A Sweet Deal at Spicy Pickle

Sweet Leaf Tea and the Spicy Pickle have a sweet deal going with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Colorado. As part of BBBS’s 90th anniversary celebration, BBBS kids will be running lemonade and iced tea stands at the Spicy Pickle at 2300 Parker Road, Unit C, in Aurora, starting at…

LoDo’s Bar & Grill Takes Patios to New Heights

Whether or not the Rockies are in town, the patio at Lodo’s Bar and Grill is always a hit. And unlike the Rockies, the Lodo’s patio is better than ever this summer. Over the winter, the restaurant expanded into the Mattie’s House of Mirrors space next door, and that almost…

Week Three in Hell’s Kitchen: Drunk and Disorderly

Jason Sheehan is no fan of Hell’s Kitchen, but he watches it. And now he’s playing it, as he describes here and here. Now on to week three: At a certain point in my career, working drunk (or worse) became a job skill rather than a liability. True, it was…

Hamburger Mary’s

One of the most awesome things about this job is that I never have to worry about who’s buying the cheeseburgers. I just have to worry about finding new cheeseburgers for my boss to buy. That’s no knock against Denver — God knows, this city has more burger joints than…

Join the Club

I like community-oriented restaurants, places that hang their existence on serving one specific subset of society but also gladly welcome others from outside the targeted demographic — seeing them as so much gravy. Hamburger Mary’s, the gay-themed burger joint transplanted from San Francisco is one of these, but so are…

Sushi & Chopsticks

Sushi-and-Sapporo Quest 2008 begins when I suggest to Noel that we go to Parallel 17, since I’d scootered by there a few hours earlier and noticed that all the umbrellas on the patio bore the welcoming Sapporo insignia. But I’d been duped. Despite those casual umbrellas, Parallel 17 is a…

Marczyk Fine Foods/Marczyk Fine Wines

After my first meal at Hamburger Mary’s, I went next door to Marczyk Fine Foods to poke around and see what was going on behind the market at Marczyk Fine Wines, since this was the first Sunday when it could sell liquor. The clerk seemed happy to be working on…

The Sorrow and the PETA

How do you like your summer internships, kids? The jobs have to be better than the one assigned to Cassandra Callaghan, who’s apparently acting as a piece of meat all summer for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. A piece of meat who can write, as Cassandra proves with…

Racines: A Fallback to Fall in Love With

It is not yet noon, and already we’re thinking about escaping for the day. But not just escaping from the office — escaping to a very specific spot, our go-to spot when we know we want to meet friends, and don’t want to bother negotiating where that meet might be…

Bloody Hell! Get This Man a Bloody Mary!

Rarely have we received a more maudlin missive than this napkin, on which Drinking Guy outlined his need for a decent Bloody Mary. He needs your help! Anyone know of a great Bloody Mary bar — preferably where Drinking Guy can make his own Mary?…

Gaslamp Grill Goes Dark

It’s lights out, nobody home at Scott Tallman’s Gaslamp Grill. After eighteen months in business, Tallman decided last week that he just couldn’t keep his restaurant at 9199 West Alameda Avenue open any longer. (He’d been paying some of the bills out of his own pocket for the past several…

In With the Inn Crowd at Panzano

Yes, Panzano is a hotel restaurant (it’s tucked into the Hotel Monaco), but chef Elise Wiggins has also made this a favorite go-to spot for locals, who rely on it both fast business lunches and long, leisurely special occasion meals. But the daily happy hour (from 3-6 p.m.) featured in…

There’s Something About Mary’s

One of the most awesome things about this job is that I never have to worry about who’s buying the cheeseburgers. I just have to worry about finding new cheeseburgers for my boss to buy. That’s no knock against Denver — God knows, this city has more burger joints than…

Moon Time Chills Out

Moon Time, at 846 Broadway, is the second office of Westword’s editorial department, the nearby bar where we go when we need peace and quiet and…um…beer. But while the beer is cold, the air there rarely is — and so we had mixed feelings when we stopped by at 5:30…

Cheap, and Chilly: Brandon’s to the Rescue

It was hot, really hot, and heading to a nearby patio for some nice, cold beers and maybe a margarita on the rocks, or two or three, seemed like the only reasonable course of action. But our go-to spot by the office was unexpectedly closed — for air-conditioning work, ironically…

Milking It: Chocolate Honey-Comb

Chocolate Honey-Comb Post Rating: Two stars out of four Cereal description: Corn and oat flour mashed into the ingenious Honey-Comb shape — a modified hexagon, thickly constructed, with six holes geometrically arrayed around the perimeter and another drilled at the center. Then, the professors at Post sprayed the bits brown,…

Join the Lunch Bunch at Billy’s

While other restaurants are cutting back on hours, Billy’s Inn is expanding. Open just over two weeks (that’s reopened — the original Billy’s opened more than 75 years ago, and just shut down earlier this year for a change in ownership and a massive renovation), Billy’s will add lunch to…

We All Scream for Little Man Ice Cream

Sign of the times: The hot evening of July 6, that fateful day when Colorado liquor stores could finally open on Sunday, the lines were much longer outside Little Man Ice Cream than they were at Tejon Liquors, just a block away. And with temperatures slated to hit triple digits…

Cool to Colorado Green Chile

The new issue of Westword includes excerpts of a letter from one R. Rubio of Phoenix, which offers a flavor of a visitor’s view of the city — as well as a taste of what bad service can do for a town’s reputation. Here’s the entire letter: I am visiting…

Welcome Back to Billy’s Inn!

Billy’s Inn is now open, and looks to become as popular with this generation of northwest Denver dwellers as it was with seven decades of previous regulars (you can find their mugs here). But unlike the last incarnation of Billy’s, this one has a kitchen (the last one closed in…