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The day after my review of Gemelli’s hit the stands, I got this missive from a reader:

After reading your excellent review, my friend and I arrived at 11:10 this morning (Fri), drooling over the thought of the shrimp scampi ...There was an 8 top that had walked in immediately ahead of us, so we settled into our booth, anticipating that the lone server was about to have a busy couple of hours. Right away we asked about the scampi: "Oh you're going to love this ... that is our lunch special today, and you two will be the first ever to order it!"

We enjoyed a glass of wine and a house salad ... more lunch diners showed up, and about 20 minutes passed before the poor overworked woman reappeared. "We don't have any shrimp today! Someone forgot to order it. You'll have to start over again." She dropped two menus off and disappeared.

Just thought you'd like to know. I know I'll never have the scampi that I was craving because we simply won't go back. As the wise man said, you only have one chance to make a good impression. I wish the staff and owners at Gemelli's all the best ...”

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From my spot at the sushi bar, I can’t see outside. The windows are frosted, decorated with pictures of geishas and stalks of bamboo. I can’t hear anything from the outside, either, because they have the radio tuned to some kind of Asian soft-rock station—Tokyo’s version of Kenny G toodling away on the sax and singing (I assume) of pretty girls, sunsets and long walks on the beach. And since no one else from the outside is coming in, for the moment I exist inside my own little bubble of Japan.

My own little bubble of delusion, really. I know nothing of Japan except what I’ve picked up from Saturday afternoon kung-fu movies, late-night anime, video games. I’ve never been to Japan, and I’m afraid I will be disappointed. How could reality possibly live up to the fantasy I’ve built in my brain of a place where there are ninjas in the rafters, robots walking the streets and nightly Godzilla attacks? It can’t.

The one thing I do know for sure are Japanese restaurants -- the lure of Japanese food, the heady complexity, the Zen calm.

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Last week, while writing about the resurrection of Pizzeria Mundo (right), I mentioned that new owner Patrick Pool was trying to be nice to the planet and his fellow man by using as much local, organic produce as he could. Since he was heavily involved in Denver Urban Gardens, he was getting a bunch of his stock from his local DUG plot and, as a way of giving back, I wrote that he planned to send “his leftover sauce, dough and fresh produce to Brad and Libby Birky at SAME Café.”

Well, come to find, that’s not entirely true. I got an e-mail from Brad Birky this morning and he told me that while, yes, he and Pool had talked about sharing, there’s no deal yet.

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My father used to smoke a pipe. For decades, the man was rarely without it, and he seemed to be forever packing and unpacking it, tamping it, lighting it, re-lighting it or just generally fussing with it. I came to know the sounds of his pipe-smoking as a kind of signature -- a DEW line of his presence in any room -- and even today, the smell of burley and bright will instantly bring him to my mind.

These days, the man mostly smokes cigarillos. He’s given up the pipe, the tins of Half & Half and bags of black cherry tobacco. Things are different. But I still have a powerful connection with that smell, with the mechanics of pipe smoking.

I remember being a teenager -- sixteen, maybe seventeen, already a smoker myself -- and sitting in his chair in the living room one night when my folks were gone; taking up the tools of his habit and trying to make them work. I remember being older, traveling, and picking up a cheap cob pipe and a foil bag of Half & Half at a drugstore, sitting in a cheap motel room and trying to go through the motions myself -- the packing, tamping, lighting and drawing. I did it because I missed his quiet, stoic company. The smell of his presence. What I learned was that pipe smoking is not something that one can aspire to casually. It takes a certain skill, a certain expertise, to make it work. How to pack the tobacco, how to hold the match, how to hold the pipe itself -- what it requires is practice: a series of motions that, once performed a thousand times, simply become reflex. My dad? He’d been smoking his pipe since I was a toddler. It was as much a part of his body as the fingers that made it work.

I was reminded of this refinement, this ease of manipulation, while sitting at a sushi bar for this week’s review (I'll post a preview here later today), watching the hands of the sushi chef prepare my fish.

Some people dedicate their lives to the study of pianist’s fingers or the way a violinist draws the bow. Others could talk for hours about the way a pitcher grips the ball before delivering a slider across the plate. Me? I remember the way my father tamped his pipe and thrill to the hands of true sushi savants at work, because they are two things that I never had the discipline or the desire to learn. -- Jason Sheehan

I recently got an e-mail from Page Productions, a Minneapolis company that produces the show Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives:

“We are researching the Denver area for our Food Network show which will be filming 6 or 7 different establishments in Colorado in a couple of months. I keep stumbling across your reviews and I like your style of write ups. I'm very interested in knowing if you would have any suggestions for places that would be interesting to look into for the show. We try to find tiny, unknown restaurants that make great, home-made food.”

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At its most elemental, a great shrimp scampi consists of shrimp, garlic, lemon and white wine. It is shrimp in an Italian beurre blanc—the garlic (and shallots) used to start a sauté pan, seasoned with good olive oil, deglazed with white wine, spritzed with lemon juice and mounted, at the last minute, with a knob of high-fat sauté butter. When cooked at the right heat (read: high) and done at the proper speed (read: fast), this composed sauce will be an unbreakable monster, slick and smooth and silky with a flavor like being hit in the mouth with a garlic-and-lemon brick. The shrimp? They’re tossed in almost as an afterthought. In Italian cooking, everything beyond the sauce is simply a transport vessel for the sauce. Sauce rules.
At Gemelli’s -- a new Italian restaurant in northwest Denver that's the focus of this week’s review -- the cooks understand this. They get the notion of essentials: of simple, basic things done extraordinarily well.

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Tyler Wiard, chef at Elway’s at 3000 East First Avenue, is bringing home the bacon after taking down all comers at the Taste of Elegance -- a national pig cookin’ competition organized by the National Pork Board out in California. Wiard bested twenty other chefs from around the country, and did so by keeping it local, doing his cumin-roasted pork loin and braised pork shoulder with green chile, posole cake, smooth avocado and red chile.

And after Monday's competition, the victorious Wiard came home with a nice, fat five-thousand-dollar check and two cruise tickets. Not bad for an afternoon’s work, huh?

And good news: Elway's is considering adding Wiard's pork dish to the menu.
-- Jason Sheehan

Funny thing about the way this job goes sometimes: I often don’t know exactly what I’m going to be writing about a restaurant until the minute I sit down and actually start writing about the restaurant.

For example, this week’s review of Spice China? I hadn’t originally intended on talking about the Peking duck at all. Not because I didn’t love it, but because up until my last meal there, I hadn’t even tasted it. And if not for the fact that the kitchen hadn’t been serving the two things I’d gone in to eat on Monday night (a wine-marinated cold chicken and duck packed in salt), I might never have had the opportunity to learn just how good chef Jack Mok’s Peking duck is.

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Here is how you make a proper Peking duck. First, invent a time machine, go back to the mid-nineteenth century, grab yourself a plot of land in one of the booming cities of mainland China and enlist the help of a bricklayer to build you an oven. Then practice. For about a hundred years. Find a source of Nanjing river mallards and a place where you can raise them, force-feeding them like foie gras geese four times a day.

On the 65th day of a duck’s life, slaughter, feather and gut it. Cut a slit in the skin near the neck and, through a long tube, blow air in between the skin and subcutaneous fat to separate them. You’re only really concerned with the breasts here, so don’t knock yourself out. Toss the loose-skinned duck carcass into boiling water briefly, then hang it to dry for 24 hours, coating the skin with anything from malt sugar syrup (back in the day) to maltose (a more modern substitute). Now introduce it to the oven. Traditionally, your oven should be fired with pear or peach wood, though any hardwood will do. Light the wood, let it burn out, then hang your duck inside, sealing the door for another 24 hours while the ambient, convective heat and smoke cooks Daffy straight through.

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While researching Georgetown weirdness, I learned that one of the places I wrote about in my April 24 Bite Me column -- the Silver Queen bar and restaurant—once had none other than Roseanne Barr on staff in the kitchen, either as a prep cook or a sous chef.

To quote that ever-trustworthy source, TV.com, “Roseanne had a brief stint (early 1970’s) as a French chef’s assistant at the Silver Queen, the then premier French restaurant in Colorado, just outside of Denver.”

The spot that once held the Silver Queen has turned into the Georgetown Valley Candy Company. Roseanne, of course, soon got out of the kitchen, moved from Denver and created a niche in Hollywood as a Domestic Goddess. But she may be back, if she follows through on her threat to cook up some mischief at the Democratic National Convention. -- Jason Sheehan

I’ve quit a lot of things in my life. Sometimes it seems as though my entire adult life has been just one long bout of giving things up. Often, I feel like I can split my life cleanly down the middle: on one side of the division, the years I spent acquiring bad habits, on the other, the years I’ve spent trying to kick them.

In college (my first attempt), I developed a taste for all manner of accelerants with a minor in depressants. I tried, with varying levels of success, to give them up for years, then quit entirely on January 1, 1999. From the date, I know that it looks like a New Year’s resolution kind of thing, but trust me: It wasn’t. January 1 just happened to be when I woke up after a three-day, interstate bender that began in Buffalo and ended on the floor of a friend’s kitchen in Santa Fe, New Mexico, not entirely sure what had happened or how I’d ended up there.

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I felt I had to set down my initial impressions of the place before I lost them -- before they were blown clean out of my head with shotgun severity by the next outrage. So there I was, hunched up against the wall, frantically scribbling on the back of an old check:

This is not a restaurant, I wrote. This is a time-warp trip back to the Rome of the Caesars…a gilt-edged and bejeweled palace filled with polished marble, fire, lacquer, iron and gold with glowing lamps and statuary and fiery angel choirs singing from atop massive pillars…

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I finally made it back to New York for what was not “one of,” not “among” the best meals of my life -- but, plainly and simply, was the greatest meal of my life. It was only the third most expensive (coming in behind a dinner last year at the Palace Arms where several diners consumed way too many drinks and my wedding reception in Philadelphia, which, coincidentally, also involved way too many drinks) and did not crack the top five on the list of most affecting (those charmed slots are almost all reserved for damaging childhood food memories). But it was the best by a good margin, and will likely keep its position for the remainder of my days.

I finally ate at Le Bernardin.

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I spent a long time talking with the Candy Company’s Rube Goeringer last week, and got a fascinating glimpse into the history of Georgetown – particularly that part of Georgetown now occupied by his candy shop. I got even more of a peek into the past just by hanging out at Kneisel & Anderson, the general store/grocery store/hardware store a few doors down 6th Street, and came away wishing that I either had a place like this in my neighborhood or that I lived right down the street from it in Georgetown. Not that I’d be willing to give up any of the weird little Asian, Indian or Middle Eastern groceries I already do have close to home, but a store like Kneisel & Anderson (where I can get a bag of Doritos, a couple bottles of root beer, a round of Danish Havarti, some French chocolate and instant, Japanese wonton soup) would certainly be a welcome addition.

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We don’t do a lot of reporting on food recalls here, but this recent one really caught my eye.

“On April 5, Malt-O-Meal announced that it was voluntarily recalling its unsweetened Puffed Rice and unsweetened Puffed Wheat Cereals produced with ‘Best If Used By’ codes between April 8, 2008 (coded as ‘APR0808’) and March 18, 2009 (coded as ‘MAR1809’) because they may have the potential to be contaminated with Salmonella. The recalled product was distributed nationally, marketed under the Malt-O-Meal brand and as some private label brands including Acme, America’s Choice, Food Club, Giant, Hannaford, Jewel, Laura Lynn, Pathmark, Shaw’s, ShopRite, Tops and Weis Quality.”

The above comes straight from the Malt-O-Meal website (www.malt-o-meal.com). I have just one question: How in the hell do you manage to get your puffed rice cereal infected with salmonella?

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