Denver Food Blog

So angry, so delicious...

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I have sworn for a long time that I would never include recipes in this blog. I have raised a (completely ineffectual) stink over the notion of other people including recipes. I have my reasons -- the biggest of which being that I neither like nor trust recipes not written by a working cook, describing his methods for cooking something that he prepares fifty or a hundred times a night, and that the recipe or prep details of a working cook are less than useless to a home cook in almost any circumstance. My favorite cook's recipe ever? This one, for prepping chicken roulade, which was written on a cocktail napkin and used to hang above the station of one of my cooks:

Pull chix
Pound chix
Roll chix
Hold chix

All the cooks and chefs reading are laughing right now. Trust me.

But anyway, I'm making an exception here because in this week's review of Paradise Asian Cafe, I mentioned that I'd never seen a restaurant offering Cantonese lobster in lobster sauce. That's still the case. I couldn't find it on a restaurant menu anywhere. But I did find a recipe, courtesy of Madame Wong's Long Life Chinese Cookbook--a vintage tome from the '70s just full of gems like this one--and have decided to share it here just because it looks so good.

​Dear Mr. President.

As you are no doubt aware, the Kellogg Company recently announced that it is experiencing a catastrophic waffle shortfall owing to a sort of "perfect storm" of circumstances: scheduled maintenance and upgrades to their army of waffle-making robots, flood damage in the vast waffle fields of the American South, and necessary repairs to the world's largest waffle-processing facility, located in Atlanta, Georgia, which has been idled for the past two months for a thorough cleaning after the discovery of Listeria monocytogenes, no doubt spread by violent waffle-robot separatists.

It is my understanding that you receive daily updates from your Homeland Security liaison on the state of various breakfast-food levels nationwide, so I am sure this vital matter has already been brought to your attention. As well, I hope you have been briefed on the expected timeline of America's waffle deficit and the steps needed to return us to international waffle independence.

​ It's what you like that matters. And I like science fiction movies and books about sailing ships and celebrity memoirs and amateur pornography. I like music made in the years that music really mattered to me -- those years I spent in high school and in kitchens and had very little of what anyone would consider taste -- and falling asleep on the couch to cartoons in the wee hours of the morning. I like literature born of pain or poverty or cripplingly poor social skills and candy from foreign countries with no concept of what candy should be made of and girls who saw the original Star Wars in the theater during its original run because girls who didn't, I have absolutely nothing in common with and can barely even talk to. When I'm in the mood for seeing shit blow up, I like Michael Bay movies because no one makes shit blow up better than he does, and when I'm in the mood for barbecue, I like it to be made by someone with a little psychotic backwoods hillbilly in their blood because I know that the ability to cook good barbecue is genetic and smoking pork is only one step removed from distilling moonshine--both of them being an art bestowed only on god's most special children. I like foie gras and French cheese and American cheeseburgers and Spanish tapas in almost equal measure. And while I like the cultural collisions and almost holy rigor of immigrant, ESL cooks making hot pots and jellyfish salad and char siu bao and sesame balls for their fellow transplants desperately homesick for a taste of Tianjin, Wuhan or Guangzhou, I love the second- and third-generation cuisine of Chinese cooks cooking for Chinese customers who grew up on the sweet-and-sour chicken, pineapple shrimp and kung pao, moo shu and orange-flavor everything that is indicative of the American-Chinese refugee canon -- neither wholly one thing nor entirely the other; a cuisine born of happy and repeated impacts between an American taste for sugar and bold, simple flavors and the Chinese appetite for all manner of savory weirdness and sauces that make the French look like poor, Third-World culinary cousins.

And when I'm looking for precisely that kind of Chinese food, now I know where to go: to Paradise Asian Cafe out in Aurora, which just happens to be the subject of this week's review.

These new PETA ads are weird...

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Twenty-eight hours and sixty-five entries later, we know one thing for sure: You people out there in Hotcakesland certainly do love your dick jokes. And your Colfax jokes. And your vegan jokes. And your vegan-on-Colfax dick jokes...

Still, we had to go with just one caption for our last set of Anthony Bourdain tickets. And the winner is Jimbot.

Well done: Your entry captured both the uncomfortable confusion and surrealistic humor we were. So, Jim, send an e-mail to cafe@westword.com and we'll get you the details on your prize.

As for the rest of you, thanks for playing. And better luck next time.

INSERT CLEVER BONE-RELATED CAPTION HERE...

​Yes, we've scored two more pairs of tickets to the Anthony Bourdain event that we've been so relentlessly hyping for the past several days -- and earlier today, we asked all you slavering readers to come up with interesting ways in which we might give them away. And since my suggestion of tying them to pigeon's feet and letting the fates determine the lucky winner was shot down, we have decided to go with that old stand-by: the caption contest.

Because commenter Brian was the first one to come up with this terribly original notion (and provided the photo), he wins one set of tickets. (Brian: e-mail your contact info to cafe@westword.com.) As for the rest of you, you know the drill: Best caption for the above picture wins the prize.

Could we have made it any easier? Post your entries below.

​We've got two closures to report in Boulder, both of them somewhat surprising.

First to go down? Spud Brothers at 2010 10th Street, which closed the doors on August 28, much to the disappointment of Micks and stoners city-wide. According to the official report from Spud Brothers management, the big problem was that the city of Boulder wouldn't allow them to stay open past 11 p.m., and that they were turning people away every night. And while, yes, I can see that this would be frustrating, I just can't imagine how an all french fry restaurant couldn't find a way to make it in a city like Boulder.

In any event, Spud made it just over a year before giving up the ghost. The space is still open and wanting for a new operator. Perhaps some sort of all potato chip and hash brown restaurant?

​The new Broadway location of Tony's Market (right across the street from the Westword offices, at 950 Broadway) was giving away nibbles of their complete Thanksgiving dinner feast today during the lunch hour.

Unfortunately, if you're reading this now, you already missed the fun. The good news? They're doing it again tomorrow from 11 a.m. 'til 5 p.m., offering up samples of a full Thanksgiving spread with all the trimmings. Sure, it's just a shallow attempt at getting more people to do their holiday shopping at the market. But there's no reason you can't take advantage of it yourself and get a taste of Thanksgiving a little bit early.

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Both readers and restaurateurs had a lot of suggestions for what to do with the former home of Mojitos -- which isn't surprising, considering that this spot at 1120 East Sixth Avenue is a good location just begging for a good operator to go into it.

And while I've already reported the news that Alex Gurevich from Limon and Bisque is taking over the space, and will be putting on the big white had to make pizzas and salumi for the neighbors, that didn't stop the guys from Dave Query's Big Red F group from playing along with my "What if..." game.

In my original fantasy version of the new Mojitos, I had James Lee--the able tender from Query's Bitter Bar at Happy--hanging out behind the bar and mixing up artful cocktails for all the Cuban food fanatics I imagined flooding my re-staffed Cuban eatery. And apparently, Lee thought that was a pretty good idea, too, because he came through with a couple of cocktail recipes for what he would've made there if only Query and the Big Red F crew had been a little quicker and snagged the space for themselves.

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846 Broadway has been a lot of things over the years. Failed restaurants have come and gone; bars have landed here, done well for a little bit, then died. I've spent time at every one of 846 Broadway's incarnations over the past seven years and, with the exception of their convenience (the building is a block from the Westword office), hated everything about them.

Until the Fainting Goat. Exactly a year ago, the Goat took over what had been Moon Time, a Widespread Panic bar that, during the day, was a decent-enough place to hang out but, come three or four in the afternoon, would suddenly get overrun with the one thing you really can't avoid in a Widespread Panic-themed bar: Widespread Panic fans. They would hijack the jukebox, flood the bar, take over the rooftop patio and do strange things in the bathrooms. They would yell and scream and listen to Widespread Panic, and I would do my best to be out of there before the place reached critical hippie mass, but I wasn't always fast enough.

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For some of us (like me), there just aren't enough hours in the day to eat all the barbecue that we want. There are barbecue sandwiches for lunch, pulled pork for dinner, ribs and sides for a midnight snack, maybe a little cornbread and chicken picked off the bone at last call.

Which means we could really use another meal when barbecue might decently be consumed. So thank the smokey 'cue gods that the good folks at Cabin Creek Smokehouse(one of my personal favorites) last month decided to open for breakfast. So if you're one of those people (again, like me) who think that brisket or pulled pork is a perfectly reasonable breakfast meat, get up to 25997 Conifer Road in Aspen Park right now and feed that meaty jones.

​I just got the news twenty minutes ago. Ian Kleinman buzzed my cell shortly after.

"So, you're unemployed, brother," I said. "Congratulations, I guess."

"Yeah, well, not completely unemployed," Ian said, laughing. "But yeah."

Yesterday, Ian was let go from his gig as chef and chief liquid nitrogen wrangler at O's Steak and Seafood at the Westin Westminster -- a normal, boring hotel posting that he somehow managed to turn into one of the coolest jobs in the country, one where he was essentially given free rein by his corporate bosses to get weird and play around with molecular gastronomy.

Fogo de Chao is not a place that any mortal man could visit with any regularity while remaining mortal, without ending up just flat dead from a meat overdose. Zeus, perhaps, could eat here three times in a week. James Beard or Escoffier could've probably managed four in their portly heydays. Me? I'd be a headline, baby. All caps: NOT TERRIBLY FAMOUS FOOD WRITER FOUND DEAD ON WYNKOOP STREET. Details would include the blood and flan on my chin, the lamb chops found stuffed in my pockets, the odor of caipirinhas on my breath and the smile that couldn't be removed but by the intervention of a team of internationally famous embalmers.

Meat, meat and more meat -- that's what's on tap for this week. And as I discovered when I ate at Fogo de Chao, the latest in a very short line of Brazilian churrascarias that have tried to make their mark in this steakhouse-heavy city, you can't beat that with a stick.

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I recently raved about Chili Verde -- the new, kinda-upscale Pueblan restaurant at 3700 Tejon Street. Poblano crepes, perfect ceviche, all kinds of seafood -- I loved the grub, the service, the room, everything about the place. The only thing that had me slightly concerned? The fact that the Yanez-Mota family didn't seem to be doing a lot of business.

I included that concern in my review of the place. And then the public responded. They descended on Chili Verde and...well, let's just say I got this letter from a concerned reader over the weekend:

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Yesterday I talked with Alex Gurevich about his plans for making pizzas at the former Mojitos/Mel's/Montecito/Piscos/Dudley's space at 1120 East Sixth Avenue, right smack in the middle of Sixth Avenue's restaurant row. It sounded like good news. Despite some bad moves over the years, I think Gurevich is a good chef who runs interesting restaurants with talented crews. And the Sixth Avenue spot isn't the only new project he has going, it turns out.

A couple years back, after getting crushed during the opening of his Limon, his novo Andino restaurant 1618 East 17th Avenue, Gurevich decided that, rather than spend his Friday and Saturday nights turning away the overflow or making his customers wait upwards of an hour just to get a table, he would pick up the space next door to Limon and expand his cool little modern Peruvian joint from around fifty seats to something more like a hundred.

​ See more of Mark Manger's photos from Cheeky Monk, the subject of this week's restaurant review, at westword.com/slideshow.

The traditional disguise of a restaurant critic in the wild

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Robb Walsh, restaurant critic for our sister paper, the Houston Press, book author and genial man-about-town, has followed what has now become a well-trod path among the rapidly decreasing ranks of full-time restaurant critics: He has blown his own cover and chosen to face the world as a non-anonymous critic. His reason? Strikingly similar to mine -- a book jacket with his un-masked mug on it.

I wrote about my own entrance into the overt world a few months back, and have since come to the conclusion that having my face out there has had little or no effect whatsoever on the daily operations of my job. I've been recognized once or twice, but never in a situation where it could've done anyone on the other side of the swinging doors a lick of good. As a matter of fact, I've probably had more bad meals served to me in the three or four months since having my cover blown by the publication of my book, Cooking Dirty, than I did in the year leading up to it. I haven't done the math, but that's certainly the way it's felt to me.

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Okay, so yesterday I used my not insignificant Staffing Up mojo to give some suggestions as to what ought to be done with the former Mojitos , which closed last week at 1120 East Sixth Avenue.

And then this morning, guess what happened? I get a phone call from Alex Gurevich of Limon and Cafe Bisque. He tells me he read the piece. He tells me he has some news.

"We're working on that location," he tells me.

"What location?"

"Mojitos."

"Seriously?"

​ This letter, which was published in today's issue, could be the best letter Westword has ever received about a review:

Having suffered through Jason Sheehan's unconscionably vindictive review of Mark & Isabella, I will make a point to try the place, simply to protest Sheehan's (as always) self-indulgent hatchet job. Really, what have your readers done to deserve the weekly dose of douchebaggery that is Sheehan's obsessively self-referential, faux-macho, desperately attention-seeking drivel? Can Westword not snag a reviewer mature enough to separate personal tragedy from professional commentary? The dreck that flows weekly from Sheehan's pen begs the question: How can he taste the food when he never takes his mouth off his own dick?

Jon Richard, Denver

Personally, I think it's the dick imagery in the last line that really sells this one.

​ "It's cool. I mean, not right now. But when the time is right, the view is amazing."

I was standing out in the back parking lot -- the smoking lounge of the Nob Hill Inn, the classic dive at 420 East Colfax Avenue that Westword writers staked out for a day -- and Randy Malone, weekend bartender at the Nob Hill, weekday regular, was hunching down, pointing to the dome of the Capitol visible over the roofs of the buildings along Colfax.

"See, right there. When the light is right, it comes through those little windows at the top. Just these beautiful beams of light. I've seen it. Never had my camera with me at the time, but I've seen it."

​Last week I spent some time at the Nob Hill Inn, a great dive at 420 East Colfax Avenue, chatting with the regulars -- some of whom have irregular hobbies.

Doctor Ray takes care of the homeless in the neighborhood. Outreach, he told me. Getting them into shelters for the night when the temperature starts to dip, the way it was doing that night. He works the streets, and then when he needs to warm up a little, he comes into the Nob Hill for a couple of pops. Everyone knows him here. Everyone knows everyone.

"You should come out with me some night," he said, and I nodded. I asked him if he had a card and he didn't, but he had a phone number. I scratched it down on the back of the reporter's notebook in my pocket and then we shook hands. He told me his name again. I told him mine.

Bad name, worse timing, but still a good idea

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Buchi Cafe Cubano is a great Cuban restaurant. Step inside Cuba Cuba on a good night, and you need an oxygen tank (or a powerful constitution) because the air in the bar is like breathing muddled mint and rum.

But while Denver has some Cuban restaurants, what this city does not have is enough Cuban restaurants -- because, really, no city can truly have enough until there is one every fifty feet or so, all serving Cuban coffee and sandwiches and boiled chicken with rice and whatever else it is that gets the people of Cuba through their days. If we had as many Cuban restaurants in Denver as we have taquerias, I might be satisfied. But then, if we ever reach that magic number, we'd pretty much all be living in Havana and then I would start bitching about the lack of Japanese robata bars or Uruguayan cafes or whatever and we'd have to start all over again.

And what few Cuban places we did have in Denver was recently reduced by one, with the closing of Mojitos. And while Mojitos was never the best of the bunch, it still saddens me to know that we're now one joint closer to none in a city that doesn't have a very large buffer separating me from a complete lack of decent Cuban sandwiches.

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Here are some things I know about the Belgians:

They invented French fries and waffles -- two vital food groups -- but the French stole both of them. Every other country in the world has had its national foods co-opted by the French, but for some reason, the Belgians never got over this. I'm fairly sure they fought wars over it it. And if they didn't, they should have. The entire country looks like a film set for some massive historical costume drama. Belgium boasts more castles than any other place on earth and Belgians earn most of their money by charging tourists to walk up those tall towers - and then amuse themselves by making fun of the fat, exhausted bastards. Of course, they once had a king named Clovis, so I'm pretty sure those bastards have been making fun of Belgians for (and other things) forever. One of the funniest movies I've seen in years was filmed in Belgium. The reason In Bruges was so funny? It was full of jokes about Belgium and Belgians. Also, it had angry midgets in it and there's nothing funnier than a pissed off midget.

Belgians make a lot of chocolate. Some people think it is the best chocolate in the world. Those people are idiots.

Belgians make a lot of beer. A lot of beer. And some people think that the Trappist ales coming out of Belgium are the best beers in the world. Those people are not idiots. Unless they also believe the chocolate thing, in which case they are idiots but probably won't buy you beers if you call them such.

Did I mention the french fry thing? Yeah, they're really upset about that. Belgians also invented oil paints, control a large portion of the world diamond trade and have a road system that can be seen from space, but really? It's the french fries that truly put their pantelettes in a bunch.

And here's something I know about the Cheeky Monk, the Belgian cafe that I review this week: If you love beer and you love sausages and you love sauerkraut, I would seriously advise you to move right now to Colfax just to be closer to the Monk.

Here fishy fishy...

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No, it wasn't the greatest fish fry in the world, but it sustained me while the snow blew outside and the drifts piled up. It came fast; it came hot. The batter was lacy and delicate from the fryer, and the fries were crisp and herbed and nowhere close to hand-cut.

But then, it was a fish fry -- comfort food that's hard-wired straight into my lizard brain. And it was a good one. Paired with a cold pint of Murphy's and a little Premier League football action on the big screens, it was the perfect way to spend a snow-bound afternoon. But now that the snow has melted away, one question remains: Can you guess where I was eating?

​I spent the weekend in Austin, much of it arguing the politics of food with very intelligent writers who fall everywhere along the eating spectrum -- from Jonathan Safran Foer, who is a born-again vegetarian, and James McWilliams, who also goes the green route, to Novella Carpenter, who raises and slaughters her own bunnies and turkeys for food, and Corby Kummer, who just plain knows more about food, the history of food, the making of food and writing about food than anyone else out there.

I, of course, was the jerk on the panel who would gladly eat a plate of bacon that he found on the street, but all this talking about vegetarianism and cruelty-free animal practices and whether or not broccoli can scream got me thinking: Where can a person eat in this town and really, truly feel as though he's making a morally correct and ethically positive (or at least neutral) choice?

It's like it comes with its own soup...

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Denver has about a million places where a man of little means can find himself a big-ass burrito swimming in some sort of chile. I wouldn't say that Denver was necessarily built on big burritos (because, as everyone knows, Denver was really built on moonshine, whores and the good fortune of old-timey prospectors), but burritos have been a fixture here for long enough that the burrito, rather than the odious Denver Omelet, ought to be the one food item with which our metropolis is inextricably linked.

But that aside, the burrito at the top of this post? That's a very particular burrito. Those who know it and love it will recognize it instantly. And for those who don't, there are at least two big clues in that picture that brand it as one of Denver's most singular and recognizable tube-shaped foods.

Think you know? Comment below.

​Yesterday I kicked off "Staffing Up," with some free advice for how Mark & Isabella can get its act together. But the idea doesn't have to be confined to restaurants that need a swift, motivating kick in the ass; reading through these blog posts for the last few days, I realize that we can also use it as a kind of fantasy football league for cooks -- building a perfect crew from the ground up for restaurants that haven't yet begun to serve.

For example, Den Deli is throwing an old-fashioned job fair for prospective employees at the new Japanese deli/gift shop/seafood market being opened by Toshi and Yazu Kizaki at 1501 South Pearl Street. And then there's Ondo's, the new restaurant going into 250 Steele Street that started staffing up a couple of weeks back in anticipation of an opening that ought to be coming before the official start of winter. Hell, even James Mazzio (who just announced his new gig as chef at Le Chateau) is in the market for a sous chef and, as everyone knows, that's basically the chefly equivalent of sending away for a mail-order bride -- someone that he's going to be spending every waking moment with for a good, long time.

Today, though, I'm going to let Mazzio choose his own galley wife and (at least temporarily) allow Den Deli to go its own way (if only because I'm not quite sure yet what, exactly, they're going to be doing at the place). But Ondo's? I've got some ideas about who should be installed in that kitchen.

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Last week, my buddy Dave Herrera over at Backbeat debuted a new bloggity thingamajig called Recast, in which he and his guys redo the soundtracks of existing movies. First one? Blade Runner -- one of the greatest movies of all time, and one with a soundtrack that already kicks some serious, artsy, Vangelis-y ass.

Despite the fact that he had Dolly Parton, the Kinks and the Electric Prunes on his new version, I still thought it was a great idea. So good, in fact, that I've decided to steal borrow it for Cafe Society.

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There are some restaurants I talk about a lot. There are others that I talk about hardly at all. And one of the very few places that I talk about continuously (some would say obsessively) isn't even open yet. It's Ondo's.

Ah, Ondo's....I've been dreaming about having a new tapas restaurant in Denver for a long time. Any kind of Spanish restaurant, really, but particularly a tapas place. And I'm not talking about some kind of fake tapas joint, either. Not some spot that serves "small plates" or just has an enormous appetizer menu with a bunch of jalapeno poppers and riblets and calls it a "Taste of the Costa Brava," or some ridiculous thing like that.

No, I want a serious tapas restaurant, and Ondo's -- which is being opened by Curt and Deicy Steinbecker, who trained in Spain for just this opportunity -- seems like it might be it.

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This just in from the boys at Frasca: "Despite receiving over 14 inches of snow (and counting...) on Frasca's patio today, we'll still be open this evening for regular dinner service. We hope to see you soon."

Two feet of snow. More on the way. But what do chefs do? Keep working, that's what. The people need dinner, and that means they're gonna need someone to cook it.

Not only that, but Frasca is still taking reservations for dinner. That's pretty hardcore. And the way I look at it, you've still got time to pull on the snowpants and get your ass over there. Provided you live close, that is. Or are willing to make a hike out of it. God knows, if I lived in Boulder, I'd be suiting up for the walk right now.

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I got a call from chef Andrea Frizzi yesterday, thanking me for including his little 17th Avenue restaurant in my list of Denver's best Italian spots, and then letting me know that he'll soon add lunch service at Il Posto.

Oh, and not just any lunch. I checked out the menu for the service (scheduled to start on November 23), and I'm drooling already. This ain't exactly soups and sandwiches, folks. Rather, Frizzi has put together a board of very modern Italian grub that matches his excellent dinner menu.