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Next to me was a man old enough to know better drinking Jager shots with Guinness back, and when Green Bay made an ultimately pointless fourth-quarter fumble recovery deep in Giants territory, he found it reason enough to grab me around the neck and shake me like a kitten he didn’t like. That’s a fairly intimate exchange between two men who don’t know each other, and had I not been stunned by the shaking and already full of Hoss’s thick and smoky center-cut St. Louis ribs, chunky mashed potatoes and sticky-sweet barbecued baked beans, I might’ve said something.

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In order to make more sense of the world around us, illustrator and public house naturalist Nate Stone is compiling here a taxonomy of different barflies. While you're out and about in Denver, if you spot any of these specimens please add your observations about their habitat (where to find them) in the comments section below. Also, if you have any pictures of these colorful creatures, please email them here so we can fully document their existence.

A quick update on ex-Café Star chef Rebecca Weitzman’s New York adventure. When I checked out her work at Bobby Flay’s Bar Americain in Manhattan, I loved the food and hated just about everything else. Now I just got word that Weitzman has put in her notice and is once again leaving the Flay sweatshop for more promising work way down around the Lower East Side/Chinatown/Bowery neighborhoods.

According to Weitzman's e-mail, she’ll be taking over as chef de cuisine at Inoteca -- a solidly and seriously regional Italian joint created by the guys who made their name with ‘ino and Lupa in New York. “This job will be a refreshing change because I will be running the kitchen, creating the menu and all specials,” Weitzman told me. “I have missed being creative and decided to follow my love of Italian cuisine and seasonal local food. I can’t wait.”

Neither can I. Looks like it’s about time to start booking another trip to the big city… -- Jason Sheehan

When the wind blows just right, kissing the exhaust vents on top of Charlie Huang’s new restaurant, Jing, all the oxygen on the street seems to be replaced, for just the space of a single breath, with the greasy, earthy, candied scent of garlic roasting, garlic frying, garlic oil gleaming on the blade of a knife. It’s like a foodie come-on, and to those of a certain curious and ever-hungry disposition, it is undeniable. True, I’d come here specifically to eat at Huang’s new multimillion-dollar, fancy-pants nouvelle Chinese restaurant, but had I been headed to Landmark for any other reason, I would have been hard-pressed to resist the siren scent of mother garlic moving down off the roof.

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View larger specimen

In order to make more sense of the world around us, illustrator and public house naturalist Nate Stone is compiling here a taxonomy of different barflies. While you're out and about in Denver, if you spot any of these specimens please add your observations about their habitat (where to find them) in the comments section below. Also, if you have any pictures of these colorful creatures, please email them here so we can fully document their existence.

How do you order right? I wish the answer were as simple as saying, “Order the simple stuff, forget the complicated” -- or the reverse, “Order the authentic, the difficult to pronounce, and ignore the rest.” But at Ali Baba, it’s not that easy. This place has a learning curve, requires a commitment of trust and time while, through a period of trial and error, you find the things that are done better here, done different here, done only here.

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The January 10 issue includes part of a letter from David Hahn of Denver. Here it is in its entirety, along with Jason Sheehan's response:

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Editor's note: sorry about that headline.

I’d had duck’s blood before, had used it in my own kitchens, but until I came to Ha Noi Pho, I’d never cared for it beyond its capacity to mount a voluptuously glossy sauce. Here the blood is one of the main points of dinner, and I spear a small, dark triangle of the stuff the minute my bowl of shrimp and field crab and weird-thing-that-looks-like-a-penis soup arrives. The thick duck’s blood tastes gamey, salty (of course), slightly sweet. It tastes (somewhat obviously) of life, condensed. And as it rests in my mouth, for a moment I understand what it is that gets vampires so worked up.

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Seek the pig, ye foodie snobs, ye noble gastronauts, ye bewildered and befuddled and besotted masses. King Pig, hanging under the lights like a beacon, like a promise. Find Osteria Marco, go down into its embrace and eat until you pop.

That kinda says it all, doesn’t it? Osteria Marco, chef Frank Bonanno’s newest restaurant that took over the space formerly occupied by Del Mar Crab Shack in a basement off Larimer Square, is amazing and (to those of us obsessed with the art of curing meat, anyway) downright awe-inspiring -- a descent from which you might never surface if you were not very, very careful.

I ate at Osteria Marco shortly right after I returned from New York City, where I stopped by Bobby Flay’s Bar Americain to check on chef Rebecca Weitzman, late of Café Star. Read all about it in this week’s Bite Me, where you’ll also find sad news about Chris Douglas’s Tula. And finally, in Second Helping, I offer an ode to take-out Chinese as weary traveler comfort food. -- Jason Sheehan