Everyone’s favorite punk-rock, vegetarian, earth-friendly tempeh joint, WaterCourse Foods, is leaving its longtime home at 206 East 13th Avenue for greener pastures. But don’t get your dreadlocks in a twist. This is a good thing. Not only is WaterCourse moving into a bigger space — the former New York on…
Location, location, location, my ass. For decades, Szechuan Chinese Restaurant has been doing business in one of the worst imaginable locations in all of restaurantdom, holding down a chunky, L-shaped space folded into the elbow of a nearly inaccessible strip mall off a one-way frontage road running beneath and beside…
While Steuben’s (see review) has that whole American regional thing going, scores of other restaurants focus on foods of even more precise regional specificity. Corn Belt picnic cuisine? Done. Japanese mountain peasant food and North Vietnamese party grub? Done and done. And when Frasca first opened, it swore by the…
What are your first three food and drink related visits when you head to your childhood hometown? What do you order? Fried Clams from Kelly’s? Supreme Sauce from Raynor’s? A slice from Joe’s? A take out order of a green-chili cheeseburger from The Owl Cafe? Maybe it’s that hot dog…
As an achievement in design, Steuben’s is unparalleled. No hackneyed, cliched or sardonic architectural detail was spared in the construction of this physical love letter to a time not too long gone when wood-veneer paneling and vinyl-covered steel-tube chairs were the height of de mode fashion. Every angle in the…
I miss Mee Yee Lin — the old Mee Yee Lin on West Alameda Avenue, the little dim sum place where I first ate crispy fried intestine, where I could linger over a late lunch in a homey American cafe as envisioned by a transplanted Chinese family. But that Mee…
As I left Vietnam House (see review), I was briefly sexually assaulted in the parking lot by a small pockmarked fellow who — overcome by the beat pounding out into the cool night air — grabbed me and rubbed up against my junk. Stunned and a little drunk, still wired…
As we pull into the parking lot, I see the sign for live entertainment, Saturdays from nine until one in the morning. I find live music in a restaurant distracting, and say so as if after the years we’ve spent together — nearly all of them described by the arcs…
The worst thing about barbecue is waiting for it. I hit Sam Taylor’s Bar-B-Q during a shift change last week, and I had to wait fifteen whole minutes — which is about fourteen whole minutes longer than I’m comfortable waiting for anything. I have what you might call an impulse-control…
I’ve got Chris Golub from Swimclub32 on the phone, just back from a trip to Spain with his partner, Grant Gingerich. Chris is in fine form, talking a mile a minute, excited by just about everything under the sun. “So we’re talking to the guy, and we’re like, ‘Man, can…
After dark, this stretch of 22nd Street can be rough. The sidewalks are unlit, every open space is a parking lot, and the storefronts are shattered, boarded up. On the walls, the tags run together like tribal voodoo — less artistic than furtive, a secret language spelled out in whispers…
From the outside, Pesce Fresco looks like just another strip-mall Italian joint shoved between nail salons and auto-parts stores. Even inside, it looks like so many similarly themed, similarly imagined restaurants: mustard-yellow walls and dark upholstery comforting in their commonness; reproduction Taittinger prints and posters advertising things that once were…
Chef Troy Guard is holding forth on his restaurant philosophy. It’s pretty simple. “The way I look at it,” he says, “you do the same amount of work doing twenty dinners a night as you do doing 250 dinners a night. So why not do the place that does 250…
There’s one thing you’ll never want for at Ocean: service. On a Thursday night, dozens of bodies are on the floor — servers and bussers and runners in pale-blue chambray and black, captains in shirts and silk ties, managers of every description. Three tenders and a barback in the pit…
El Coyotito #3 (see review) is a real Mexican restaurant — all tacos and menudo, sopas de mariscos and sad accordion music on the juke. Lola, on the other hand, is a very fake Mexican restaurant that, in being fake, has earned the freedom to be so much more. In…
There are a lot of very cool things about living in Denver. The availability of cheap tacos and Mexican Coca-Cola (see my review of El Coyotito #3). The ready access to excellent sushi and cheeseburgers and pho and menudo and kitfo and Chinese dumplings and tandoori — sometimes all within…
Life is full of small pleasures and little joys. Sometimes, they’re all you get. The bad stuff is big, often overwhelming, frequently spinning madly out of control. Focus on it and you’d think the whole universe is going to hell. What with wars and disasters, tragedies both personal and global,…
Federal Boulevard stretches almost thirty miles down the spine of the metro area, from Bowles Boulevard in Littleton, where the Southglenn Luncheon Optimist Club keeps the last mile litter-free, to north of 120th in Westminster, where the Belger family handles clean-up duties as the road loses its U.S. Highway 287…
Tables (see review) is a great neighborhood restaurant — one of those places you dream of finding when you move to a new neighborhood and remember long after leaving. But if Tables is the fantasy-come-almost-true, the Cherry Tomato is indicative of the reality — the kind of spot you usually…
They’re already setting up the road signs, laying out the hurricane fence, rolling in the trailers and cordoning off huge swaths of Civic Center Park in anticipation of this year’s Taste of Colorado. And yeah, yeah — I know there’ll be music and art and culture and people selling custom…
At first, the most surprising thing about Tables is the lines. Big lines that sometimes reach to the door, stretch past it and spill onto the patio, lines that break and become clusters of neighbors squeezed too tightly around four-top cafe tables, gatherings of friends on the sidewalk and nearby…
Wine bars come and wine bars go. Like Sketch (see review, page 53), they often enter the scene with a splash — but then, crippled by the double demands of being excellent in both the kitchen and the cellar, too often vanish almost as quickly. For more than ten years,…
