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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.

Crepes ‘n Crepes is uncompromisingly, unabashedly and unstintingly French. The cooks are French. Owners Kathy Knight and Alain Veratti have imported all their iron crepe griddles from France. The ingredients and preparations -- the Camembert and Chambord, ratatouille and sauce aux champignons -- are French. And the space itself -- the ramshackle, patched, plastered and sunny dining rooms, cramped back bar, sundry collection of plates and flatware --gives off the honest and earned vibe of café-along-the-Seine frugality and disorder. The place is lovely in only the way that something so necessarily unlovely can possibly be, and after retiring briefly to use the facilities, Laura, who has been everywhere, came back and settled the matter. “Unisex bathroom,” she said. “How very European. Substandard plumbing and all.”

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As reported in Off Limits this week, absinthe is now legal in the United States! And I don’t mean that phony shit that’s like anisette dyed green or that Eastern European stuff that tastes like cough syrup or that legally gray gunk shipped under cover and marketed specifically for its brain-blisteringly high levels of thujone (the psychoactive ingredient and wormwood derivative that caused authentic absinthe to be banned in the U.S. in the first place).

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I remember the first time I saw someone eating a pizza with pineapple on it. My friend Nick was sitting in his living room in Buffalo with a sixer of Molson Export and Beverly Hills 90210 on the TV, eating a Hawaiian pizza from La Nova covered with thin-sliced ham and chunks of wet, yellow pineapple. I was horrified and, to console myself, drank most of his beer and ate all the leftover chicken wings in his fridge because I sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere near that abomination masquerading as a pizza.

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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.

A few months ago, I got an e-mail from Sean -- one of my original commandoes, a hired gun whose long and noble service to the cause dated back to my first days here. An ex-chef and patissier, Sean was one of the first guys to eat with me professionally in Denver, to drink with me recreationally, to cause trouble with me just for the pure, sick thrill of it. He was there as my backup when I took apart Dave Query’s Rhumba in Boulder, suffering with me through five awful courses and then, I think, going home with one of the waitresses -- if for no other reason than just to wash the terrible memory of that dinner out of his brain with a little bit of casual sex. He did Mel’s with me, was my go-to guy for questions of pastry and obscure French technique; was also in attendance for an epic, bankrupting meal at Opal, back when Opal was, briefly, the greatest restaurant in Denver.

And then he vanished.

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My personal commitment to the Froggish arts is nothing when compared to the two-line backstory of Uttam Lama, chef at the five-month-old Tibet’s Restaurant in Louisville.

For culinary street cred, Uttam has it over just about anyone working today. Not only does he have the whole “I spent fourteen years at a Tibetan monastery” thing (an admission generally followed in American culture by something like “… and now have returned to kick your ass with my Leaping Buddha kung-fu!” or “…just like Bill Murray in that movie The Razor’s Edge”), but cooking for His Holiness, the 14th Dali Lama? To quote another Bill Murray character, groundskeeper Carl Spackler in Caddyshack, who once caddied for the 12th Dali Lama in Tibet: “So we finish the eighteenth and he's gonna stiff me. And I say, ‘Hey, Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know?’ And he says, ‘Oh, uh, there won't be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.’ So I got that goin' for me, which is nice.”

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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.

Radda is a great restaurant, but it’s also a comfortable restaurant, an unassuming restaurant, a restaurant where families come to eat penne al cinghiale and chicken soup in a parmesan broth, made with winter vegetables, lemon and faro, and where rogue CU economics professors sit and argue vehemently about the Bush tax cuts over plates of golden-brown pressed chicken and small bowls of rosemary-roasted fingerling potatoes. In Manhattan, Radda would be wickedly successful -- the sort of roots Italian joint that inspires the swells to fight each other in the streets for a place on the waiting list. In Chicago, it would be feted like the Second Coming -- over-boosted by those foodies still pissed that they can’t get Batali to open a place in their area code. In Vegas, it would be turned into some faux-Tuscan set-piece complete with wandering shepherds and the smell of grape arbors pumped in by compressors. But in Boulder? It’s just a little spot in a retro strip mall, with plenty of parking and always room for another table, another party, another restaurant critic waiting to sing its praises.

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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.