It’s really surprising, the number of food items that are illegal to import into the United States. What’s maybe even more surprising (and no doubt troubling to the food police) is how easy it is for a crafty gastronaut to lay hands on most, if not all, of these proscribed…
Biker Jim Pittenger runs the coolest hot dog cart in the city: Biker Jim’s Gourmet Dogs. A trained journalist and former repo man, ex-resident of the great state of Alaska and proud biker, Jim now makes his living slinging Denver’s best dogs from his Cadillac of carts on the corner…
This week we have a special guest commentator, J “I love grandpa candy” Kellermeyer. That’s not really his middle name, but it sure is what we like to call him. J is a connoisseur of all sorts of candy that you probably thought they stopped making in 1953. He’s been…
I watch the guy behind the counter work the rice, his hands moving with the formality and grace of a Balinese dancer’s, through a series of motions so natural, so ingrained, they are like breathing. “Slow today,” I say, and he nods. “Slow,” he repeats. “Not for lunch. Lunch was…
I’m slowly coming to the realization that the quality of a neighborhood sushi bar can be judged by the number of personalized sake boxes displayed behind the bar. Why? Because the sake box is a mark of dedication — like a gang tattoo or Heidelburg dueling scar — that shows…
The day after my review of Gemelli’s hit the stands, I got this missive from a reader: After reading your excellent review, my friend and I arrived at 11:10 this morning (Fri), drooling over the thought of the shrimp scampi …There was an 8 top that had walked in immediately…
I love cereal, I love milkshakes. So when Carl’s Jr. introduced their new Cap’n Crunch Milkshake, I was immediately putty in their hands. Or I should say I wanted to be putty. The trouble was twofold: 1) I don’t much frequent Carl’s Jr. and 2) I accidentally caught a glimpse…
From my spot at the sushi bar, I can’t see outside. The windows are frosted, decorated with pictures of geishas and stalks of bamboo. I can’t hear anything from the outside, either, because they have the radio tuned to some kind of Asian soft-rock station—Tokyo’s version of Kenny G toodling…
Last week, while writing about the resurrection of Pizzeria Mundo (right), I mentioned that new owner Patrick Pool was trying to be nice to the planet and his fellow man by using as much local, organic produce as he could. Since he was heavily involved in Denver Urban Gardens, he…
The Cherry Creek neighborhood went into mourning when Greg Goldfogel closed Amore last year. (The space it once occupied across from Little Ollie’s s slated to become a Hudson’s steakhouse.) But Goldfogel gave Denver a real consolation prize with Alto Restaurant, the spot he opened in the former home of…
My father used to smoke a pipe. For decades, the man was rarely without it, and he seemed to be forever packing and unpacking it, tamping it, lighting it, re-lighting it or just generally fussing with it. I came to know the sounds of his pipe-smoking as a kind of…
Indiana Jones Chocolate Cereal with Marshmallows Kellogg’s Rating: Three spoons out of four Cereal description: The main pieces consist of brown oat-and-corn puffs — but the main attractions are the marshmallows, which come in four different shapes. “Indy’s Hat” might more accurately be described as “a triangle,” and only its…
Can a candy with a malted center ever really be milkshake-flavored? Wouldn’t it automatically be malt-flavored? This obviously isn’t a question the marketing people at Hershey’s worried themselves over, and it certainly didn’t stop us from picking up a giant pink pack of the candies when we spied them in…
If you’ve got a sweet tooth, you’ve come to the right place. Welcome to Candy Girls, where we, your faithful candy enthusiasts, Aubrey and Liz, will review a new sweet treat every Friday. We’ll be on the lookout for oddball delectables, out-of-the-ordinary confections, and all those bizarre sweets you always…
Okay, what the hell is up with my coffee? Seriously, I go to Starbucks because I like Starbucks. If I didn’t like Starbucks, I could go to any one of a dozen other coffee shops within spitting distance of my office door. But I don’t, because I like Starbucks. Or…
I wanted to get above thirty. Thirty sounded respectable: the number of days in June, the number of minutes it’s safe to stare at Rachael Ray before your head explodes. Thirty would be an accomplishment, something I could brag to people about and they’d stare back at me, impressed, and…
Three weeks ago, I had the worst shrimp scampi of my life. Two weeks ago, I wrote about it when I reviewed Grand Lux Cafe. The shrimp scampi there was so bad that even though I ate only a few bites before pushing it away, the horror of it (and…
“If you’re going to take Vienna, take Vienna.” Napoleon said that, and I’ve always liked the line. He was speaking, of course, not just about sacking Austria’s capital, but of a certain conqueror’s mindset: Don’t just say you’re going to do something; do it. And once you’ve started, see it…
Mark Schlereth isn’t a green chile expert. He doesn’t know how to make it, he doesn’t have any favorite places around Denver that make it, and he certainly wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between Colorado-style chile and New Mexico-style. Until recently, he admits, “I’d never had green chile…
I recently got an e-mail from Page Productions, a Minneapolis company that produces the show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives: “We are researching the Denver area for our Food Network show which will be filming 6 or 7 different establishments in Colorado in a couple of months. I keep stumbling across…
Talk about a raw deal! According to the Colorado Attorney General’s Office, the former owners of Osaka Sushi have been charged with human trafficking — because they allegedly made two South Korean immigrants work there for no pay, threatening them with deportation if they complained. Here’s the press release from…
At its most elemental, a great shrimp scampi consists of shrimp, garlic, lemon and white wine. It is shrimp in an Italian beurre blanc—the garlic (and shallots) used to start a sauté pan, seasoned with good olive oil, deglazed with white wine, spritzed with lemon juice and mounted, at the…
