Keen readers may have noticed we didn’t give an award for Best Coffee Shop in this year’s Best of Denver issue. There’s a reason. Coffee shop awards are the third rail of best-of editions. Most people rabidly adore their favorite java joint with the same passion usually reserved for a…
I felt I had to set down my initial impressions of the place before I lost them — before they were blown clean out of my head with shotgun severity by the next outrage. So there I was, hunched up against the wall, frantically scribbling on the back of an…
I finally made it back to New York for what was not “one of,” not “among” the best meals of my life — but, plainly and simply, was the greatest meal of my life. It was only the third most expensive (coming in behind a dinner last year at the…
Coming down from the mountains, I was eating tafelspitz with my fingers. I was scooping up spaetzle — sticky with gravy, dyed purple by the pickled cabbage it had snuggled up against on the plate — and shoveling it into my mouth. Like a caveman (or just another unprepared culinary…
Much as I might enjoy them, man cannot live on caramel corn and kartofelpuffer alone. So while I was experiencing springtime in the Rockies, I stopped by another Georgetown favorite, the Raven Hill Mining Company, for a quick lunch. Like T-shirt shops on the boardwalk and shacks selling coconut boats…
I spent a long time talking with the Candy Company’s Rube Goeringer last week, and got a fascinating glimpse into the history of Georgetown – particularly that part of Georgetown now occupied by his candy shop. I got even more of a peek into the past just by hanging out…
We don’t do a lot of reporting on food recalls here, but this recent one really caught my eye. “On April 5, Malt-O-Meal announced that it was voluntarily recalling its unsweetened Puffed Rice and unsweetened Puffed Wheat Cereals produced with ‘Best If Used By’ codes between April 8, 2008 (coded…
Calling all couch potatoes! Check out the Food Network this Sunday at 7 p.m. for the Iron Chef America battle between Bobby Flay and Martin Rios of the Inn of the Anasazi in Santa Fe. Why? Because Chef Rios brought along his brother Daniel Rios as one of his two…
I used to be afraid of going into new places. And not just regular afraid. This was real terror — the kind of knee-knocking, heavy-breathing, anxiety-ridden fear that some people (like me) feel when forced to go to the dentist and others (unlike me) would experience if, through some unfathomable…
No sooner had Jason Sheehan’s review of Encore and its crooked tables hit the streets than those tables disappeared. The timing was pure coincidence, Sheehan reports in the current Bite Me. But the new hats on the chefs — replacing their Strawberry Shortcake: The Musical toques — was no coincidence,…
GB Fish & Chips used to be a computer store before owner Alex Stokeld got his hands on it last year. But the place really looks more like the kind of place where computers might’ve been operated in secret, like maybe during the run-up to a nuclear war. It is…
We are gathered here today to mark the passing of one of the oldest Chipotle restaurants in Denver, the location at 13th and Pennsylvania streets. One of the original, 15-20 pre-McDonald’s Chipotles, the store opened in 1998, back before the big-burrito chain — founded in Denver five years earlier –…
Neighborhood Flix Cinema & Cafe, which opened in November in the Lowenstein project, is a combination movie theater and cafe with a menu gleefully designed by gallivanting knife-for-hire James Mazzio and a full bar, a place where a man willing to lay down the coin can drink his way through…
If Neighborhood Flix is an independent, high-end exemplar of the dinner-and-a-movie concept, then Movie Tavern — part of a multi-unit, food-and-movies chain out of Texas — is the McDonald’s, Olive Garden and T.G.I. Friday’s of the industry all rolled into one. While the basic idea of combining food and film…
They say that everyone — even the guy with the best gig in the world — dreams occasionally of doing something else with his labors. I know chefs who dream of being musicians, musicians who’d love to be chefs, real estate brokers who spend their nights writing strange novels, and…
I’d been looking forward to seeing There Will Be Blood. It had been nominated for about a hundred Academy Awards, and my more serious film-nerd friends talked about it like it was a singular work of staggering genius that would shape the way Hollywood made movies for decades — the…
Last week, I received this e-mail (reprinted verbatim) from a Mr. Jason Mason: Sheehan (Mr Anthony Bourdain wannabe) Can you or will you ever give a true review w/stars, forks, diamonds, pokadots, liquor bottles, etc? I’ve been in the business a long time and have never seen anyone like you…
Here’s my favorite story about the Mexico City Lounge — a great neighborhood joint that was in the ballpark neighborhood long before Coors Field ever entered the picture. Back in the days when Denver having a Major League Team was just a pipe dream, Pete Coors was having lunch with…
It was my dining companion who noticed the weird thing about the tables at Encore. “Look at that,” she said, pointing to the round four-top next to us, noting how uneven the table was, how crooked. It was warped so badly that the flat outside edge had cracked and split…
In the Best of Denver 2007, I touted Yo Philly, the sandwich shop inside a Conoco station run by Jerry Cheryl, and followed up a few weeks later with this warning: “If you haven’t yet made the scene, you should. My only fear is that someday this gas-station counter will…
Of the many contributions of the Irish to world culture—from colcannon and those silly snap-brim tweed hats of which my father is so fond to the music of the Pogues and the films of Jim Sheridan—I don’t think anyone would argue with my saying that whiskey is the best. There’s…
My friend and the waitress were still talking about recycling, about the re-use and re-application of found objects, cast-off materials. And though I was concentrating on the food, some of their conversation must’ve penetrated, because I found myself thinking about recycling, too. About the salvage and reclamation of forgotten things…
