Singapore for Your Supper

Over the years, I’ve been assembling a dream menu of the best foods I’ve ever eaten, a desert-island top ten from which I’d choose if ever asked the question, “If you could eat only one thing every day for the rest of your life, what would it be?” Beef jerky…

Bite Me

Where’s the beef? First Con Agra recalled 19 million pounds of beef processed at its Greeley plant, and now GFI American, a Minneapolis meatpacker, has announced a nationwide recall of approximately 717,000 pounds of beef possibly tainted with E. coli. But if these recent horror stories of slow, inefficient health…

Consumed

When Kevin Daly opened Boulder’s Mountain Sun in October 1993, the brewpub had a small list of ambitious craft beers, an affordable, whole-earthy menu and a Grateful Dead theme. Nine years later, beer fans are very grateful for Mountain Sun, which is doing such a lively business that it’s just…

Drink of the Week

That crazy Aussie Steve Irwin may make his living pouncing on snakes and alligators in the untamed wild, but all you have to do to snag such a beast is order a Dirty Alligator at the Cherry Cricket. The Dirty Alligator is one of the Cricket’s specialty shots, served in…

Home at the Range

All of you health nuts are going to feel pretty stupid someday, lying there in your hospital beds dying of nothing in particular. Redd Foxx said something like that once, and I agree with him. All you joggers, all you twig-and-berry vegans, all you juicers, you fasters, you calorie-counters and…

Bite Me

Yeah, but how’s the food? Inmates at Denver County Jail are in for a change later this year, when the traditional “three hots and a cot” are replaced by two hots, a cot and a bologna sandwich. In accordance with Mayor Wellington Webb’s proposed 7 percent cut in departmental operating…

Drink of the Week

As Michelangelo discovered in the Sistine Chapel, creating an Italian masterpiece takes time. Mixing a great cocktail does, too — but the Limon Cello at Campo de Fiori is more than worth the wait. Poured from a glass decanter into a frozen shot glass, the Limon Cello mixes a simple…

Man With a Plan

Gene Tang — the owner, floor manager and master sommelier of 1515 — knows how to work a room. One minute, he’s on the stairs, smiling all the way back to his eyeteeth and greeting the point man for a group of eight just making their way up from the…

Bite Me

Market watch: Need some fresh foie gras for that traditional Labor Day picnic dish? Marczyk Fine Foods, at 770 East 17th Avenue, has goose liver available and will be stocking Hudson Valley and Sonoma duck lobes by early next week. These are fresh products, folks: If they’re in your hands…

Consumed

It’s Labor Day weekend, and no faction of the local workforce is more worthy of salute than the hardworking (and generally underpaid) men and women who staff the area’s eateries. But save your sympathy: Phill Corbin thinks he has the best restaurant gig in town; he leads the cliff-diving crew…

Drink of the Week

Ready for some monkey business? Follow the brightly painted arrows on Colfax past Kitty’s and right into Dulcinea’s 100th Monkey, Denver’s newest jazz venue. This no-frills dark den fills up nightly with the town’s hipper cats, who lounge on comfortable couches and listen to live jazz; Colfax regulars, who make…

Almost Heaven

The interior of Shead’s Fish and BBQ Heaven is not hip or slick or fabulous. Nor does it have that bogus clutter aesthetic or the faux-rustique feel so popular at some of the carefully sculpted eateries I’ve been skulking around these days. I can guarantee you that not a single…

Bite Me

Things are stirring at the moribund Dick’s Hickory Dock (26220 Highway 74, Kittredge), which was sold a few years ago by its original owners (who’d opened the barbecue joint in the 1970s) and recently sold again after the next owners couldn’t open because of unspecified financial troubles. After being closed…

Drink of the Week

Rocky Balboa’s glass full of raw eggs won’t prepare you for the Knockout, the signature martini at Sullivan’s, a swank LoDo steakhouse named for legendary pugilist John L. Sullivan, the “Boston Strong Boy.” This killer cocktail is made with fresh Hawaiian pineapple slices that have been marinated for seven to…

Chef and Tell

Chefs acquire weight over time. I’m not talking about pounds packed on the beltline from nights spent surrounded by food, but rather a kind of metaphoric weight — a density of celebrity that increases incrementally with each mention of their names by critics and chowhounds, a slow accretion of notoriety…

Bite Me

More news from Mr. Radek’s neighborhood: As we all know by now, Papillon Cafe (250 Josephine Street), Radek Cerny’s premier Denver address, has closed its doors for good. This came as quite a surprise to everyone in the biz (including some of Papillon’s employees who, allegedly, weren’t even told the…

Consumed

Ten years ago, Steve Berge set out to make a better barbecue sauce. In the process, he made a better life for himself. This month Berge celebrates his first decade as an independent sauce boss. “I make a whole lot less money than I used to,” says Berge. “But I’m…

Drink of the Week

“Wasted away again in Margaritaville…” You can practically picture Jimmy Buffett, who made it fashionable to fritter away sunny days, spending an idle August afternoon in Lakewood, belly-up to Gordo’s bar, while Sixth Avenue traffic speeds past in the distance. Gordo’s, which roughly translates as “Fatso’s” in Spanish, was founded…

Paint the Town

When I first sat down at Maruti Narayan’s, the table was a blank canvas, holding only white plates and white napkins set against a white tablecloth. By the end of the meal, it was chaos, a full-color topographical portrait of the Indian subcontinent done entirely in shades of food. There…

Bite Me

Food for thought: I’ve been on this job for a month now — thirty days that have been a cyclone blur of restaurants and reservations, a juggling act with me trying to keep a fork, a keyboard and my appetite all up in the air at the same time, and…

Food Fetishes

Karen Beeman is tending her WeeBee Farms stand at the Boulder Farmers’ Market on a Saturday morning. A band with alternating dried flowers and garlic heads adorns her hat. It’s around 11 a.m.; she’s already been here three hours, having gotten up at 5:45 to load up her boxes. “These…

Drink of the Week

As Russell Crowe strutted around the Colosseum — a scantily clad warrior seeking revenge — he should have challenged his opponents to the Gladiator drop-shot at the Foundry Cafe and Billiards Club: It would have brought them to their knees. To deliver this knockout, the Foundry fills a pint glass…