I remember the first time I saw someone eating a pizza with pineapple on it. My friend Nick was sitting in his living room in Buffalo with a sixer of Molson Export and Beverly Hills 90210 on the TV, eating a Hawaiian pizza from La Nova covered with thin-sliced ham…
View larger specimen In order to make more sense of the world around us, illustrator and public house naturalist Nate Stone is compiling here a taxonomy of different barflies. While you’re out and about in Denver, if you spot any of these specimens please add your observations about their habitat…
There are some foods that become sacred through nothing more than fierce love and attachment. Your mother’s meatloaf, Sunday-morning pancake breakfasts, the roasted chicken your wife made the first time she cooked for you, pressed with the indents of her thumbs and speckled with fresh thyme. And there are entire…
I have mixed feelings over the recent closure of Sparrow at 410 East Seventh Avenue. On the one hand, I was never a big fan of the place — having beaten it down once in a review (“Cry Fowl,” March 17, 2005) and then returning for a Second Helping last…
There are some nights that you just know are going to suck, and then others that sneak up on you. I had great hopes for my night at the Buffalo Rose. It was a beautiful drive to Golden: The air was crisp and clean, with a sky full of stars…
It’s 11:59 on a Saturday night, and Blackjack Pizza won’t take my call. I dial and hit send, dial and hit send. Finally someone picks up. “BlackjackPizzawe’reclosed.” “Really?” “Yeah.” “At midnight?” “Yeah.” “On a Saturday?” “Yeah.” “Really?” Click. After six rings and a three-minute hold, Papa John’s agrees to speak…
Tokyoya Bowl & Bowl had every chance to be a restaurant I would love. It’s a small, stand-alone operation about the size and shape of a Taco Bell, stuck back in the corner of a commercial plot, and offering rice bowls and udon, gyoza, yakitori and tonkatsu — the classic…
A few months ago, I got an e-mail from Sean — one of my original commandoes, a hired gun whose long and noble service to the cause dated back to my first days here. An ex-chef and patissier, Sean was one of the first guys to eat with me professionally…
My personal commitment to the Froggish arts is nothing when compared to the two-line backstory of Uttam Lama, chef at the five-month-old Tibet’s Restaurant in Louisville. Uttam spent fourteen years as the chef at a Tibetan monastery. While there, he cooked for the Dali Lama. For culinary street cred, Uttam…
View larger specimen In order to make more sense of the world around us, illustrator and public house naturalist Nate Stone is compiling here a taxonomy of different barflies. While you’re out and about in Denver, if you spot any of these specimens please add your observations about their habitat…
It was long after midnight, and I was hours late for home, but it had been a great party — the tenth or thirtieth or fiftieth in a row; I’d lost count. We’d closed the restaurant, seen the last lingering tables out the door, then occupied the place like a…
While driving back from Boulder after visiting Radda Trattoria (see review), I got to thinking about the restaurant scene and how it relates to anthropology. Specifically, to “carrying capacity,” the term that anthropologists use to describe the size of population that can be sustained by a certain tract of earth…
I’m one of “those” people. You know the ones. The crazy people who talk about their dogs the way other people talk about their kids. The kooks who spend thousands of dollars on doggie daycare so that Daisy or Rex won’t be home alone. The people who allow their dogs…
In retrospect, we should have ordered sake. We definitely thought about it, lingered on the cocktail page while our server stood impatiently behind the hot hibachi grill with the rest of the menus and her free arm outstretched, almost asked for the $22 bottle and five glasses. But then we…
I don’t know why it surprises me so to find good Vietnamese food outside the neighborhoods with which I am comfortable. Federal and Alameda? No shock. Aurora? The town’s spilling over with great Vietnamese restaurants. But even though I’d heard that the stretch of Federal Boulevard running through Westminster was…
Radda is a great restaurant, but it’s also a comfortable restaurant, an unassuming restaurant, a restaurant where families come to eat penne al cinghiale and chicken soup in a parmesan broth, made with winter vegetables, lemon and faro, and where rogue CU economics professors sit and argue vehemently about the…
View larger specimen In order to make more sense of the world around us, illustrator and public house naturalist Nate Stone is compiling here a taxonomy of different barflies. While you’re out and about in Denver, if you spot any of these specimens please add your observations about their habitat…
Like all purveyors of great barbecue, Hoss Orwat is a renaissance man, a fine storyteller and a little bit goofy in the head. I’ve never known a good pit man who didn’t come to barbecue sideways — who didn’t sneak up on it or stumble into it or (in the…
I love fried cheese. Of all the things that man has invented over the course of history — the wheel, zombie movies, Gary Busey, the interweb — fried cheese has to be in the top ten. I mean, penicillin is great: You go to Thailand, drink a few too many…
I love trying new places, so when a friend told me of a “great” restaurant near her home in the Denver Tech Center, I was willing to get on the highway and head down to my old stamping grounds. But as I walked in the door of Bonefish Grill and…
Like many young smokers, I don’t mind the Colorado Clean Indoor Air Act — the smoking ban, as it were, that took effect in this state July 1, 2006. I recognize my filthy habit as a phase, one I will (hopefully) leave behind once I’m a parent and a full-fledged…
At Big Hoss Bar-B-Q (see review, page 44), owner and Buffalo native Hoss Orwat does chicken wings – because every restaurant guy who’s ever spent time in Buffalo is bound by law and tradition to do chicken wings at his joint, no matter its official cuisine or location. But, being…
