Restaurants

This ain’t my first rodeo, as they say. I’ve done my culinary tour of Colorado. I may not be to the Mile High born, but I have eaten the hell out of my adoptive home, taken to it with the fervor of a convert — of a man who knows…

Come August, Rob McColgan and Anthony Pigliacamto will open Modmarket at 1700 28th Street in Boulder’s flailing Twenty Ninth Street mall, a risky move that is nothing short of roulette, considering the succession of restaurants that have opened, and subsequently shuttered, in that wasteland of chains. But the 2,500-square-foot Modmarket…

Sand Creek Lounge turns 27 this weekend — and it’s been an eventful time. The first owner lost the bar when he sold cocaine to an undercover cop; the second lost it to noise complaints. Then Paul Engel won $10,000 on the dog races at the now-closed Cloverleaf Kennel Club,…

Here’s a little bit of what I wrote about San Lorenzo Ristorante two years ago: “Carpaccio di bue dressed in lemon and oil, whole peppers stuffed with cheese and prosciutto, buffalo mozzarella with fresh tomatoes and roasted peppers draped with marinated Italian anchovies, grilled salmon with roasted potatoes, garretto d’agnello…

It’s one of those eternal rites of summer: Stopping by the weekend farmer’s market, chatting up a few vendors and coming away with a juicy cantaloupe or two. But in the process, how often do you stop to inquire where, exactly, those cantaloupes came from? If you purchased them at…

Lev Grossman is my new best friend. Who is Lev Grossman, you ask?  Lev Grossman is the book critic for Time magazine.  And in Time magazine, Lev Grossman (my new best friend) just wrote a killer review of my book, Cooking Dirty. Yeah, that Time magazine.  And yeah, little ol’…

Phil’s Place, a watering hole at 3463 Larimer Street, was the unlikely setting Sunday for a book-signing event by Dick Kreck, the former Denver Post scribe who’s the author of Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family. After all, for close to sixty years the Smaldones ran Gaetano’s,…

T-WA Inn, which opened on January 1, 1984 as Denver’s first Vietnamese joint, is celebrating 25 years at 555 South Federal Boulevard by offering a four-course dinner for $25 per couple. The deal, which continues through Sunday, June 28, includes your choice of soup (chicken Thai, hot and sour or…

Great Divide Brewing Company and City, O’ City, the bohemian vegetarian restaurant, bar and bakery at 206 East 13th Avenue, are hosting Boozenfüd (useless trivia: “boozenfüd” has exactly six Google entries, all of which are related to this dinner), a multi-course meal featuring four Great Divide brews paired with four…

After twelve years, Dixons Downtown Grill, at 1610 16th Street, is finally introducing a happy hour. And it’s really making up for lost time. The happy hour, which starts today, will run from 3 to 6 p.m. seven days a week, and feature cocktail specials ($3 Ketel One John Daly…

By the time the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen ended yesterday afternoon, I’d already seen a whole posse of amateurs puke; another man suffer a seizure just after chef Michael Symor ended a fantastic cooking demo devoted to pork belly; Top Chef winner Hosea Rosenberg locking arms with knifed…

Since I found myself in Littleton Friday night, I decided to substitute a trip to the Southwest Plaza’s farmers’ market, at Wadsworth and Bowles, for my regular Saturday morning visit to the Boulder Farmer’s Market. Big mistake.If you bill yourself as a farmers’ market, more than 25 percent of the…

Biker Jim Pittenger, whose Biker Jim’s Gourmet Dogs won our Best Cart on the 16th Street Mall in the Best of Denver 2009, now has a second location — off the mall.Three days a week, he (or one of his minions) will now be on the plaza at 17th and…

Oops. Just posted this week’s Ask the Critic question, and already we have an answer (and a correction). Turns out that Bistro Vendome does, in fact, have exactly what Jim is looking for.  Right there on the brunch menu, between the soup a l’oignon and the croissants, there’s a breakfast…

The last couple of weeks, our regular Ask the Critic time-waster has been concerned with moms and dads and holidays and other assorted domestic questions.  This week, we’re getting back to the core mission of our Monday-morning discussion with an actual question by a reader. Jim writes: I spent 9…

For the past five years, the Third Way Center benefited from a major wine-tasting/fundraiser wine-tasting fundraiser in LoDo. But the event, scheduled for tonight, “was cancelled rather abruptly a week ago by the host/venue, leaving Third Way Center high and dry,” according to Tami Lack, Third Way’s director of administration…

Mighty Bites HoneyCrunch Kashi Rating: One-and-a-half spoons out of four Cereal description: Lots of different grains in this stuff: oat, wheat, corn, rice, rye, barley — pretty much everything included in the grain page on Wikipedia other than millet (which is just as well, since I don’t know what the…

At 6:30 p.m. tonight, Table 6, 609 Corona Street, welcomes Slovenian winemaker Aleks Simcic and master sommelier Laura Williamson for a four-course dinner paired with the rare wines of Edi Sincic from Goriska Brda. Not impressed? Ray Isle, Food & Wine magazine’s wine editor, called these wines the “darlings of…

The Denver Zoo hosted its twentieth annual Do at the Zoo last night, and Denver’s party animals were out in force, sampling tidbits from dozens of restaurants and getting wild! See for yourself on our slideshow…

You didn’t miss all this good stuff, did you?  No problem, we’ve rounded up the best of the Cafe Society week for you below.Hot dog eating champs battled it out in a Denver qualifier for the big 4th of July competition in Coney Island.  Jason Sheehan sought your opinion on…

This week, I talked about Dougherty’s — a fantastic neighborhood bar that’s perfect for getting into all kinds of lightweight trouble, which just happens to have a very decent restaurant attached and a chef in the back who knows his way around the cuisine of the whiskey-sodden Micks.I followed that…

Yesterday, I got a very nice note from loyal reader Jason Marsell, hipping me to some killer street food in one of the most unlikely of places.Pad Thai on the 16th Street Mall.I was both intrigued and highly skeptical — my first blush of overwhelming enthusiasm giving way to some…