He’s just a kid, maybe ten years old, with very new white sneakers that don’t quite reach the floor and martinet parents like something out of Dickens or the grayer volumes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Society types with ramrod postures and delicate, picky little hands. They’re older, but definitely not…
Max Burgerworks should have been a great restaurant. Like a privileged kid saddled with a goofy name (and not even a truly awful one like Hubertus, Melvin or Agamemnon, but one only slightly unfortunate) or a Montessori rugrat born with every advantage, it had the potential for doing wonderful things,…
If I had an unlimited budget, enough pull to get the best guys in town away from their kitchens (or their families) for one night, and room enough at home for all of you good readers, I’d treat you to one great holiday meal. A classy cocktail soiree, dimly lit…
I walk into the Cherry Creek Grill, and it just feels right. From the outside, from the inside, from the heavy front doors to the exhibition line in the back, everything about this restaurant oozes comfort. The smell of smoke from the wood-fired rotisserie oven catches me in the chest,…
It was the Christmas lights that messed me up. The tiny glass ornaments lit from within. The tinsel. The light-up motorized reindeer standing beneath the abbreviated spiral leading up to the rotunda — unused these days except under special circumstances, dark, the chairs all stacked and set aside. The decorations…
I know how Thai food tastes when eaten with the fingers in the back seat of a Toyota Celica parked facing the wrong way down a one-way alley, windows up, lights out, the air thick with stale pot smoke. I know the smell of it — full and exotic –…
We were saying our goodbyes. Laura was inside with her mother, doing the last-minute traveler’s waltz of checking tickets and departure times, making sure everyone had their jackets, collecting books that had been shoved up on shelves, fussing with the cats — doing any and every little thing that could…
You know one thing that bugs me about the French? Their cigarettes. Gitanes, in particular. Their boxes are too big; they burn funny; and they taste like a pile of burning hair. But the Frogs love ’em and are absolutely convinced that Gitanes are the best smokes on earth. Know…
By the third time I’d driven past the construction site, the workers were getting suspicious. The fourth time, they waved. I was beginning to wonder if mocking motorists was their job, if the building site at First and Josephine was really some sort of day-vacation spot for burned-out roughers and…
There’s a colossal amount of stuff I don’t know. Seriously. A lot. And I’m not talking about the specialized, esoteric knowledge that only a few specialized, esoteric people possess. I’m not talking about being able to translate dead languages, suss out the weight of distant stars, or speak at length…
The original Brewery Bar closed right around the time I was born. What information I have about its glory days comes mainly from historical documents, Web archives and the spotty memories of its habitués. It was a beer-soaked neighborhood watering hole that took up residence in the old Tivoli brewery…
Here’s some advice for all the aspiring chefs in the crowd. Want a cinch gig in the kitchen? Go to Switzerland, the home of fondue-style cooking. If there’s an easier path to cash for a chef than setting up a fondue joint, I haven’t heard of it. That’s because no…
It’s Saturday night and it’s raining — long, vicious sheets of water not just falling, but slapping the ground as if the pavement had said something nasty about the rain cloud’s mother. I’d made the dash from my car to the door in a scuttling hunch — the way you…
Oh, I like this. It’s like having dinner in L.A. or something.” I blink, look around the room. “What?” “This place. I like it. It feels like we’re in L.A.” “Or something,” I reply, then lapse back into silence, feeling shifty and uncomfortable while trying — and succeeding, at least…
In the beginning there was the hamburger, and it was good. Back at the dawn of American cuisine (I’m talking the ’30s — the goddamn Paleozoic Era, foodwise) there was the hamburger, and all things sprang forth from it. Sure, we had our Betty Crockers with their apple brown betties,…
People who say you can never have too much of a good thing just haven’t tried hard enough. It’s Saturday night — technically Sunday morning, but not by much — and I am lying on my back in the middle of my living room, all the lights out, with my…
Tip down!” And the people cheer. Servers, cooks, busboys, regulars — those in the know — send up a loud, brief shout. Sometimes it’s “Thank you!” Sometimes it’s just “Yeah!” — but they always do it. Every time someone pokes a few crumpled dollars into the little treasure box by…
For a restaurant, looks aren’t everything. Pretty is nice, no doubt. Pretty will get you places, but on its own, pretty ain’t enough. The business is tough and getting tougher. A lot of sharp young chefs and blooded, veteran operators out there are hungry for what little cash is flowing…
In fourteen syllables, the sign out front — a small thing, almost understated, the color of wet slate — manages to capture the kind of arrogance, the brash hubris, that would be celebrated in Los Angeles or Vegas with spotlights and names spelled out in hundred-foot-tall bonfires of neon. That’s…
We stepped outside, Laura and I, our arms loaded down with takeout boxes, protected by an invisible force field of fennel, anise, clove and curry smells that pushed back the gray ugliness of another suburban parking lot in another suburban strip mall. Before us were too many SUVs, greasy puddles…
What is patriotism but the love of good things we ate in our childhood?” wondered Lin Yutang. Lin, I’m guessing, was not thinking about fettuccine alfredo when he wrote that, but I am. I’m thinking about gloppy alfredo sauce out of a jar from the grocery store, the dim ghost…
There’s a method — rigorously tested and refined by my friend Andy, an old kitchen buddy — for determining the quality of a Mexican restaurant before you even sit down. It’s quick, scientific and nearly foolproof, and it simply calls for tallying the bullfighting paraphernalia on the walls. A single…
