They asked if I spoke Spanish when I first walked into Los Cabos II, the beautiful Peruvian restaurant-slash-social club hidden behind the ugly facade at 15th and Champa streets. And I do, sort of. Mostly kitchen Spanish, which — if you cut out all the extraneous cursing and references to…
Cafe Star (see review) was brought to us by the same people who opened Trattoria Stella six years ago. And while there’s not anything wrong with Stella (in fact, there’s a lot I really like about it), if I were told to pick two places on absolute opposite ends of…
Normally I avoid opening events like the PR plague they are. Soft openings, hard openings, grand openings, invitation-only VIP openings — all really just code words for the same thing: amateur night. While I understand the necessity of openings and the point of such parties (everyone has to have a…
“Lucky Star.” “Shining Star!” “The Star Chamber.” “Enough,” I said. “Star Quality!” I held up a hand. “That just sucks. Okay, who’s got that key lime thing?” The decimated remains of a key lime tart were passed my way, and I pressed my thumb into the crumbs, then licked off…
After eating pad thai everywhere from Noodles & Co. to Alameda Square, I thought that maybe I just didn’t like pad thai. I suspected that all the pad thai I’d put away over the years had probably been just fine, and that I — being the bumbling dimwit that I…
We are a highly mobile people these days. Not many of us are now where we were yesterday (or yestermonth or yesteryear), and we feel this displacement in weird ways. For example, I’m always gripped by a wicked wave of homesickness in the middle of October, right around the time…
When I reach Tom Bird, owner of Pho Fusion, the first thing he does is apologize. He’s sorry that the place doesn’t look the way he’d like it to. It’s kind of empty, not yet finished to his satisfaction. “I know, you walk in and you can see that it’s…
No local discourse on comfort food would be complete without a few words regarding the humble breakfast burrito. And while there are many, many places in town that serve up great breakfast burritos at all hours of the day and night, this week I’m stumping for one that may be…
Last summer I stumbled across Mike Frislie at the Bugling Bull Trading Post, where he was working the drum grill and smoker out on Highway 67 (1668 North Highway 67 in Sedalia, to be precise) and cooking up burgers, brats and some of the best damn barbecue I’d ever tasted…
I love expensive cheeses. The good ones — cave-aged, smeared in ash, riddled with veins of carefully tended mold, rubbed down by nuns and Italian virgins in towns whose names I can barely pronounce, made from the milk of animals whose teats I wouldn’t squeeze on a dare. Cashel Blue,…
Although fast-casual Mex is all the rage today — and with good reason, in the case of Tin Star — there was a time not long ago when Denver was inundated with white-tablecloth Mexican joints. But they were still years behind Las Brisas, which opened in 1987 and has real…
So how is it that Tin Star (see review, page 57), a Tex-Mex chain outfit from Dallas, and John Jourde, a first-time restaurateur more comfortable around software reps than line cooks, came together in Colorado to create a place that so impressed me? Good question. Rich Hicks opened the original…
I hate admitting that I’m wrong. Up to this point in my somewhat spotty career, I would have insisted that certain rules govern a restaurant’s survival. A space that can only be located by satellite photography is never going to make it. A fusion menu that fuses the cuisines of…
During the first months of Mao’s existence, developer-turned-restaurateur Jim Sullivan (yeah, the same Sullivan behind Nine75, reviewed this week) probably took more heat than any other owner in town has taken for the opening of anything. Restaurants, check-cashing services, massage parlors. Anything. I mean, the guy plopped a Chinese restaurant…
On my visits to Nine75 (see review), I pretty much avoided the desserts — and not because I was watching my trim and girlish figure. No, I skipped the massive slabs of peanut butter-chocolate cake and individual apple mini-pies (dressed with mint leaves) because I knew that the pastry department…
We have reservations for dinner — just the two of us, prime time on a Saturday night — but we don’t need them. Three months to the day after the opening of Nine75 — the high-gloss, high-concept, locationally challenged and oh-so-eager-to-please cafe/bistro that took over the former home of the…
Chicken-fried steak, chicken-fried steak, chicken-fried steak, gyros. All through lunch and well into the afternoon, this is what customers keep asking for at Diana’s Greek Market and Deli. Three out of five orders (and sometimes five out of every five) are for pounded, breaded and deep-fried beef, slathered in peppery…
Following service this past Saturday, Adega suddenly went dark. It came as a helluva shock. I mean, this was Adega. No place in the city had gotten better reviews locally or more love from the national press than this hip outpost at the corner of 17th and Wynkoop streets. Chef/partner…
One of the reasons I’m staying married to Laura for the rest of my life: She’s got a real good eye for hot dogs. And it’s not just hot dogs, either. She can suss out a decent Mexican spot from a block away, will know — with just a glance…
I have only one problem with Japon: the wasabi. It tastes chalky, pasty and dry, and its texture affects me like nails on a chalkboard. And since I’ve been known to order tekka maki to go just as an excuse to eat wasabi off my finger, a sushi bar’s wasabi…
After my disastrous meals at Del Mar Crab House (see review), I started feeling nostalgic for the simple, rookie mistakes of Go Fish Grille, a seafood restaurant that I’d given a mixed review back in December. In comparison to the terrible, terrible things done to my dinner at Del Mar,…
I’m not going to order lobster anymore. Or perhaps I’ll just limit myself to lobster once a year. Twice, tops. One of the quirks of this very strange job is that every food-related luxury, every delicacy, every rare and wonderful thing is now available to me pretty much all the…
