Monsters and meatballs at YesPleaseMore "Test Market" Foodie Call

On Saturday night, YesPleaseMore, an organization that spreads the love for Colorado artistic endeavors through pop-up retail stores and events, descended on the Denver Pavilions for "Test Market," a collaborative production featuring a bevy of creative projects from around Denver, including crafts, fashion shows and live music.

And jump-starting the affair was a dining event with Foodie Call and the Horndribbles, a display of culinary arts supplemented by the antics of dancing monsters and a puppet show of scrubby little creatures with incredibly dirty mouths.

Foodie Call is a company built on the principle of home meal delivery, dropping off ready-to-eat family-style dinners to households that order them. On Saturday, though, it served up a sampling of standard catering fare.

The menu included soft, crumbling meatballs in chunky marinara, toasted baguettes that hosted slices of ham and lardons of bacon and tangy barbecue sandwiches, supplemented with creamy cabbage slaw and crisp pickles on soft buns. But it was the citrusy mustard sauce -- tart and slightly spicy -- that was the winner, both with the bready pastries and as a condiment for the sandwich. We washed all of it down with wine selections from a self-serve table -- until the bottles ran dry.

Rob Christensen

As the handful of guests made its way through the line, a team of vibrantly hued monsters danced like maniacs to a beat, trying to raise the energy of an otherwise sleepy crowd. Not even the puppets, with dirty mouths and a repertoire of sexual innuendos, could raise the energy in the old Wolfgang Puck space. Maybe we were all tired on a cold Denver night.

Rob Christensen

Here's our real gripe, though: Tickets to the dining portion of "Test Market" were $40. Entrance into the rest of the event was included, but that still meant paying an extra $25 to graze at a limited buffet of appetizers, some of which were pretty mediocre, and pour our own wine.

Granted, that money went, in part, to Create Denver, an organization geared toward vitalizing the creative side of the Mile High City. But would we do it again? Probably not.