If you try to tempt me with anything fried, I’m pretty much going to enjoy it no matter what it is — except for doughnuts, which are frequently disappointing. Too often undercooked, over-glazed, floppy or dry, the truly exceptional doughnut is hard to come by. But when a doughnut is…
Palisade-based Peach Street Distillers has rocked the marketplace in the Centennial state with clear spirits, but whiskey — and, more specifically, bourbon — has been part of the plans since the get-go. “My two partners, Bill Graham and David Thibodeau, are two of the founding fathers of Ska in Durango,”…
Forty one years ago, Jerry and Deb Sturm opened the South Restaurant, an Englewood joint that turns out a massive board of Mexican-American fare and fish bowl-size margaritas in a festive space. Now, the family is getting ready to take their concept downtown: Next year, they’ll introduce Zi South on…
Eric Skokan’s Black Cat Farm may have started as a backyard garden, but over the past few years, it’s grown to a seventy-acre operation that provides a good deal of the food for his Boulder restaurant, Black Cat, throughout the year…
I got my own taste of living like a 1-percenter when, for this week’s review, I grabbed a table at Edge, the opulent restaurant tucked inside of the year-old Four Seasons hotel. Through a game-heavy steakhouse menu, the restaurant serves up its own version of Colorado — and it’s a…
Sake, with its range of styles, light body and crisp finish, is ideal for food pairings as well as an easy thing to sip all night long. Plus, you can take down a lot of it and escape a hangover. Those factors should have long ago propelled it into a…
A young woman pressed her face and hands to the window. She was wearing a tattered dress smeared with blood, which also dripped from the corner of her crimson mouth. That mouth contorted with an unheard moan as she scratched at the glass. Zombie or Occupy Denver protester? “Has to…
When President Barack Obama came to Denver last week, he snubbed the Brown Palace — which has hosted every president since Teddy Roosevelt except Calvin Coolidge — for the Four Seasons…
“The most innovative man in the world of food at the moment is Chipotle founder Steve Ells,” writes Jonathan Gold, the Pulitzer Prize-winning food critic at Westword’s sister paper, LA Weekly, in a profile of the CEO that ran in the Wall Street Journal late last week. That’s high praise…
All sakes start with rice and water, which are fermented in a process similar to that of brewing beer. But every toji — head sake brewer — has a different style, and rice polishing, additives and aging techniques all result in vastly different expressions of the spirit. Sake can be…
Yesterday morning, sixty people huddled over rows of glasses in the new addition at The Mediterranean in Boulder, feverishly writing notes while sniffing and sipping. While they worked, a panel of master sommeliers highlighted comparisons and characteristics of wines from Burgundy, walking the group through tastes that compared village samples…
Over the last few months, I went from the worst shape of my life to the best while continuing to eat like a food critic. Don’t punch me in the face; instead, read how I did it in part three of this new series: I love booze. I try to…
Tyler Baer’s foray into the kitchen started during a year abroad in Germany. “Food is a very important thing for me and it always has been,” he says. “My mom always made things from scratch and organic ingredients, so I was really used to having good food. But during college,…
A couple of months ago, we noticed that Mt. Everest Restaurant and Bar, the home of one of our favorite lunch buffets, had shuttered. And while we lamented the loss of goat curry, we were pleased to see that a restaurant was slated to rise quickly in its place…
Before Liu Zeng Qun opened Chef Liu’s Authentic Chinese Cuisine, his Szechuan restaurant in Aurora (which I review this week), he spent eight years working for the man who secured the visa that brought him over here: Johnny Hsu. Hsu is the man behind Imperial Chinese Restaurant; he’s owned restaurants…
We ambled down to Freshcraft last night looking for a pint of beer and a snack. But to our dismay, the spot was dark…
Boulder has welcomed several wood-fired pizza joints in the last couple of years, and it’s not exactly short on Italian restaurants, either. So we were curious how Tossa, which signed a lease on a place near Folsom and Arapahoe two months ago, would differentiate itself from the rest…
This week’s review took me out to Aurora to experience the Szechuan cooking of Chef Liu’s Authentic Chinese Cuisine, a restaurant that opened last year after Liu Zeng Qun left Imperial Chinese Restaurant to do his own thing. In addition to a meal, I got a primer from one of…
It may have been 80 degrees on Monday, but after six inches of snow, Denver’s warm fall is over — temporarily, at least. And when the weather’s like this, there are few things we want to do more than cozy up in the corner of some warm restaurant with an…
You can get great Chinese food in this town, but you have to know where to look — especially if you’re on the hunt for real Szechuan food, not the dumbed-down American version of the cooking of Southern China that’s a mainstay of dollar-a-scoop joints and many strip-mall spots…
Since he opened the first Pasquini’s on South Broadway in 1986, Tony Pasquini has grown his Italian restaurant into a family of five, expanding (in some cases via franchise) into the Highland neighborhood as well as Uptown, Lone Tree and the Tech Center. Now the owner is about to add…
Justin Cucci, owner of Root Down and Linger, has been gardening near Root Down since it opened three years ago. But he’ll be the first to deny credit for what grows there. “I’m a city person,” he says. “I have no green thumb in me. We have some great people…
