Buffalo, New York, sometime in the mid-’90s. I was briefly between jobs — having just told one owner (of a ginormous Irish restaurant/pub/banquet hall/ hotel operation) that he could go fuck himself and his nine dollars an hour if he thought I was going to run his entire floundering food…
I love cheeseburgers. Seriously, madly, deeply. I love foie gras, too. I love maguro sushi. I love whole fish with their eyes rolled back, seared crisp and served under a blanket of dark, thick oyster sauce, and I love bacalao and blood sausage and agnolotti with sage and butternut squash…
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing simple, straightforward neighborhood Italian food. In fact, doing just that is a noble tradition that extends further back in this country’s history than does the impulse to slap down a bunch of white tablecloths, boot Dean and Louis Prima off the radio in favor…
Last week I took a run out to the Montecito at 5970 South Holly Street in Greenwood Village, which is right next to Annabel’s, the other new joint owned by Mel and Jane Master. Chef Adam Mali has handed over day-to-day ops at the original Montecito, at 1120 East Sixth…
Stop giving him pork chops!” The woman is hissing, eyes flashing, using her mom voice on her husband, one arm thrown protectively over the top of the car seat set beside her on the banquette seat two tables down at Cucina Colore. “I’m not giving him pork chops. I’m giving…
When I reviewed Arada last summer (“Stranger in a Strange Land,” June 29, 2006), Ethiopian food was still new to me. Somehow, I’d managed to miss this incredible, uncorrupted African mother cuisine for years — even here in Denver, where African cuisines in general have established a foothold far more…
Although Denver has several Peruvian restaurants, it has only one Limon — the recently expanded spot at 1618 East 17th Avenue where chef/owner Alex Gurevich’s menu runs more toward the hyper-modern than the traditional, with cuisine rooted in modern Andean- and urban Lima-style cooking. Still, it retains the soul of…
Lomo saltado. Hot empanadas and a sweating bottle of Cristal or Quilmes beer. Chupes de this and chupes de that, a small plate of ceviche classico or ceviche mixto and then, of course, the ubiquitous papas a la huancaina that I love even more than the backyard, church picnic-style potato…
Just two months after I gave Aqua a thorough literary ass-kicking, it already deserves a second shot. Chef Duy Pham (late of Kyoto and, years back, Jay Chadron’s other restaurant, Opal) recently signed on to take the reins at this eatery that, several revisions ago, was based on his concept…
I’d like to offer both a stern warning for those who might be headed out to Centro Latin Kitchen & Refreshment Palace (see review) and a helpful bit of advice for those who refuse to heed it: At Centro, the bar mixes a caipirihna that could strip paint. The bartenders…
A few months ago, the awkwardly named Centro Latin Kitchen & Refreshment Palace rose up, phoenix-like, from the ashes of La Rhumba — Dave Query’s failed attempt at Caribbean-Asian fusion, a place I loathed with a fine, hot passion — and further fortified the multi-unit owner’s entrenchment on this hard-fought…
I was out at Park Meadows, and I was hungry. Absolutely unwilling to eat anything from the food court (and already suffering from my mistake in ordering a grainy, chalky cafe au lait and a cookie that tasted like chocolate-covered balsa wood from the little cafe attached to Nordstrom), I…
One of the defining characteristics of a meal at Sushi Den (1487 South Pearl Street) has always been the wait. A half hour, an hour. On busy nights, the wait for dinner can take longer than the dinner itself. I’ve been forced to sit on my hands for as long…
My cell phone rang around one in the morning. For most people, this would be a harbinger of bad news — kid in jail, someone in the hospital. For me, it almost always means work: a debriefing, a confession, an eleventh-hour emergency like a restaurant on fire or, worse, dead…
Everyone should have a restaurant that is saved for special occasions — not for birthdays or anniversaries or celebrations of life’s small victories, but for dinners that are themselves the occasion. For me, the Palace Arms is that place, a restaurant that always makes a meal worth remembering. When I…
Ask me how I ended up at the Brown Palace four times in the past two weeks. Go ahead. Ask me. The answer? Because I am one lucky sonofabitch, that’s how. Because somehow, out of the tattered, twitchy, gin-soaked, uneducated, ass-backward mess I made out of my so-called career over…
I love the Brown Palace. I’ve never spent a night there, never seen the inside of one of the rooms, never even gotten off the ground floor, but something about the place just moves me. Which is odd, because normally I don’t care a whit for architecture, have no particular…
Some people (and you know who you are) seem to think that I do not love the food being done at Luciano’s Pizza and Wings. Yes, I have compared the pizzas there with the pizzas I remember from “Pizza Thursday” back in high school. Yes, I have stated that the…
There was a time when I would have raged and mounted the barricades to do battle with any chain restaurant. Back when I was younger, dumber and somewhat more deluded than I am now, I made no distinction between behemoths like Applebee’s and the Olive Garden (true villains) and operations…
To get a good meal in Northfield, first find yourself a child. If you’ve got a rug monkey of your own, fantastic. If not, acquire one. Far be it from me to suggest something as gauche as kidnapping, but the little creatures are often running rampant through the carefully designed…
I’m fairly sure that if you were to make a list of all the songs least likely to be heard in a Deep South barbecue shack, “Dead Man’s Party,” by Oingo Boingo, would be damn close to the top of the list. And yet that’s just what was playing over…
Last year, I did a three-minute radio piece on my deep and abiding love for barbecue. I’d been asked to do it by Jay Allison, who was producing a show for NPR called This I Believe — a resurrection of a project originally started by Edward R. Murrow in the…
