Next to me was a man old enough to know better drinking Jager shots with Guinness back, and when Green Bay made an ultimately pointless fourth-quarter fumble recovery deep in Giants territory, he found it reason enough to grab me around the neck and shake me like a kitten he…
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…
A quick update on ex-Café Star chef Rebecca Weitzman’s New York adventure. When I checked out her work at Bobby Flay’s Bar Americain in Manhattan, I loved the food and hated just about everything else. Now I just got word that Weitzman has put in her notice and is once…
Driving through the new Landmark development in Greenwood Village is like moving through an incomplete Hollywood backlot. Eight out of ten storefronts are empty, but they’re varnished with promises: a salon here, coming spring 2008; a bar there, pledged for 2009. There are parking garages and street signs, lights in…
When I was talking with Michael Bortz about his new City Bakery (“From Z to A,” January 17), he went on a ten-minute tangent about Under the Umbrella, a coffee shop and cafe at 3504 East 12th Avenue, and how much he dug the place and its baker-owner, Jyll Tuggle…
Ohio Pete called early last Thursday. “What time are you getting to the Cowboy Bar?” he asked. “We were there yesterday,” I told him. “But we planned our trip because we met you there last year on a Thursday,” he whined. Too bad, Ohio Pete: There’s no postponing this cattle…
My meals at Jing (see review) convinced me that the problems at Charlie Huang’s other restaurants come not from the rigors of cuisine or the classic chef’s tug-of-war between art and commerce, but simply from age and popularity. And in the interest of science, last week I stopped by his…
When the wind blows just right, kissing the exhaust vents on top of Charlie Huang’s new restaurant, Jing, all the oxygen on the street seems to be replaced, for just the space of a single breath, with the greasy, earthy, candied scent of garlic roasting, garlic frying, garlic oil gleaming…
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…
About twenty minutes into our first meal at Ali Baba Grill, I leaned across the table and whispered to Laura, “What’s the big deal? I just don’t get it.” For years, we’d heard glowing endorsements of this little Middle Eastern restaurant in a Golden strip mall from people who refuse…
Z Cuisine, the best thing to happen to Denver’s Frog-humpers and charcuterie addicts since the now-defunct Brasserie Rouge made its debut, has finally expanded — sort of. Last Thursday marked the opening of À Côté, chef Patrick Dupays’s homage to the Parisian wine-bar culture of the 1900s, at 2245 West…
I met Charlie Huang in a limo on the way to the Diamond Cabaret — which sounds a lot sleazier than it really was. A friend and I were drinking at the Funky Buddha when we met up with a group of guy friends who had a limo for the…
This could very well have been a story of anger and aggravation, a story about waiting fifty fucking minutes for a cab to arrive at my apartment in Five Points, a story about years of frustrated anticipation and irritation, a story that was really little more than a diatribe about…
How do you order right? I wish the answer were as simple as saying, “Order the simple stuff, forget the complicated” — or the reverse, “Order the authentic, the difficult to pronounce, and ignore the rest.” But at Ali Baba, it’s not that easy. This place has a learning curve,…
Every time I go to Ha Noi Pho, I stop for a moment in front of the doors and look at the hours, painted in white on the glass. They say the place opens at 8:30 a.m., but I’ve never made it here anywhere close to that early. In fact,…
Shortly before New Year’s, I went back to O’s at the Westin Westminster with some of my most trusted dining compatriots, where we put away several bottles of Piper Heidsieck champagne and had chef Ian Kleinman (“Mr. Wizard,” October 25, 2007) cook us a mind-altering meal. I’d arranged this foray…
The first time I went to the Little Bear, I was in high school and using my new State of Kansas fake ID. Like any teenager attempting to commit fraud, I was exceedingly nervous. Back then, the Little Bear was so tough that rumor had it if you came without…
“I’m going to drink you out of house and home,” I tell Matt LaBarge sometime between my second and third mimosa at Sputnik (3 South Broadway). LaBarge, a former kickball teammate and co-owner of both the hi-dive and Sputnik, has told me more than once that he loses his ass…
There was a time when my favorite Korean restaurant was the one housed in the shell of a former McDonald’s on Parker Road in Aurora — a massive place that still had uncomfortable plastic McDonaldland seats in the dining room and big Ms embossed on things like the napkin dispensers…
The January 10 issue includes part of a letter from David Hahn of Denver. Here it is in its entirety, along with Jason Sheehan’s response:…
Editor’s note: sorry about that headline. I’d had duck’s blood before, had used it in my own kitchens, but until I came to Ha Noi Pho, I’d never cared for it beyond its capacity to mount a voluptuously glossy sauce. Here the blood is one of the main points of…
Hanging above the entrance to Osteria Marco is a brass pig. It’s a smallish thing that you could miss if you weren’t looking for it. As a matter of fact, you could easily miss the entire restaurant if you didn’t know where it was — behind a dark door, down…
