17th Avenue is such a solid restaurant neighborhood, I don’t think anyone out there thought the space would stay empty for long. I just got off the phone with Keith…
Okay, I’m not saying that the place is dead for sure, but, once again, things are looking bad for Pizzeria Mundo at 1312 17th Street. I got a tip from yet another neighborhood cruiser that the space — which has been absolutely fucked by a web of construction scaffolding that…
I don’t know what it is with me, but lately I’ve just been loving everything. Even places that I probably shouldn’t. Even joints that have nothing whatsoever going for them except that they were there when I was hungry and/or thirsty and/or badly in need of a little whiskey and…
By last year, the vacant restaurant space at 410 East Seventh Avenue was beginning to take on an odor, an invisible miasma of failure that was blamed on everything from the economy to the parking situation to the weird little jog that Seventh Avenue takes coming off Broadway — but…
I’d heard about Transalpin, the groundbreaking restaurant that moved into 410 East Seventh Avenue (current home of Lala’s) almost three decades ago, because Robert Tournier ran it, and Tournier, who’s had Le Central for 23 years now, is still very much a part of the Denver scene. And of course…
There is almost nothing I can say about this that wouldn’t get me picketed. Direct from the PETA website at www.peta.org: People don’t seem to like fish. They’re slithery and slimy, and they have eyes on either side of their pointy little heads–which is weird, to say the least. Plus,…
Just got word from a sharp-eyed tipster in the 17th Avenue neighborhood that something appears to be going on at Aix. Or, more to the point, nothing seems to be going on at Aix. I hit this place, which won our Best Taste of Provence in 2007, a few weeks back…
It took me a minute to shake off the triple-vision I was experiencing, but once I did, I saw the wisdom in not screwing around too much with the bones. This space has been refined and re-refined a lot over the years. Doomed owners have dumped barrels full of money…
Peking Tokyo, which I reviewed this week, was a weird little joint, no doubt. The name was strange, the space bizarre. And yet, it was an excellent neighborhood player and the kind of place one might well thank the food gods for should one find one’s self in the area…
So how much, exactly, is that perfect table worth to you? I’m curious because I Just heard from one of my good office sources about a scene last night at Proto’s (2401 15th Street) that completely blew my mind.The way he told it, Proto’s was packed on Thursday. Wall-to-wall and…
The space at 846 Broadway has long been the go-to bar for all our needs around the office. It’s been the Parlour, the Minturn Saloon and Moon Time in the years that I’ve been here –everything from a kinda weird, quasi-classy bolt-hole with a serious kitchen to a mountain…
I was sad when Mee Yee Lin closed its first home, thrilled when it reopened in Aurora, then sad all over again when it closed a second time. And then a new operation moved into Mee Yee Lin’s former spot at 2295 South Chambers: El Viva Villa, a shoestring family…
I love ethnic restaurants that open in the abandoned shells of chain restaurants or, better yet, fast-food restaurants, and I love them even more when they keep the impedimentia and knickknacks of those former operations and end up serving their bulgogi beside napkin dispensers still embossed with a big, humped…
