By now, even Americans raised on Spaghetti-Os know the infamous differences between Italy’s northern and southern cuisine–but that’s just the tip of the boot. In fact, anyone who’s been to fewer than half of the country’s twenty or so major regions can’t claim to be an expert on Italian food…
Dining, Italian-style: My discovery of Geppetto’s (see review this issue) helped fill the hollow left behind when a real class-act Italian restaurant, O Sole Mio, closed earlier this year. A group of Ethiopian restaurateurs has taken over the building at 5501 East Colfax Avenue. Now called Axum, the name of…
Heaven help us if someone does a study that shows eating dog food lowers cholesterol and helps us live healthier, longer lives. Within weeks Denver would be overrun by “poocherias,” and restaurants could get a leg up on the competition by offering the freshest, just-kibbled ingredients. All it took was…
Eat and be merry: Nothing works up an appetite quite like a day of Christmas shopping. Hey, the energy required to repeat “No, thanks, I’m just looking” a thousand times in three hours to salespeople haunted by the bonus checks of Christmas Past was enough to make me start munching…
Over the past year the neighborhood around Coors Field has exploded with new eateries. Now, with the baseball fans gone and a long, cold winter ahead, some of those restaurants are going to make lunchmeat of the competition. But until they do, people who work in LoDo have a smorgasboard…
An ugly day in the neighborhood: The employees at Chef Zorba’s Cuisine, at 2630 East 12th Avenue on Capitol Hill, say a year-old controversy is taking a toll on the restaurant–and that they’re paying the price. On two separate occasions in 1994, Zorba’s owner, Alex Pappas, applied for and was…
Even a restaurant that set up shop in the Sistine Chapel and employed Capuchin monks who devoted their lives to serving others would eventually have to rely on the quality of its food to keep it in business. You can only drink in beautiful scenery and subsist on sheer subservience…
On the market: After nearly nine years of purveying fresh, organic produce and superior gourmet deli items, Michael and Clare Nolting are washing their hands of Greens, at 1312 East Sixth Avenue–their grocery, folks, not their excellent restaurant at 1469 South Pearl Street. The market’s salad days have long since…
Few caterpillars crawl as much as Radek Cerny has on his way to the butterfly stage. After the Communist government took away his family’s farm in Czechoslovakia, Cerny (pronounced “chair-nee”) had to fight hard for his culinary training in Prague. He ultimately escaped the country by slipping away from a…
Brunch hunch: A co-worker recently asked me to recommend a good place to take his mother, who was celebrating a birthday, for Sunday brunch. The group would include children, so it was important that the place be kid-friendly and reasonably priced. After recalling (and not fondly, either) many of the…
You can’t make all the people happy all of the time–especially if you’re a restaurant. A few years ago, trendy dining establishments tried to offer something for everyone: a few beef and chicken dishes, some fish for the pretend vegetarians, a selection of pastas and maybe some pseudo-ethnic dishes. But…
Subsisting: Finally, downtown Denver has a sub shop worth raving about–Mangia Subs, which opened a few weeks ago at 1730 Glenarm Place. In addition to the fact that owner Dave Cavalaro uses only nitrate-free meats, all the sandwich ingredients are top-drawer in the flavor department. I had a sausage sub…
Judged by its cover, the Fourth Story is looking good. This restaurant has what might be my favorite dining room in Denver. There’s an endless supply of books to pull down and peruse, and in this library, eating and drinking are not only allowed, they’re very much encouraged. All the…
California, here I come: After Barbara Lane, Westword’s first food writer and then-restaurant critic at its partner paper in San Francisco, the SF Weekly, visited Denver this past summer, she returned home to tell her readers that it takes a trip to another city (and a truly bad meal at…
It started with wine dinners at a handful of restaurants, monthly culinary happenings where cellared vino was uncorked and paired with complementary dishes. Next thing you knew, everyone but McDonald’s was doing wine dinners. Then came the boutique wine sellers, a handful of small, focused stores that catered to the…
Soon after trying Denver’s version of Napa (see Cafe, previous page), I visited the original for the first time. The weather was beautiful, but my California dreams of a leisurely vacation strolling through vineyards sipping vintage wines went down the crusher with the grapes. Since it was the busy season,…
Facing the unappetizing prospect of unemployment when their company laid off a third of its workforce last year, two couples decided to ensure that they’d always have food on the table–by opening a restaurant. But they didn’t stop there. To guarantee that they’d always have plenty with which to drown…
Brew snub: At this past weekend’s Great American Beer Festival XIV, Colorado got skunked. Denied. The state’s 27 microbreweries, 33 brewpubs, two major breweries and two minor breweries produced more than 400 types of beer last year–but only twelve won awards. I can accept that. What I’m having a tough…
Once upon a time, Daddy made the money and Mommy made the dinner, and Junior and Buffy would come home from school and do their homework while Lawrence Welk bubbles floated through the living room and the dog helped set the table. Daddy would ask what was for dinner, and…
To market, to market: Back in 1989, Alfalfa’s Market, the granddaddy of Denver’s organic groceries, introduced hot-and-cold food lines at its original Boulder store. Since then, the array of offerings has expanded considerably. On a recent visit to the Littleton store, at 5910 S. University, I tried a sushi sampler…
Just for fun, try making Hamburger Helper for dinner every night. Make it the same way, with the same ingredients and the same side dishes. After two weeks, you’ll be sick to death of making Hamburger Helper. That’s what it’s like cooking in a restaurant. Many chefs circumvent kitchen tedium…
Hello and goodbye: Development in LoDo took an ugly turn recently when owners of the Ice House forced the Bluepoint restaurant (and everyone else) out so the building can be turned into lofts or offices, they’re not sure which. Half the staff at Westword is in mourning–Bluepoint was the spot…
