When Gary Lee Bomar, a veteran of the Denver restaurant industry, took over a dilapidated garage on South Broadway almost a year ago, he planned to refurbish the space and build a bar and restaurant with a menu full of smoked meats and cheeses. And while his remodel was always…
Hana Japanese Bistro is the complete package — complete with instructions on how to eat there, too. During a recent meal at this six-month-old spot in Louisville, every dish came with a lesson plan. “Eat the hand rolls first,” our server advised as she dropped off a tray of sushi…
Hana Japanese Bistro is the full package — complete with instructions. Every meal at this six-month-old spot in Louisville starts with warm towels and complimentary bowls of miso soup (a little dish of pickled vegetables or edamame often finds its way to your table, too). And on my most recent…
Andrew Weil, head of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, had a long-held conviction that food could be both healthy and tasty enough to be served in a restaurant. But convincing Sam Fox, head of Fox Restaurant Concepts — which owns NoRTH in Cherry Creek and Bloom in FlatIrons –…
In this interview, Anika Zappe, newly appointed beverage director for Le Grand Bistro & Oyster Bar and the upcoming Punch Bowl, weighs in on transitioning from beer-and-shot bars to craft cocktails, the drink that’s brilliant unless the limes suck, and her most memorable night while managing a punk-rock bar…
We’ve had some spectacular dishes at Encore on Colfax since it opened in 2008, and the restaurant recently landed our award for Best Brunch in Best of Denver 2012, thanks to chef-owner Paul Reilly’s deft skill behind the burners. Sadly, though, Encore has reached the end of its act: The…
Denver has a strong Italian history — but until the last decade or so, this town’s Italian restaurants were mostly run-of-the-mill red-sauce joints that you went to more for the convenience than the food. That’s changed, though, and today’s dining scene is rich with inventive and stylish fare from Italy…
With the Denver’s eating and drinking scene exploding all around him, Casey Berry realized that he was stuck in a rut. “I was kind of getting sick of my friends always wanting to go to the same LoDo bars,” he explains. “There’s nothing wrong with those bars, but there’s a…
Good weather looks like it’s here to stay, which means that food-truck season is revving up. Boulder is finally getting in on the action with “TRUCK IT!”, the town’s first truck party, set for June 8…
“Sriracha,” says Row 14 executive chef Jensen Cummings as he combines four kinds of garlic and serrano peppers in a food processor, “is like the new ketchup. I even saw it at a Mexican restaurant the other day.” Here’s how Cummings makes sriracha, in photos:…
When Brett Shaheen and Jane Duncan Knauf opened The Wooden Table in the southern suburbs, the place I review this week, they wanted to bring urban sophistication to their strip-mall address, giving the place a sleek makeover and putting out a menu of well-executed and thoughtful Italian dishes made with…
The restaurant would soon fill up with middle-aged ladies who lunch, but when Rob and I first stepped into The Wooden Table, we were the ones on early-bird-special time. The dining room was empty at 11:15 a.m., and after the server manning the host stand gave us the “Sit anywhere…
When Rayme Rossello first announced her plans to build Comida Cantina, a stationary extension of her mobile concept, in Longmont, she had big plans for brunch: “In my dreams, I’d love to do a 9 to 5 service that’s old-style Mexican: long, leisurely, pork dinners and whole roasted chickens served…
Brett Shaheen and Jane Duncan Knauf cut their restaurant teeth in the city: The pair met at the long-closed Sambuca Cafe in LoDo; after that, Knauf worked for the Magnolia Hotel for years while Shaheen did time in kitchens in the Bonanno empire…
“Corrido,” explains Yuri Kato, the director of Tequila Corrido, “is a type of music associated with the tequila smugglers of the border region. It’s romantic and story-telling.” And it’s also the name of a highland-region tequila that launched two years ago in Arizona but, thanks to Kato, is starting to…
Earlier this year, Leigh Sullivan Enterprises — a hospitality-industry marketing, brand-management and public-relations consulting firm helmed by Leigh Sullivan — announced its fifth crop of chefs to fill out the ranks of the Denver FIVE, an organization that’s “a culinary group whose main goal is to celebrate and promote the…
After some service flubs at Charcoal, the subject of my most recent review, I lamented the fact that the quality of service in many of this town’s restaurants has not kept up with the ever-improving food turned out by the kitchens. There are exceptions, of course, and those are worth…
Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was in Denver over the weekend, promoting her pin collection, “Read My Pins,” that’s currently installed at the Denver Art Museum, and revisiting the town where she spent her teenage years…
“We’ve been in Denver almost five years to the day,” says Amy Kempster of her and her husband, Adam Dunbar. And in that time, the pair has made a major impression in the Denver dining scene: Kempster has worked behind the bars at Jonesy’s EatBar, City O’ City and Colt…
In this interview, Courtney Wilson, bar manager at Williams & Graham and president-elect of the board of the Colorado Bartenders Guild, weighs in on what she’d like to see next for the guild, the drink that makes her forget her aversion to vodka and what she drank when she partied…
Charcoal, I noted in my review this week, has a service problem. The front-of-house team is generally a good-natured bunch of people. They’re friendly, they’re eager, and they seem to want their guests to have a good time. But they missed the boat when they ignored the small details, which…
Bartender Matty Durgin recently landed behind the stick at À Côté Bar a Absinthe after parting ways with Adrift, the tiki bar that just opened on South Broadway. But the rum aficionado immediately began making plans to integrate his favorite spirit into the drink list there — even if those…
