From the outside, Bar Americain looks like the storefront of an abandoned Sibley’s department store, and from the inside, like every winner of the Miss America pageant over the past twenty years: pretty, but only generically and broadly so, calculated to be satisfying to the largest possible swath of the…
After a trip, my first meal back in Denver is almost always at Little Panda. Why? For starters, it’s always open. Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Christmas Day, St. Paddy’s: I’ve never once called the joint when someone wasn’t there, waiting (though sometimes grudgingly) to take my order for steamed…
Seek the pig, ye foodie snobs, ye noble gastronauts, ye bewildered and befuddled and besotted masses. King Pig, hanging under the lights like a beacon, like a promise. Find Osteria Marco, go down into its embrace and eat until you pop. That kinda says it all, doesn’t it? Osteria Marco,…
I’m looking back at the year from a twelfth-floor suite across from Carnegie Hall, on the quiet side of 57th Street. I’ve got a bellyful of ridiculously overpriced beer, cheeseburgers and Cuban chicken from the Brooklyn Diner, and have just returned from a nice digestive stroll through the Christmas market…
Mexico, Christmas 2001. Laura and I, in a fit of wild-goose inspiration, had quit the bright, dusty and idiot-ridden confines of Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a quick run through Truth or Consequences, Las Cruces and Vado, aiming the blunt nose of yet another in a long line of used $400…
Jesse Morreale, owner of Tambien, called me at home last Wednesday night. “So, how is it?” he asked with no preamble, no hey-how-ya-doin’. “How is what?” I asked, feigning a sweet, downy and unsullied ignorance. “How is it?” “How is what, man? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”…
As I walked into Santa Fe Tequila Company, I felt a little like Alice falling down the rabbit hole into a magical place. Sadly, I saw no caterpillar sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah, but the specialty drink list definitely winks at that wonderland with such cocktails as…
I’ve been back to the bars in Iowa City — the town where I got my undergraduate degree — a number of times since I left three years ago. And every time, my college friends and I have stood around feeling just plain old. Not old like the non-traditional graduate-student…
Some of the world’s worst restaurants come out of a restaurateur’s attempts to define a cuisine, a mood or himself. Some of the best come as an answer to a problem or a declaration of intent. When it opened exactly four years ago, Mezcal could have gone either way: become…
It was almost midnight when I left Izakaya Den. I muscled my way out the big, unmarked front doors, turned to face a bracing, cold breeze whipping down the street and staggered just a little. I shook my head to clear away the cotton, patted down my pockets for a…
I recently spent an afternoon at the University of Colorado at Boulder, boring the pants off an entire classroom of aspiring food writers with tales of my misfit adventures. But when their questions inevitably turned to how best to get into the food-writing racket — and whether this must necessarily…
There are people who love the entire holiday shopping experience, who are excited at the prospect of going to a hectic shopping mall with other busy shoppers, perusing the tsotchkes and searching for the perfect gift that their kids will actually believe Santa made. I, on the other hand, regard…
It starts out so normal, my inaugural trip to Micky Manor (2544 Federal Boulevard): warm greeting from a group of friends watching the Broncos trail late in the third quarter; pitcher after plastic pitcher of Natural Light, poured steadily into six-ounce glasses and accompanied by complimentary shots of a yellow…
As evidenced by the strange but incredibly successful tapas menu being done izakaya-style at Izakaya Den (see review), the Japanese know a thing or two about small plates. But other Asian cuisines have taken to the notion of little tastes of several dishes, too. The Chinese have dim sum; the…
My waiter came by, brought me a warm towel for my fingers, a stack of menus, a beer. Then we started talking — about the menu, about the Izakaya concept, about how to order and what I should order and how much of everything I should order. “How hungry are…
I’d spent most of a lazy Saturday avoiding the commitment of deciding where to eat that night. Laura kept asking, kept pestering me to make a decision — wanting to know what kind of freaky, dumb-ass experience her darling husband would settle on this time: raw fish, testicles, chicken-fried steak,…
In the restaurant business, the holiday season goes one of two ways. Either it’s all quiet on the Western front, complete with men in the trenches and hastily whispered prayers, or it’s a last-minute flurry of chaotic action — an eleventh-hour push to get open, get set, get closed or…
Something about the Thunderbird Lounge (721 Quebec Street) makes me want to take off my shoes and get more comfortable, maybe hang my coat in the hallway closet and then grab a bite from the fridge. I’ve never been here before and know only the people I came with, but…
While I may always have a soft spot for the Bagel Deli (see review) with its cramped displays of Jewish deli essentials (Dr. Brown’s soda, bagel chips, Halvah and schmaltz), those looking for a wider variety of sundries could do a lot worse than the East Side Kosher Deli. Open…
Laura does not eat breakfast out. Ever. She’s one of those people who dreams of someday living in a hotel penthouse — not for the housekeeping or the views or the glamour of being the sort of person who lives in a hotel penthouse, but just for the room service:…
I’ve heard it said a thousand times, by tourists and by natives, by local chefs and national food writers — said ironically, in jest, in cold seriousness, in rage. When your new, million-dollar French-Asian fusion restaurant goes under in a flood of bad debt and worse reviews, it’s what you…
When the people behind Prime 121 decided to bring yet another steakhouse to this crowded cow town, they were taking on quite a challenge (see review). But it’s been done very successfully a couple of times in the past few years, by operations that managed to jam yet another top-shelf…
