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There is only one true Italian restaurant -- back east, in that charmed province that runs along the coast, north into New England, south as far as Baltimore. Upstate, downstate, in the barrens and on the shore, just one restaurant with 10,000 names that has grown the way mushrooms grow, invisibly, inexplicably, sending runners out into dodgy neighborhoods and onto street corners once lit by trash-can fires, sprouting buds that push up through the cracked cement and grow into another Tony’s, Frank’s, Mama Leone’s, Mama Tacone’s or Jimmy’s All-Star, another Campesino’s, another Gianello’s -- always possessive, always named.
There is only one Italian restaurant. Ten tables, sometimes a bar, sometimes a counter separating the kitchen in the back from the floor, sometimes a curtain, sometimes a door. Red-and-white checked tablecloths or green-and-white checked tablecloths, Sinatra or Louis Prima, pictures on the walls of long-gone relations in black and white; of Tuscan hillsides in oversaturated color; of garlic cloves, tomatoes, bowls of fruit.

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“I’ve been thrown out of some of these bars. Chased out. Ignored. I don’t do karaoke, but I know a place where one might indulge their proclivities for singing half-drunk versions of Mandy or Forever in Blue Jeans until late in the night or early in the morning. I know where to get great baguette, crab soup, acupuncture, a two dollar bacon sandwich, Korean donuts, Pocky and lychee juice. I know where to find durian. If it ever becomes an issue, I’m pretty sure I know where to find a hitman. When I have an appetite for it, I know where to go for shabu shabu.”

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“On my second night at Fruition, I lit my menu on fire. It wasn’t a big fire—just the sort one gets from an unfortunate proximity of a heavy-bond paper menu to a small candle on the dinner table. I put the fire out with the palm of my hand—thankful, in the instant that my hand came down on the little tongues of flame, for the years of kitchen work that’d given me calluses like cracked leather, but remembering about two seconds later that it’d been five years since I’d been in a kitchen in any professional capacity and that calluses (like scars, friendships and memories) fade. Burning paper smells thick, heavy, a little bit woody like paper’s memory of when it used to be a tree. Burning restaurant critic smells, perhaps unsurprisingly, a little like barbecue.”

I managed to embarrass myself quite thoroughly every time I sat down to dinner at Fruition. Three meals, three bad scenes—and yet through it all, the restaurant itself got better and better. Fruition is an amazing restaurant, and this week you can read all about it right here.

In this week’s column, we’ve got even more about Fruition—a conversation with chef Alex Seidel, some chat about how his kitchen is arranged and his plans for the future. (Here’s a hint: he’s going to be cooking. A Lot.) And for those of you who’ve maybe heard enough about Fruition already (seeing as I am willfully a bit late to the game here and everybody and their mothers have already been talking this place up like it was the Second Coming), there’s also some news on Eric Roeder’s new venture, some word on closures, and another visit to Z Cuisine for an update on chef Patrick DuPays’s menus as we roll into the spring season.– Jason Sheehan

Never heard of a Violet Crumble? Don’t worry, because neither has most of the rest of the world outside of Australia, Hawaii and parts of the U.K. But personally, I’m somewhat obsessed with the stranger extremes of the confectionery arts and have spent many an evening wandering around the dry-stock shelves of import stores searching out freak tastes from across the country and around the world.

And while many of these (candied baby crabs, Botan rice candy, Turkish Delight, digestive biscuits, sickly-sweet milk chockys, jellybeans that taste like cut grass and veal) have been completely and totally disgusting, I did become thoroughly addicted to a bar made by Nestle Australia.

This would be a Violet Crumble -- a chocolate-covered honeycomb bar with a texture like biting dry plaster, which shatters into shards as sharp as glass. Sounds delicious, right? But that’s the trick, because it is delicious -- tasting of smoked raw sugar, of deeply sweet and dirty honey, of a sugar cube soaked in Liquid Smoke, then veiled in milk chocolate. It is such a bizarre flavor that the only proper way to eat a bar is over days, taking a nibble here and a nibble there, never allowing yourself to become accustomed to the essential strangeness of biting into something that tastes like cigar-ash-and-honey dressed in chalk.

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Okay, so after the totally less-than-smashing success of my last attempt at getting all you grubniks more involved in the day-to-day business of this blog thingamajig (my ill-fated “What’s your favorite taste of Colorado” question, posed just ahead of this year’s Best of Denver issue in a thinly-veiled and desperate attempt at getting some new restaurant ideas), I swore that I was done with this whole vox populi, word-on-the-street experiment in dining democracy. I figured that if a simple question like the one I posed was too much for more than a handful of you to respond to, then I would just drop it, forget these periodic fishing trips for new flavors, and get back to doing what I do best: cursing, ranting, making dick jokes and regaling you with long, rambling, often pointless stories about zombies and pancakes.

But here’s the thing: I don’t like to fail. I’m uncomfortable with the thought of abandoning this dialog, even if it sometimes seems as though I’m talking to myself. And I don’t ever give up. So I’ve decided that it’s time to try again.

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It was the first seriously hot day of the year, maybe the second. Outside, the whole world smelled like cherry blossoms and living earth. I had the speakers on the computer turned down low and Tom Waits was singing You Can Never Hold Back Spring. It was that kind of day, his voice like glue and sand, singing ugly about pretty things, but I barely heard the husk of his words. I had my own lyrics running: picnickin’ and politickin’, a pig in the potato patch. Funny names for serious business, all talking about barbecue.

“Come on, Jay! I’m hungry. Make a decision here.”

I smiled to myself, maybe a little evilly. We’ve been married almost six years, Laura and me. I’m just now starting to figure some shit out.

“Barbecue,” I yelled down the stairs. “We’re gonna go get some barbecue.””

Ah, yes… As the seasons change, a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of barbecue. And where better to get some barbecue than at a drive-thru, chain pig-cooker out in the wilds of suburban Southlands?

Okay, I can think of a few better places than that, too. But really, I think you’ll be surprised with what Jim ‘N Nick’s Bar-B-Q is able to come up with. And you can read all about it in this week’s review, just a quick click away…
--Jason Sheehan

As promised in this week’s Bite Me, here’s the full text of Lili Bjorklund’s review of La Sandia from the student newspaper at Graland. Bear in mind that though she may come from a restaurant family (her parents are Adde Bjorklund and Halleh Hessami, who used to own Bistro Adde Brewster), the kid is in 8th grade.
I can’t wait to see what she does when she gets older…

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Not everyone is comforted by mashed potatoes and big bowls of pasta. Some people like pad thai. Some people like sushi. Some people (though not me) are comforted by piles of truffle-scented shoestring fries. This board is comfort food for the well-traveled, the very well-fed, the occasionally heartbroken. It’s a mess but it works because it is all variations on a theme: the foods that Leigh Jones likes and hopes you will, too.

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