It’s not easy improving on an old family recipe. That’s what Alice “Candy” Gonzales discovered when she tried cooking up a few innovations at M&G Cafe, the restaurant at 2706 Larimer that her grandmother, Pat Gaitan, founded 43 years ago. Gaitan grew up on a Colorado farm where, as a…
While the rest of the country was making its way to Denver for the Oklahoma City bombing trial, two boys from another Midwestern metropolis slipped quietly into town to open a restaurant. Paul Khoury and Bill Crooks already had six successful eateries in their hometown of Kansas City and another…
Weary of wearing a suit and fed up with Denver’s lousy pizza, Charlie Puma stopped selling commercial real estate and traveled to Italy to learn how to make a good pie. Hey, if you want something done right, sometimes you have to do it yourself. So now Puma’s doing Enzo’s…
Best guesses: As I eat my way through another couple hundred recommendations for Westword’s Best of Denver 1997, coming your way June 26, I am once again forced to swallow some of the worst meals imaginable. Case in point: my lunch at Mad Platter, 5950 South Platte Canyon Road, Littleton,…
India’s Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal for his wife–sorry, for his favorite wife–in the mid-1600s. But while the ornate mausoleum in Agra has since become the ultimate symbol of opulence, in Persian the words “Taj Mahal” simply mean “the best of buildings.” Denver’s Taj Mahal, however, may be in…
Food in the news: First a LoDo bar tour spilled out in testimony during last month’s Peter Schmitz trial. (Schmitz partied at Enoteca LoDo, among other bars, after the not-guilty verdict came in.) Then Stephen Jones, attorney for Tim McVeigh, threw ravioli into the mix while criticizing an article by…
My two cents’ worth: Ever since Denver’s Best Restaurants, by Susan Permut, came out this past fall, local critics have been offering their own Top Ten lists. But as one caller pointed out on my voicemail, these lists are nearly identical and consist almost exclusively of high-end joints. Please, she…
When Coors Field set up residence by LoDo, the area came down with a bad case of baseball fever–as evidenced by an outbreak of sandwich-serving sports hangouts and frat-boy brewpubs. Several years later, these symptoms show little sign of abating. Considering the sheer number of eateries that have opened in…
A half-foot high, the tower of alternating raw onion and underripe tomato slices was dripping with balsamic vinegar. The first bite was like doing a shot of vinegar. The second bite was like doing a second shot of vinegar. There was no third bite. Until that salad, every dish I’d…
High steaks: Steak places are stampeding into town faster than cattle getting a whiff of water. Of Denver’s many meat-eaters, the truly fickle have already moved on to Del Frisco’s (8100 East Orchard Road, Greenwood Village), but does Del Frisco’s have that wide-eyed comic-strip boy Dondi hanging from a wall?…
Some chefs have such distinctive styles that you can tell when they’ve got their hands on a certain restaurant–they leave their fingerprints all over the place. Still, Oodles was the last place I expected to encounter a familiar face. This noodle joint is the umpteenth restaurant in a fairly enviable…
To see or not to see: The joint was jumping last Monday on the opening day of Peter Schmitz’s vehicular-homicide trial. No, not the courthouse, although there was plenty of action there, too. At lunchtime the new power place to be is Thuy-Hoa’s Bar & Grill, the Vietnamese restaurant that…
Religion has a few simple benefits. By regularly attending a place of worship, one gains not only a sense of deep, abiding faith, but a clearer understanding of the difference between right and wrong. Families that observe religious traditions together make it through tough times together. So I hear, and…
The more things change: The rough-and-tumble restaurant business leaves few eateries untouched. Except, perhaps, Club 404, a longtime oasis for cheap steaks at 404 Broadway (and a low-cost favorite of the meat-eating Chotzinoff family, above). Asked recently whether the restaurant had made any changes that should be reflected in its…
Beer today, gone tomorrow: On Saturday the three finalists in the Wynkoop Brewing Company-sponsored “Beerdrinker of the Year” contest came to town for a grueling round of questions by a panel of bewigged and wigged-out judges. And the winner (who receives untold fame and, more important, a year’s supply of…
Fine dining is out, family dining is in. Horseradish mashed potatoes are out, expensive steaks are in. Iceberg-lettuce salads are out, soups are in. Most food fads fly, then flounder like a hooked trout. So who would would have thought that more than a dozen years after the eat-it-raw craze…
Noodlin’ around: Rhonda L. Damraur, whose letter to the editor appears on page 6 of this issue, works at Basil Pasta Bar–and no one’s going to say she’s not a loyal employee. Damraur wrote to complain about my review of the place at 30 South Broadway (“Oodles of Noodles,” January…
Want more bang for your dining buck? Forget those theme-park “concepts” and million-dollar designs, the 350-seat restaurants that serve the same food you’ll find in any other 350-seat restaurant. Instead, take aim at a neighborhood joint with character and innovative eats. Bang! shoots a big hole in the theory that…
Begin again: Finnegan’s in the Adam’s Mark Hotel, 1550 Court Place, is now closed, bringing the number of food-serving Irish pubs in the area down to two (that I know of)–Nallen’s Irish Pub, at 1429 Market Street, and Clancy’s Irish Pub, at 10117 West 37th Place in Wheat Ridge. When…
When the food is spectacular, bad service can be forgiven and forgotten–once. Maybe twice. But three strikes and you’re out, baby, because few diners have either the time or the patience to spend two hours on a meal that should take one, no matter how good the food is. And…
The Pilgrims may have landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620 simply because they’d thrown one too many keggers on the Mayflower and their beer supply was low. Hey, they may have been Puritans, but they had their priorities straight. “For we could not now take time for further search or…
Hopping mad: There’s a right way to do a brewpub (see above) and a wrong way. Anyone interested in the latter should drop by the year-old Hops Grill and Bar Restaurant, at 149 Steele. The only nice thing I can say about this link in a Tampa-based chain is that…
