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In the next Bite Me, you can read all about the rest of the Best of Denver. But in the meantime, I have a major correction on the Best Free Chips and Salsa. I gave the award to Los Carboncitos, which definitely has the Best Free Salsa. Just one problem: Los Carboncitos doesn't serves chips. Not for love or money. Never has, not at either location.

Still, Los Carboncitos does serve incredible salsas -- four varieties, brought free to every table. They're meant to be used as condiments, slathered across everything on the menu -- except chips, of course, of which there are none. The fact that I would sit there pulling apart tortillas or tearing the ends off my huaraches in order to sop up every drop of salsa does not change that.

So, okay. I fucked up. Los Carboncitos' award should be for Best Free Salsa; I'll discuss my back-up choice in Bite Me. And in the meantime, the readers chose Benny's for Best Free Chips and Salsa, and that's always a good bet. -- Jason Sheehan

At the end of a good night, I often have more takeout stacked in the front seat of my car than I can carry up the stairs in a single trip. Some of my to-go compulsion is work-related. When I need to know exactly what ingredients were in the ravioli, the salade compose or yak tournedos, it's a comfort to be able to perform a forensic examination of the dish itself. But mostly I bring home leftovers because I am an insomniac and inveterate middle-of-the-night snacker who, owning to the quirks of his unusual employment, often gets to eat foie gras on the couch in his underpants at 3 a.m. while watching Futurama reruns on Adult Swim.

Yeah, Laura's a lucky woman..."

For your consideration this week: Blue Ocean Asian Cafe, a restaurant that nearly caused the breakdown of both my marriage and my refrigerator owing to the volume of tasty leftovers my meals there produced.

That aside, there's also dish on the Dish, as well as an update on Lucile's, where you can now get in, get fed and get out in less than three hours on a weekend. -- Jason Sheehan

I have long held that Buffalo, New York -- where I spent a few formative years of my cooking career -- is a city unjustly labeled as a one-hit food town. Chicken wings, chicken wings, chicken wings, right? Nothing but deep-fried bird parts and snow.

But this is wrong. Well, maybe not the snow part, but certainly the food part. Yes, Buffalo is home of the chicken wing. Yes, the lowly chicken wing is the food that made Buffalo famous. But really, there has always been a lot more going on in that town than it gets credit for. On many occasions I've held Buffalo up as a good training ground for chefs—a decent city with low rents and low prices with a well-educated population (including the students of several colleges and universities) willing to try anything at least once. A chef can experiment in Buffalo without suffering the kind of risk he would in, say, Manhattan. A guy (like me) can learn without the stakes being quite so high as they are in L.A.

Anyway, I've always been a booster for Buffalo.

"Look, Rhumba was never a restaurant that I was fully, culinarily happy with."

That's Dave Query telling me this. Dave Query, owner of the now defunct Rhumba (above), of the very much funct Lola and Jax and West End Tavern and Zolo Grill. Dave Query, who I took to task years ago for what I saw as the failings of Rhumba -- a sort of quasi-Caribbean bar and restaurant at 950 Pearl Street in Boulder that was ridiculously popular among a certain segment of that town's drinking and dining demographic but served food which I felt was being done...less than perfectly.

Ceviche...fresh chips and chipotle salsa...empanadas and arepas con something-or-other with goat cheese...fried plantains, thick-cut and buttery, crisp at the edges and gooey in the middle. Plantains are hard to do even moderately well, and these were the best fried plantains I've had in Denver. Since I eat fried plantains everywhere I can, that's really saying something.

Yes, I'm heading sur dela frontera this week with a review of Red Tango in Wheat Ridge, and the tale of one epic meal that very nearly ended with me exploding in the parking lot. For full details, grab the March 15 issue or return to this spot. -- Jason Sheehan

The lineup was always heavy on jam bands and, eventually, Adam, Jeremy and Matt realized one of their fundamental problems: the fans of that trippy, spacy, Grateful Dead style music were all showing up stoned and stoned hippies don't drink. Or at least not enough. What stoned hippies do have is the munchies. And what do stoned hippies with the munchies like to eat? Twinkies, of course. But also pizza. Lots and lots of pizza. So Matthew did what any sober, business-minded young entrepreneur would do when faced with such a situation. He went on vacation.

And thus began the saga of the D Note -- the watering hole/pizza joint/neighborhood hangout in Arvada that I review this week. Against all odds, the D Note charmed me by having some of the best damn pizza I've had in a year. So blow the dust off your copy of From the Mars Hotel, fire one up and return here later today to read all about it. -- Jason Sheehan

Fruition, which opened last month in the former Somethin' Else space on Sixth Avenue, opted out of Denver Restaurant Week because owners Paul Attardi and Alex Seidel wisely decided that the crushing DRW scrum might be tough on such a new place.

Still, it's doing a respectable business this week. Though I was able to get a late reservation just two days ahead of my planned visit and my table was ready and waiting when I arrived, the place had two turns on the books and was doing an excellent walk-up business, too, with (I have to assume) a whole lot of procrastinators like me keeping the floor full and the staff jumping right up until closing time.

The red/gold beet carpaccio with goat cheese fritters was amazing. The butter-poached salmon was like a textbook example of French technique, smoky, sweet, decadent with butterfat and fish oil, and perfectly presented beneath its thorny crown of shaved and salted asparagus. The beet spaetzle? Not as good as I'd been led to believe, but coming along.

I felt the same way about some of the other dishes, but Fruition is young yet. Right now, it's like ten degrees shy of excellence, needing nothing more than a little nudge here and there to become the truly great restaurant it has the potential to be. -- Jason Sheehan

A special report by Amy Haimerl

Ugly Americans.

That's the only way to describe the party that was celebrating a fiftieth birthday at Bistro Vendome last night. Of course, if we'd really been sitting on the patio of a Parisian bistro, we'd be saying "Ugly Americans" with an accent and that condescending snobbery perfected by the French. As it was, we were in Denver and still prepared to pretend we were Canadian in sympathy with our surroundings.