Blogs

While most of the Best of Denver 2008 fallout has been outside the office, there's been plenty of talk here at Bite Me World HQ regarding my Best Green Chile award for Jack-n-Grill. Backbeat editor Dave Herrera takes it very personally when I say things about Colorado-style verde being just an insignificant knockoff of the New Mexican original, and often threatens to punch me for my out-of-towner’s perspective and obvious bias toward the Land of Enchantment.

More

View larger species

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.

For the first time in 25 years, Westword's readers showed the collective good taste to choose something other than McDonald's french fries as the Best French Fries.Their choice? Bistro Vendome, which makes its delicious fries even more addictive with a salty/sweet sprinkle of spices.

The editorial choice for Best French Fries wasn't nearly as smooth a process. Since we're not big fans of sweet potatoes, we'd initially passed over the fries at Bistro Vendome for those at Fruition, a great restaurant made even greater by the spuds, fried in deliciously rich duck fat, that once attended the kitchen’s culotte steak. But one of Fruition's frequent menu shifts ditched the fries (the steak is still on the board), and in a category this contentious, we needed to find a fry that readers could try for themselves.

After some last-minute eating, Jason Sheehan found his Best French Fries: at Encore, the restaurant that opened last December in the Lowenstein project. Fine on their own, these fries are made even better by the squiggle of mustard the kitchen squirts on the spuds before sending them out.

Read about those fries here. And then run, don't walk, to brunch at either Encore and Bistro Vendome, and fry some spuds on for size. -- Calhoun

Beer lovers at Lodo’s Falling Rock Taphouse got to try a unique Colorado pairing Friday night when the staff from Oskar Blues brewery passed out samples of their winter seasonal, Ten FIDY imperial stout, as well as the same beer after it had been aged for three months in a barrel from Stranahan's Colorado Whisky.

Dubbed “The Battle of the FIDYs,” the tasting attracted numerous beer aficionados. The Ten FIDY, already a big beer with more than ten percent alcohol by volume, became even larger with the addition of the whiskey-barrel flavor, which gave it an immense, almost port-like character. Stranahan’s (a 2007 Westword Best of winner makes small batches of whiskey on Blake Street, just five blocks from Falling Rock, a 2008 winner.)

Oskar Blues (famous for its canned microbrews like Dale's Pale Ale) recently opened a new brewery in Longmont to handle its rapid growth. It plans to phase out Ten FIDY for the summer, but will likely bring it back. On tap for the warmer months is something creatively light, said one of the brewers on-hand for the tasting. (The brewery staff, incidentally, were sampling Odell Brewing Company’s new IPA and Hoegaarden when they weren’t drinking their own concoction; always good to know what brewers like.) Sadly, Falling Rock blew through the whisky-aged beer on Friday; hopefully, they'll bring it back another time. – Jonathan Shikes

Every year, our work on the Best of Denver reminds us of not just what's new and wonderful in this city, but what we've lost -- although you don't see the latter in the final issue. We just take note of the dearly departed as we research, then discard, potential awards, because we discover that a certain dish is no longer served -- or that the place that served it has disappeared altogether.

That's what happened with Slayton & Corine’s, a bizarre little to-go joint tucked into the old McKinley mansion at 950 Logan Street. Last year, Jason Sheehan was tipped off to the place by a Capitol Hill neighbor, and he hurried over to try the joint, which he wrote about here.

But sadly, Slayton & Corine's has disappeared, and that wonderful fried tilapia is now just a memory. Ditto for the mean lemon and cream-cheese pie. -- Patricia Calhoun

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.

Both spots were serving the same purpose, separated by two dozen years and a million miles of desire. That old grocery store was dedicated to its community of farmers, drunks, rednecks and fishermen, just as Fisher Clark tends to the needs of the yuppies, old folks, new money and urban/suburban neighbors who call Bonnie Brae home. In one store, there were sixers of Genny Cream Ale, Rocket Pops, explosives and Retarded Moose-brand oatmeal. In the other, Picholine olives, cans of sardines, a dozen kinds of olive oil and beautiful tins of Spanish saffron. In one, you could get a pack of bright pink boloney for 99 cents. In the other, an Italian muffuletta sandwich of artisan salami, capicola, powerful oil, wonderfully strong provolone and an amazing, rough-chopped and savory tapenade of mixed olives squashed inside a roll stiff and chewy enough to hold it all together, for $7.95.

More

Today is my birthday. Which is all well and good. St. Patrick’s Day babies get to be honorary citizens of Ireland; our birthdays are remembered by more people; and there is an entire section of greeting cards dedicated to those born on March 17 (if you divide the U.S. population of 303 million by 365 days in the year, there are 830,000 of us).

But going out on St. Patrick’s Day sucks. First of all, it’s amateur hour. Every two-bit drinker and his monkey’s uncle is getting shitfaced and wearing a green Leprechaun hat. Plus it’s absolutely packed. Try convincing a bartender to give you a free birthday beer when 150 turbos with green Leprechaun hats are demanding Guinness by the bucketful.

More

While Denver itself frequently ranks in national polls for having one of the biggest St. Patrick's Day celebrations, none of our local Irish pubs ever get so much as nod from out-of-towners. Whatever, we don't need some national booze critic to tell us where to get soused. For a town this size, we have quite a few great Irish bars, and to judge which among them are the most authentic in town, we went to the most biased source we could find: the bartenders at five Irish locals. Here's what they had to say:

More

"Is this your first time dining with us?” she asks, smiling. In response, I just bob my head like a moron—completely gone on whatever weird cocktail of hormones and brain chemicals it is that makes a grown man fall in love with a menu, with nothing more than words on a page. Patiently, she explains to me the basics of dining at French 250: the multiple courses—

She speaks to me as though I am a little dim, for which I don’t blame her at all.

More

Denver has had newspaper wars for as long as there have been newspapers, and just because the size of the papers is shrinking doesn’t mean this war is any less intense. But another, newer battle between media outlets took place last week, and it was even more…heated.

The Women’s Bean Project hosted its third annual chili cookoff at the Denver Press Club on Friday, pitting 28 chili cooks -- the majority of them from local papers, TV stations, magazines and other organizations or outlets – for bragging rights and first prize: the Gold Crockpot.

It was a charity fundraiser, sure, but you wouldn’t have known it by looking at the likes of Rocky Mountain News columnist Bill Johnson, Denver Post food editor Kristen Browning-Blas, Denver Daily News reporter Peter Marcus or Press Club president Bruce Goldberg. These folks showed up with serious-looking pots of chili and their game faces on.

As a longtime chili cook myself, however – one who has repeatedly refined his recipe over the past decade -- they looked like suckers. I figured the Gold Crockpot was mine.

More

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.

I was surprised this week to get an email from DISCUS, the national trade group for distilled spirits producers and marketers, about a pro-Sunday sales press conference to be held at Argonaut Wine and Liquor -- of all places.

Two years ago, when I was reporting on a campaign to allow Sunday sales, I couldn’t find a single Colorado liquor store that wanted the freedom to sell booze on Sunday. In fact, Applejack President Jim Shpall told me then that any campaign to change the blue laws in this state was really a plot by DISCUS to get alcohol into grocery stores and chains. Once liquor stores were open on Sunday, the chain grocers would yell that they’re losing Sunday 3.2 beer sales and should be therefore allowed to sell liquor.

More

Originally, my review of Agave Grill was supposed to be a two-fer — a kind of culinary Entebbe Raid whereby Laura and I would roll in fast on slow nights to the King Soopers plaza at Orchard and Holly, where both Agave and Mel’s Greenwood Village incarnation are located, have our meals undercover, steal a couple of menus, and get out again before anyone (namely, anyone from the Master family) knew we’d been there.

Then I would have banged out my usual witty, erudite and potty-mouthed column, shoehorning two clean and uncorrupted reviews into one week’s space. The places are virtually right next door to each other, after all. They share executive chef Chad Clevenge and some of the rest of the staff and, in their strange juxtaposition and the reach of their menus, nicely point up the two very different sides of Clevenger’s life as a white-jacket. Through one door, there’s the New World flavors of the American Southwest; through the other, the Old World flavors of Europe as translated through the modern, suburban lens.

More

About three weeks ago, Chad Clevenger put Agave Grill through a mid-season menu overhaul, altering or outright dumping about two-thirds of the opening board. While the result could have been a return to the mixed Chihuahua-meets-Lyon Old World/New World fusion of the Cherry Creek Mel’s during Clevenger’s days there, he surprised me again by further refining the kitchen’s output so that his new menu, far from aping the doomed nouvelle Mexican trends of five years ago, went even thinner on the classical conceits until they became a near-invisible presence that existed only in the hands of Clevenger and his cooks.

That change is what put Agave Grill over the edge for me.

More