It’s a brilliant concept: Let diners cook their own food. Not only does the restaurant save the cost of a grill man, but it also erases any annoying misconceptions about how long it takes food to cook–and how fast a kitchen should work. The idea is not exactly new, though…
My family was always known for its progressive thinking, but never more so than on New Year’s Eve. Every year, instead of driving downtown and getting drunk, we stayed close to home and got drunk. This happened during the annual progressive dinner, a tradition that originated in Britain but took…
It’s that time of year when your company, which is filled with employees who normally can’t stand each other, hosts a festive luncheon outside the office where those same employees can overindulge and exchange such enchanting, thoughtful gifts as coffee mugs shaped like breasts or cows. It’s also that time…
This is the way many of my conversations with owners of small Asian restaurants start out: “Hi, this is Kyle Wagner from Westword newspaper. I have visited your restaurant and would like to ask a few questions for the review.” “Newspaper? We don’t have advertisement.” “No, I’m not selling advertising…
Only the rigors of founding a new nation could have kept infamous foodie Thomas Jefferson from doing what one out of every four restaurateurs in this country (and what seems like one out of every two in this city) feels compelled to do: open an Italian restaurant. In fact, Jefferson…
Living out in the boonies has its advantages: There’s no pollution (we see Denver’s brown cloud from a healthy distance), people shoot each other only after they’ve listened to too much country/ western music, and you can run around the house naked, because the neighbors are too far away to…
For fifty years Dolcamino’s held forth in a South University storefront, cooking up big batches of pasta and red sauce for hungry students and other locals. Then the Coos Bay Bistro moved in–and suddenly the street is flooded with folks from all over town hungry for the restaurant’s excellent Italian-based,…
If the first rule of creating a successful restaurant is location, location, location, the second is to come up with a marketable menu. Ogden Cafe owners Jin and Mercy Lee had the location thing locked when they settled into the old home of Footers, located in the heart of Capitol…
If the dinosaurs had known ahead of time that all they needed to stave off extinction was a fresh, up-and-coming chef and a revamped menu, they would have put an ad in the Cretaceous Times posthaste. The Normandy didn’t have to go that far, however. Pierre Wolfe, owner of the…
Without Chinese takeout, the falling-in-love scenes in movies just wouldn’t be the same. First, there’s the montage of the couple walking around the city, her in an oversized shirt, him in high-top sneakers; they’re just getting to know each other. Then they stand by whatever body of water is near…
Barbecue was once the province of the poor, an inexpensive way to entertain. Three days before the big party, the host would drop the pig into a smoldering pit. By the time guests started arriving for the festivities, the meat was dripping off the bone. As the smell of barbecue…
The owners of Greens restaurant have a few things to say about the importance of location. “Don’t underestimate it,” says Michael Nolting, speaking for himself as well as for wife Clare and Greens’ chef, Hugh O’Neill. “We now know that the incantation `location, location, location’ is the absolute truth.” And…
Restaurateurs keep stampeding into LoDo–but frankly, the joints already there are starting to run together. They attempt to offer the newest, the hippest and the hottest, but instead of a wide range of choices, we all seem to be dining at cadiranchchampbrewfirewazkoophousegrill, ordering brewchew (overpriced food that goes well with…
Blessedly spared from Catholic schooling by a mother forced to convert long before Vatican II, I nonetheless endured the rigors of CCD (that’s Catholic Sunday school to the lay folk), with its ruler-wielding nuns and interminably long prayers. One Sunday Sister Agnes didn’t appear at class, and half an hour…
There’s nothing like having a child of your own to give the phrase “family-style dining” real meaning. Finding restaurants that are kid-friendly is only slightly more difficult than finding restaurants that are happy to have you pay your bill with Monopoly money. Enter Armando’s Trattoria, which not only calls itself…
If there are people somewhere on the face of the earth who don’t know about The Fort, it’s not because Sam Arnold hasn’t tried to reach them. A shameless promoter who hawks his Morrison restaurant like a culinary snake-oil salesman, Arnold has made this replica of a southwestern trading post…
The cash-poor college years can push many people to extremes. So it was only slightly surprising when, during a budget-minded trip to Pizza Hut, my then-boyfriend accepted a dare to down the entire contents of a shaker full of cracked red pepper. The stakes: $50–but he probably would have done…
If Jimmy the Greek were putting odds on Jimmy’s Greek restaurant, he’d probably say it was a sure thing. But then, Jimmy the Greek doesn’t know that Denver diners are a real handicap for Greek restaurants. The Jimmy of Jimmy’s–really Demetrios Lemonidis, “but everybody calls me Jimmy because of the…
At the beginning of the year, Pour La France! got the seven-year itch and decided it was time to try something new at its Denver and Boulder locations. So out came fresh paint, a snazzy set of china–and a revamped menu that no longer pulls solely from French roots. Still…
French kitchen god Escoffier advised that an omelette is “really scrambled eggs enclosed in a coating of coagulated egg.” And in The Way to Cook, one of Escoffier’s disciples, Julia Child, writes that “the eggs should be soft and tender inside, enclosed by a cloak of lightly browned coagulated egg.”…
The word on Carmine’s on Penn: You either love it or you hate it. If you love it, as I do, you appreciate the casual, fun setting and the huge portions of inexpensive Italian food. If you hate it–as many others apparently do, judging from the calls I’ve received from…
It’s hard to imagine, but as recently as a hundred years ago, no one but a few goats and some crazy rugged individualists cared much for traveling into the mountains. Hey, who could blame them? You either had to pack in your own food, live on berries–or kill your dinner…
