Courtesy Denver Seitan Company

Best of Denver award-winner Denver Seitan Company has been mysteriously absent as of late: no presence at this past Sunday's Neat Market, no Denver Seitan pizza at the Marquis -- and we just found out why: The health department embargoed and confiscated all DSC wheat meat due to permitting issues. But it's a good thing -- really!

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Lori Midson

Panang curry at US Thai Cafe, one of the city's best Thai restaurants.

Denver may have an abundance of Thai restaurants, but most of them serve food that's a far cry from what you'll actually find in that country, one of the best in the world for eating. If you know where to look though, you can find a handful of restaurants turning out wickedly hot curries, vibrant papaya salads, whole grilled fish and perfect sticky rice.

Here, in no particular order, are the city's five best Thai restaurants.

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Cafe|Bar

The patio at Cafe|Bar is one of Denver's best.

It's above 80 degrees right now in Denver, which means that for the past several hours, we've been doing nothing but daydreaming of our favorite patios, counting down the minutes until we can shut down the computers and head outside for a drink. Adding urgency to our mission is the fact that it's supposed to be cold again tomorrow...and Saturday.

So in the spirit of celebrating today -- and the onset of late spring and early summer -- here, in no particular order, are Denver's ten best restaurant patios.

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Glacier Ice Cream

Ice cream at Glacier, one of Denver's five best ice cream parlors.

Rain or shine, we spend a considerable amount of time thinking about ice cream. It's one of our very favorite desserts, not least because you can totally put it on the side of any other dessert and it doesn't count as two treats: it counts as a la mode. This succession of warm days, however, has us in a veritable ice cream-eating frenzy: we ponder eating a pint for lunch or dinner, and rarely does a day go by without us stopping somewhere for a scoop.

And when we're considering where to sate our cravings, we look to these places, our five best ice cream parlors in Denver, listed here in no particular order.

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Cassandra Kotnik

Agedashi tofu at Hana Japanese Bistro, one of the city's best Japanese restaurants.

While Denver is swimming in great options for sushi, we're woefully short on Japanese joints that feature good versions of the broader culinary canon -- and, in fact, we'd be stoked if a few more spots of this sort opened up, whether they're restaurants serving up Japanese noodles like ramen or soba or authentic izakayas, giving the Mile High City a taste of that nation's countryside.

There are a few that sate our cravings, though. Here, in no particular order, are the city's five best Japanese restaurants.

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Mark Manger

Agnolotti at the Wooden Table, one of Denver's best Italian restaurants.

Denver has a strong Italian history -- but until the last decade or so, this town's Italian restaurants were mostly run-of-the-mill red-sauce joints that you went to more for the convenience than the food. That's changed, though, and today's dining scene is rich with inventive and stylish fare from Italy -- and many of the best Italian restaurants are also Denver's best restaurants, period.

Here, in no particular order, are the city's ten best Italian spots.

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Jim Wills

Williams & Graham, winner of our 2012 Best New Bar award.

The metro area gained so many liquid assets in 2011, we had to do a lot of drinking before we could choose the winner of our Best New Bar award for the Best of Denver 2012. And even then, the awards kept spilling out for other new spots, including Best Neighborhood Brewery, Best Place to See a Grownup Cry Over Pac-Man and Best New Brewery.

Here's our rundown of the ten best new bars in Denver.

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Mark Manger

The seafood at Charcoal is stunning.

Anyone who says you can only find good seafood on the coasts is just plain wrong. A number of restaurants in Denver are helmed by chefs who really know their way around fish. They bring in the best specimens they can find, and they turn out some truly exceptional ocean-focused dishes.

Some spots do it better than others, though, offering up long lists of innovative creations featuring creatures from the sea. Here, in no particular order, are Denver's five best seafood restaurants.

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Mark Manger

Inside Pinche Taqueria, our Best New Restaurant.

At the end of last year, we published our list of the ten best restaurants that had opened in 2011 -- as we saw them at the time. Over the next few months, though, as we prepared for the Best of Denver 2012, we had a chance to really digest what the 300 new restaurants had brought to the city, and our ranking of contenders for the Best New Restaurant award shifted.

Now that the issue has hit the streets, we're updating our short list. Here, in no particular order, is our definitive list of the best new restaurants of 2011.

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Mark Manger

Our Best New Restaurant: Pinche Taqueria.

About three hundred restaurants opened in the metro area in 2011, and many of them were very good restaurants indeed. There's no question that the bar has been raised in Denver -- and things are only going to get better from here.

But as we considered the contenders for the Best New Restaurant award in this year's Best of Denver, we were looking for a restaurant that was more than just a sum of its parts. And so we honed in on places that not only had a clear vision of what they wanted to accomplish -- and then accomplished it -- but also really added something to this city. We looked for restaurants that kept us coming back for more, no matter how many times we've been there before. Because those are the places that feed our souls as well as our bellies.

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