Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter has been outspoken about cutting employee hours to less than thirty hours per week so that he doesn’t have to pay their health insurance costs — as mandated Affordable Health Care Act — or Obamacare; he has cited concerns over the estimated $5 to 8…
Earlier this month, I broke the news that Il Mondo Vecchio, Mark DeNittis’s artisan sausage plant, would cease production at the end of November. And within minutes of the announcement, you could hear the collective sighs of despair all over the state — and beyond. When I interviewed DeNittis, he…
Pete Marczyk and Barbara Macfarlane do not leave their work behind when they leave Marczyk Fine Foods and head for their great old Denver house with the big, new kitchen. They often bring some of their market’s choicest ingredients home with them and cook up a feast. “I found this…
Vail’s Sweet Basil restaurant produces some beautiful dishes, like their signature cauliflower and black truffle bisque, crispy veal sweetbreads and Greek yogurt cheesecake with honey-poached blueberries. And on November 20, owners Kevin Clair and Matt Morgan, with executive chef Paul Anders, will spill their sweet, savory and spicy secrets in…
Zest Cafe opened last month at 2740 South Wadsworth Boulevard, and owner Andrew Krull and his crew have been serving up organic, locally-sourced cafe fare to an appreciative crowds ever since. “We make everything from scratch, including the bread,” Krull says, “and we have an amazing baker with thirty years…
Chef/owner Ryan Leinonen says that a rare flower, the blue trillium, was the inspiration for the restaurant that he opened last year in the Ballpark neighborhood, Trillium. But a flawless meal here is also a rare thing, as Gretchen Kurtz discovered when she reviewed the place this week. See also:…
We came. We saw. We tweeted. Last night, Westword hosted the third annual Denver Web Awards, our celebration of Denver’s greatest digital minds. In September, we put out a call for you, dear readers, to nominate your favorite online projects, and a team at Westword spent more than a month…
Developer Mickey Zeppelin bought the old Victorian building at 1434 Blake Street back in the early ’80s, moving his office upstairs, putting an architectural bookstore in the basement, and then opening the iconic City Spirit Cafe with his wife, artist Susan Wick, on the first floor. After the closed City…
We’ve all heard (or made up our own) the pejorative nicknames for Taco Bell. Taco Hell, Taco Fail, Toxic Hell, Taco Smell, Tizzle Bizzle, Baco Tell, Think Inside Your Buns, and Get The Runs From the Border are just a few off the top. It might seem like all of…
Yesterday afternoon, just hours before Ben Parsons would unveil his new wine lab, part of the 30,000 square-foot plot he leased last year in RiNo that’s now the quarters of the Infinite Monkey Theorem manufacturing facility and tasting/taproom (Parsons refers to it as a wine lab), the British-born winemaker was…
As the daughter of a master gardener, I appreciate cool quirks of nature, even if I don’t have a green thumb myself. So when Ryan Leinonen, chef-owner of Trillium, explained that his restaurant was named for a rare blue wildflower that blooms every few years, and only when conditions are…
Kevin Morrison Pinche Taqueria 1514 York Street 720-475-1337 pinchetacos.com Part one of my interview with Kevin Morrison, exec chef-owner of Pinche Taqueria, ran yesterday; this is part two of our chat. What do you enjoy most about your craft? It’s always changing, so it fits my personality. I get bored…
The sandwich — a Reuben-like creation with housemade Thousand Island dressing — was good, but it was the conversation between a straight man and a bisexual woman, who was discussing whether her sex is better with men or women that kept me lingering at the one table that doubles as…
McDonald’s is trying to kill us with 1830 milligrams of sodium at a time, most of which may be in the form of some seriously over-applied sauce. I was eager to try the new CBO — Cheddar, bacon and onion — Angus burger and chicken sandwiches, because I’m enthusiastic about…
Punch Bowl – Social Food & Drink opens this weekend with a diner/coffeeshop up front, eight bowling lanes, a lounge with a marbles table, three ping-pong tables, a pool table, two big bars…and 85 parking places in front, with another lot that will hold over forty cars half a block…
Unless you’re a movie buff, you probably don’t remember The Doctor, a touching early-’90s film about a surgeon diagnosed with cancer. Having seen life through a patient’s lens, the doctor, played by Oscar winner William Hurt, learns to practice a different, more empathetic kind of medicine after his recovery. Ryan…
Bob Blair went to City Spirit, a legendary restaurant that will be the focus of Friday’s City Spirit Reunion, just once — “back in the day,” he remembers. But he knows all about the place, since he opened Fuel five years ago come December 31 in the Taxi development, right…
Every generation of hipsters has its hangout, and from 1984 until 1997 in Denver, that place was City Spirit, an eclectic cafe that opened at 1434 Blake Street four years before the Lower Downtown Historic District was formally established, and long before LoDo became the mainstream mainstay it is today…
After months — hell, years! — of waiting and watching, Punch Bowl – Social Food & Drink, Robert Thompson’s 24,000-square-foot gastro-diner, coffee bar, lounge, bowling alley, ping-pong powerhouse, pool hall, marbles mecca, throwback video arcade and game hang (deck-shuffle, shuffleboard, darts, pinball, Foosball and board games round out the amusements),…
The kitchen where the above snap was shot much be suffering a seafood economic crisis, because while I ordered my tom kha with seafood, it arrived with exactly two shrimp and a whole boatload of mock crab, a cheap, unappealing substitute. Can you guess where I’m eating? Special bonus: Anyone…
Kevin Morrison Pinche Taqueria 1514 York Street 720-475-1337 pinchetacos.com This is part one of my interview with Kevin Morrison, exec chef-owner of Pinche Taqueria; part two of our conversation will run tomorrow. “Just shut the fuck up and give me the taco.” That was the order Kevin Morrison received years…
Sonic has again graced the fast-food dining public with its deep-fried cheesecake bites –or, as I call them, “Thousands of years of tradition stuffed into a greasy paper bag with a side of strawberry sauce.” Couple an order of those with one of Sonic’s new Hickory Flatmelt sandwiches crammed with…
