Pot was definitely a hot topic in Colorado in 2012 — even before voters decided to legalize the recreational use of marijuana, and that includes growing your own (six plants per person, please). And if pot is hot across the state, it’s led to particularly heated conversations on this blog…
Later this morning we’ll post our Restaurant Roll Call for December on Cafe Society — a compendium of all the openings and closings on the Denver dining scene over the last thirty days. One of the more notable closings was Tossa, a fast-casual Italian concept created by the folks by…
Britt Chester admits that he knew it was against the law to skateboard on the 16th Street Mall, so he wasn’t surprised when officers told him to stop. What did surprise him was what came after that — including charges of interference, a ridiculous mug shot, an overnight stay in…
For nine years, Simply Sloppy Joes has been dishing up sloppy goodness in Lakewood. But when the last sandwich has been served up tomorrow, the business will close its doors for good. See also: – Garbanzo’s opens in Lakewood, the first of many restaurants in the Denver West Project -…
In the wake of the shootings in Newton, Connecticut two weeks ago today, experts have tried to find clues in the dozens of school shootings over the last three decades. They’ve found that 60 percent of the shootings happened in small towns. And almost inevitably, the culprit has been a…
In preparation for our own Restaurant Roll Call, a compendium of all the openings and closings on the Denver dining scene over the past year, we listed five restaurants that had both opened and closed in 2012 — and then offered a ray of hope: Since the legendary City Spirit…
As the year draws to an end, Cafe Society is compiling our annual Restaurant Roll Call — a compendium of all the restaurants that opened and closed in 2012. That very long list includes plenty of food for thought on the Denver dining scene. And one category is particularly rare:…
Blinky the Clown was an icon for generations of Colorado kids who grew up watching his Blinky’s Fun Club on local television. Blinky — aka Russell Scott — passed away on August 27 at the age of 91, and now his friends and family members — including daughter Linda and…
According to some of our prognosticators in “Trends Without End,” this town’s gluten-free obsession will only grow next year — and that’s just one reason to pick up the 2013 Gluten Free Calendar. A more compelling reason? Mr. May is Denver’s own Brian Gansmann, who had close to twenty years’…
Over a year after Wanda James and Scott Durrah closed 8 Rivers in LoDo and returned to Highland, home of Denver’s original 8 Rivers and also the couple’s own home, they’re finally ready to open Jezebel’s in the corner space at 3301 Tejon Street. Those who enter that space will…
The Prius was one of the great automobile success stories of the last decade. Toyota’s hybrid took off very fast — too fast, it turned out, when owners found their accelerators sticking. And yesterday, Toyota said it had reached a settlement worth over $1 billion with car owners who’d sued…
Jason Bosch won a MasterMind for his work with ArgusFest, showing important movies for trivial prices. And tonight, ArgusFest will be screening two more segments of Oliver Stone’s The Untold History of the United States. And as Bosch notes, “You don’t need to have seen the first parts to follow…
For our year-end issue, Lori Midson reached out to dozens of people in the local food scene — chefs, restaurateurs, restaurant brokers, wine merchants, farmers — to ask for their views on Denver dining and their predictions for the year ahead. We’ll be sharing their responses for the next week…
The holidays have not been so happy in Colorado Springs, where recent acts of vandalism included a car on the south end of town covered with the large, spraypainted message message “I hate black people!” The city’s graffiti-abatement team cleaned the car; the police are still looking for the culprit,…
Broadway continues to be one of the town’s fastest-evolving areas, with the three blocks south of First Avenue seeing incredible changes in 2012. After numerous delays, Gary Lee’s Motor Club & Grub finally opened this spring; after even more months in the planning, Punch Bowl – Social Food & Drink…
The website for Fat Sully’s asks you to “stay tuned” for a “sexy new website coming soon.” But that’s not all that’s coming soon. Fat Sully’s, which started as an offshoot of Atomic Cowboy, working out of the same space at 3237 East Colfax Avenue, is about to bring its…
Neighbors are raising a stink over smells that they say emanate from a dog-snack factory that moved into the River North neighborhood — now the hot-hot RiNo — long before most of them did. This past spring, the city issued an odor citation to Kasel Associates Industries — but the…
Mark Antonation has an ambitious resolution for 2013: He’s eating his way through Denver city limits along Federal Boulevard, from the southern border to the northern, and blogging about it for Cafe Society in “A Federal Case.” But he got off to a rough start, when he found that the…
Running for governor “was the most fun I’ve ever had,” Tom Tancredo said last week, in a conversation that ranged from his rogue 2010 candidacy against John Hickenlooper and Dan Maes to Amendment 64 to the slopper at Gray’s Coors Tavern to the Sudan to immigration. A lot about iimmigration…
Westword ho, ho, ho. Cafe Society will be busy in the kitchen through December 25, but we’ll be cooking up plenty of tasty stories for when we return early on December 26. And in the meantime, we’re leaving you some holiday food for thought in this post by Jenn Wohletz,…
Latest Word — and all of Westword, in fact — is taking off today and tomorrow (and again January 1). But the web never sleeps, and so during breaks in your holiday activities you can still log in and comment to your heart’s content. Those comments are the gifts that…
Metro Denver lost some longtime institutions this year. Pagliacci’s.The Burnsley. Gabor’s. And now El Rancho, once a dining destination for tourists and Denver residents alike, a place so popular it had its own exit off I-70, is gone, too. See also: – Historic El Rancho Restaurant has new owners and…
