Via has had a tough run. In the summer of 2005, it took over the former home of Brasserie Rouge, whose sudden death is still spoken of in hushed tones by those in the industry — no doubt for fear of bottom-feeding lawyers overhearing the stories and then trying to…

Let’s agree from the start that no new incarnation of Lucile’s will ever compare with the first at 2124 14th Street in Boulder. The original has a kind of magic, a musty, irregular charm that can only be earned, never bought. That said, the Denver Lucile’s has only improved since…

We can’t do this anymore.” “We can. I know we can make this work.” “We can’t. This has been a problem for too long.” I sighed. “Look. We’re both smart people. We’re college-educated grownups.” “Well, one of us is, anyway.” “We can figure this out.” Laura crossed her arms and…

Here’s everything I ate at Red Tango in one sitting last week, an enthusiastic order so large that the dishes could not fit on the table at one time, forcing the kitchen to stagger courses, the floor manager to wonder aloud if six or seven more people would be joining…

I’ve always been a little creeped out in empty restaurants. There’s that uncomfortable sense of being watched — because there’s no one else in the dining room to attract any of the staff’s attention. I feel like I ought to whisper, so as not to distract the bored cooks and…

A brief list of stuff I don’t like: Poetry, with the exception of a few pieces by the likes of William Carlos Williams and T.S. Eliot and the shell-shocked blasphemy of Siegfried Sassoon. The musical stylings of the Grateful Dead or any of their legions of hippie imitators. Vegetarianism used…

People are always trying to bring a taste of somewhere else to whatever place they now call home. Immigrant cuisine, nativist cuisine, fusion cuisine, recipes passed down through generations — they’re all attempts at preserving across time and distance memories that are tied up in food. This is a noble…

This was not the kind of place I was likely to review. It was not the kind of place where I was ever likely to eat, much less steal a menu from. And yet here I was, puzzling over a menu that I lifted from Reiver’s a week or so…

On any day of the week, Sherpa’s is waiting like a familiar, comfortable neighborhood bar — one that just happens to be staffed by sherpas and run by a former Everest guide, and serves momo, thupka, dahl bhat and aloo paratha. It’s a foreign restaurant yet oddly comforting, confined as…

Denver restaurateurs have never been very good at taking the long view, but they’re going to get there eventually. And when they do, the mistakes of the past will seem ridiculous in hindsight. Someday, prospective chefs will be taken on a tour of the failed restaurant playgrounds of Denver’s gullible…

Les Delices occupies what could be the most inconvenient location on Leetsdale, but on its best days, this is the best-smelling spot in the entire city of Denver. Walking into the warm, bright, well-scrubbed interior of the little pastry shop — which is decorated almost exclusively with the diplômes and…

Here’s my problem with fusion cuisine: No white cook has ever learned how to properly use galangal. No black cook, either. Or Latino or Spanish or French or what-have-you. Or me. We’ve all tried it — experimented the way others might with smoking weed or light bondage — but none…

On its very first day of business, Limón was a hit, a force to be reckoned with on 17th Avenue. Actually, from before its first day, because — as is the habit lately — Limón opened very soft, for friends and family, with no flags or fanfare, just an unlocked…

If I’d known what I was watching, I might have felt differently. But because I hadn’t the foggiest idea what anyone was saying, why things kept exploding every thirty seconds, or what the deal was with the dancing slice of pizza stopping traffic on the beautiful arabesque bridge, I loved…