FRI, 8/5 “You don’t need twenty thousand dollars to start an art collection with one piece,” says Charmain Schuh of Boulder’s Dairy Center for the Arts. “If you can’t afford the original paintings, like with Warhol, you can always have them in your collection through the print media. Printmaking is…
While I’m not crazy about what the folks from the “Wynkoop Family of Restaurants” have done with Gaetano’s (see page 52), they’ve done just fine by the Cherry Cricket. Maybe that’s because rather than having a downright cinematic past like Gaetano’s — where dinner was served to gangsters and gun-runners,…
While Gaetano’s (see review) makes a Mafia Disneyland out of this town’s Italian heritage, Patsy’s, another northwest Denver institution a few blocks away, at 3651 Navajo Street, continues to make history — and great homemade pasta. Patsy’s doesn’t have any Mob stories (that I know of), but it did have…
In this cash-and-carry world, nothing is inviolate and everything is for sale. Even memory. Especially memory. There’s good money to be made in strip-mining nostalgia, and for those who find a ripe vein — like the folks at Wynkoop Holdings, who moved their heavy gear into northwest Denver this year…
10920 South Parker Road, Parker 720-851-8559 The two restaurants in the mini-empire of Yume Tran and Jeff Nghiem are almost exact opposites. Where Sapa is sprawling, Indochine is tiny. Sapa is meditative, Indochine is cozy. And while Sapa’s interior is cool and green, Indochine is all black lacquer and tapestries…
Just in time for those record-setting temperatures, local pastry man John Hinman has opened the Gelato Spot at 1439 South Pearl Street, the former home of the Paris Flea Market. Hinman’s turned the odd little space into an Italian garden complete with patio seating and a shady gazebo. It’s the…
Walking into Sapa, the first thing you see are the green, green hills of home. Before that, it’s just a box — a nice box, fronted with a curving path leading to the door, lots of French windows and a nice patio wrapping around one corner, but a box, nonetheless…
For many years, Sam’s #3 on Havana Street kept Sam Armatas’s dream alive. When it opened in Aurora in 1969, it was the last Sam’s left — and now, 36 years later, it’s not only going strong, but it has been joined by a new, improved Sam’s #3 downtown. But…
When I get to thinking about diners, as I did in this week’s review of Sam’s #3 , I start making lists. Best of this, greatest that — it’s my Nick Hornby High Fidelity obsession shining through. And while his scruffy obsessives did their thing mostly with records and songs…
When I moved “out West,” I never thought I’d make it. Not really. Not way down deep, where a boy’s roots grow. When I first came here with thoughts of commitment — as opposed to the little visits I’d made in the past, tooling around Santa Fe and Boulder and…
FRI, 7/15 Tonight at the stroke of midnight, the wait will be over. Two years of agony and despair will end as millions of wannabe wizards and witches speed-read to find out the answer to the burning question: Who is the Half-Blood Prince? Local booksellers are keeping the anticipation level…
When this spot was known as Burgers-n-Sports, before last year’s run-in with In-N-Out attorneys, it was a great burger joint, serving waxed-paper-wrapped singles and doubles, excellent hand-cut fries and killer milkshakes, all under the watchful gaze of Colorado’s own Goose Gossage. With its green paint, chain-link décor and gift shop,…
If 240 Union (see review) is a model for how a restaurant makes it into middle age, then Steak au Poivre (in the old, subterranean Manhattan Grill space at 231 Milwaukee Street) exemplifies why so few places reach an age where they can be called “venerable.” “This is the toughest…
Sitting in the calm, cool darkness, bathed in the blue submarine glow of the television, I see them coming. Infomercials, spreading like kudzu across the stations, filling those weird hours between 3 a.m. and dawn. Paid programming: the last refuge of the terminally insomniac. Get rock-hard abs with rubber bands…
Sean Kelly and his chef, Seth Black, have been doing the Tapas Thing (see Bite Me/a>) for quite some time. They may have been the first in town — this time around, at least — to take the trend seriously, and they built the entire Somethin’ Else menu around the…
I ate my first two official meals at The 9th Door (see review) while the kitchen was still technically under the command of Michel Wahaltere, and was ready to file my review when I got the news that he was leaving the kitchen he’d set up. “For the record,” Wahaltere…
I love zombie movies. Of all the filmmakers in the world, I feel the most kinship with the guys who make zombie movies — freakish, obsessive man-children who know how to guiltlessly tell a ripping good yarn and who never got over that visceral thrill of being fourteen-year-old boys, up…
Just because you’re not part of the problem doesn’t mean you’re part of the solution. I’ve become increasingly tired of Chinese restaurants claiming some sort of special capacity for greatness simply because they aren’t part of a chain. Most independent Chinese joints offer food that’s no more authentically Chinese than…
A critic’s lament: Maybe I shouldn’t be so pissed off. After all, the Aspen Food & Wine Classic, which wrapped up June 12, did invite twice as many Colorado chefs as it had in 2004. Problem is, last year it invited exactly one — Goose Sorenson from Solera — and…
This is your father’s bad toupee. It’s a leisure suit, lovingly tended and preserved and worn regularly by a guy who still thinks he looks good. It’s an old Volvo kept running by unconditional love and duct tape, the ABBA record you listen to when no one else is home,…
Bad business, like bad karma, generates its own sort of poison. The taint of failed enterprise can linger for years in the floorboards and hood vents of a space, sickening and killing new businesses indiscriminately. Realtors, consultants, accountants and other numbers types will point to things like parking, visibility, foot…
Me happy in a vegetarian restaurant (see review) is weird, but how’s this for mind-blowing: me fucking ecstatic in a full-on vegan bakery. I have spent years walking the earth like Caine in the old Kung Fu series, roving around the countryside in disreputable pants and indulging my every culinary…
