Comfort food is dead. I keep hoping that if I say that enough, it will actually come true. Comfort food should be pronounced dead, because it’s gone as far as it can go in the white-tablecloth-and-heavy-silver restaurant cosmos. It’s a horse that has been ridden hard, whipped to within an…
I miss Leon a little already. Don’t get me wrong: I’m glad to be back from my East Coast adventure — but he was something special. To lift a line from the good doctor (Hunter Thompson, that is), Leon was “one of God’s own prototypes — a high-powered mutant of…
When I’m in need of an energizing, centering, head-clearing taste of the Big Apple, I usually go to New York Pizzeria, a little hole-in-the-wall strip-mall joint in Glendale. But last month, I realized it had been a long time since I’d made a trip back to the state that spawned…
While the food Solera serves all us regular folk on regular days is just fine (see review), the food coming out of the kitchen on Monday, April 28, was better. And not better by a little, but by leaps and bounds. Better by orders of magnitude. Better in a way…
Bennigan’s. We have Bennigan’s to thank for Christian “Goose” Sorenson, executive chef at Solera. Coming to the Mile High City from his native Wyoming, where he’d been a frat-house cook in Laramie, Sorenson thought that working the line at Bennigan’s was the top restaurant job to which he could aspire…
The duck feet did me in. I’ve eaten some pretty freaky stuff in my time and have had duck (and chicken) feet on more than a few occasions, but after spending several days gorging myself up, down and across Denver’s Far East intersection at Alameda Avenue and Federal Boulevard, the…
When I am through with this industry — when I no longer feel (as I sometimes still do) the strong magnetic pull of kitchen life, the strange urge to put on my old whites and checks and stumble blearily into the 5 a.m. quiet of a house not yet awake;…
SAT 4/26 Lest you forget that outgoing Mayor Wellington Webb and his wife, Wilma, are prime movers behind the new Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library, take a look at the mural inside the arched, interior lobby.When the three-story brick library at 2401 Welton Street celebrates its grand opening at ten…
We have had an interesting 24 hours at Luna.” That’s how the conversation started when Wendy Aiello, who’s doing PR for the new hotel, got me on the red phone here at Bite Me World HQ last Friday. First, the easy stuff. The space at 1612 Wazee Street that had…
It would be so easy to make fun of the Royal Hilltop. It’s just another theme restaurant, after all. A British pub theme restaurant. A non-smoking British pub theme restaurant, tucked away in the back of a strip-mall so far out in southeast Aurora that it might as well be…
I don’t usually go to restaurant openings. There are several reasons for this, chief among them that the events themselves — filled with back-slapping and pasted-on smiles — generally bear no resemblance to how the places will look on their first day of actual service, and the food is nothing…
It was a cold night in Boulder when Laura and I walked out of Rhumba, the three-year-old Caribbean stepchild of the Jax/Lola/Zolo Grill family. The sky was silvery-gray, like old steel, with clouds hanging close over the Flatirons and a mean wind whipping scraps of newspaper, cigarette butts and crushed…
It was a little tough back then,” Sean Yontz, now of Vega (see review), says of his ten years with Kevin Taylor. “We all, all of us, worked 10 a.m. to 1 a.m. every day. I saw more of Kevin than my wife or my son. I spent my life…
Midway through my first meal at Vega — somewhere between cleaning up every scrap of delicious oxtail tamal and toppling a pretty but ill-conceived Napoleon of salmon ceviche, thin-sliced cucumber and jicama, and moving it around the plate to make it look like I’d enjoyed it — I had one…
Well, folks, it’s over. Last week you saw my rookie-year picks for the best of everything Denver’s restaurants have to offer, and I gotta tell ya: While I had a blast eating my way through the city (and beyond) over these past months, no Best of Denver issue ever comes…
By my twelfth cup of coffee, the walls were starting to vibrate. My tongue tasted like a leather strap dipped in Pennzoil. Through the big front windows, I could see the lights of Romantix glowing through the fog hanging close over I-25, interrupted now and then by the dirty white…
One of the great, guilty pleasures of a critic’s gig is having to wait for a table. Because I work anonymously, I don’t get to waltz into any room I choose and demand the best table in the house and untold adulation. No, I have to wait out in the…
One more bean sprout, Jay, and I swear to God, I’m gonna shank someone.” I laughed. Not out loud, though, because Glen’s threats aren’t always idle. “You gotta trust me,” I told him. “You’ll like the place. And it’s better than the bird food you’ve been eating lately.” Glen’s doctor…
My near-religious experience was inspired by mussels (see review, page 65); a guy I knew had a slightly less reasonable epiphany over a glass of wine. Mark was a cook, a blackout drunk and all-around unsavory character I knew back in the early days of my apprenticeship. I was just…
Le Central is what most people picture when they daydream of lunch at the perfect French cafe — the perfect French cafe this side of France, that is. Whitewashed walls and sunlight streaming in through the windows. A cozy grouping of small dining rooms, with ten seats here, fifteen there…
If you’re wondering what to do with those two hours before a table opens up at Lola (see review, page 67), Jamey Fader’s yuppie-dense Mexican fish shack, here’s a suggestion: Head to Hanson’s Grill and Tavern, just down the road to 1301 South Pearl Street. Like Lola, Hanson’s opened this…
While the crowds at Lola (see review) can seem downright predatory in their quest for the perfect table, the scene at Vega (410 East Seventh Avenue) — which opened just two months after Lola and started out billing itself as “nuevo Latino” — can be fairly sedate. According to chef-owner…
